You can’t watch TV any more

On September 15 2008 · 4 Comments · In Diary

I have to get a TV recorder thing. It dawned on me last night without the benefit of a TV recorder thing that TV really is shite. Whole hours pass with nothing good to watch, making watching without a TV recorder thing unfeasible now. I have Freeview, because I like the idea that you don’t have to pay to get more channels of rubbish. Paying for extra TV is such a phenomenally bad idea because the vast, vast majority of what’s on Sky or cable is utter, utter tripe. When I have had cable, I got to like Mythbusters on Discovery, and a lot of the National Geographic stuff, but that isn’t enough to justify shelling out a lot more money every month. Pay TV is a cavalcade of mediocrity and brainless tosh that makes ITV look like quality broadcasting.

It’s fair to say that not only is a lot of it rubbish, but a lot of it is evil, nasty, and should be purged from the Earth. Like Fox News, shopping channels, Christian channels, endless repeats of Star Trek, fat bored-looking slappers shaking their back-ends at the camera while on the phone to fat curry-stained masturbaters, and Jeremy Bloody Clarkson smugging it up left right and centre. People really will watch any old dross, but paying for it just seems like the equivalent of actually asking someone to stand on top of your television and defecate on your carpet, and then handing them a wad of notes by way of thanks.

Watching TV with a TV recorder thing is brilliant for several reasons – entire series of programs build up and let you binge for hours on whatever your favourite is, you can skip through commercial breaks in 3 seconds flat (which in itself is a beautiful middle finger up to all of the effort and expense spent by advertising people to patronise you and sell you shit you don’t need), you can pause TV while you go make a cup of tea, and you can watch exactly what you want when you want rather than just watching the last ten minutes of Vernon Kay’s gormless mug on Celebrity Family Fortunes because there’s actually something you want to watch next. You can actually enjoy TV again. I can’t watch TV the old way any more.


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  • http://www.bob.seldo.com Bob

    I wonder if we’re missing an arms race thing here.

    Having watched only the good stuff, and minus the adverts, there won’t be any money made by commercials. This is happening already: the adverts are poking their way into the actual programmes with product placement and brand names dropped into casual conversation.

    So the arms race will ramp up, and your TV recorder thing will have to learn to be able to block out the Starbucks logo (which it recognises from it’s huge anti-commercial spam database) as the protagonists walk down the street. It’ll have to bleep out the brand names that James Bond drops into conversation (“Shaken, not stirred. And it must be made with Gordon’s gin please. And I’ll follow it with a Krispy Kreme donut, thanks. And do you like my Nike trainers?”) Eventually the commercial spammers will fight back, rooting brand names so deeply into the plot that just about everything will be blacked out or bleeped out until you remove the filters and are suddenly drowned in a tsunami of product placement which destroys all concept of honest human narrative.

  • Niall

    I live off a TV recorder thingy which unfortunately means I have succumb to one their own TV adverts – “Make your own TV channel”.

    Of course you could just download things off the internet. Those nice people cut out the adverts as well!

    Eastenders sponsered by Carbon White and Burberry!

  • http://www.spikydog.com/ Nathan

    Bob, that’s a terrifying thought, and seems quite likely. I remember watching football in Argentina and seeing that they put adverts on, covering half of the screen, during game play. You ended up seeing an advert for cheap van hire whether you liked it or not. Mind you, you were compensated by the commentators very entertainingly shouting “gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooolaaa!” when the ball went in the net.

    These evil people will get their way won’t they.

  • Prue

    I have one of those things on loan from a travelling friend.

    The saddest thing is that i’ve set it to record Midsomer Murders…