Box of delights kept us going
ONE of the shared experiences of lockdown was the massively increased consumption of streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon.
Add to that the existing cable companies who want to offer us the world in my living room, a phone line and faster broadband – why ever leave your sofa, pets? 5G? Fibre optic? I don’t even fully understand what they are.
Recently, a masked and callow youth with a badge and an attitude recently accosted me in town and tried to tell me my download speeds were inadequate (things must be getting back to normal if those folks are our prowling the streets again!).
I smiled weakly as if to say “I know, son, but when you hit your mid-50s you start slow down in many areas – whaddya do?”
He stared at me as if I had tried to order a stottie in Starbucks!
I began to realise how confused my dad felt in 1981 when I tried to explain the “Tomorrow’s World” technology of the new VHS recorder to him.
“Ahve told you man, dad, it can record when you aren’t watching – ye divvn’t even have to have the telly turned on, man. It’s pure mental!”
Dad, bemused, just said: “Wey, givowwer!”
The said machine is now in the parents’ loft – as curious an antique to today’s kids as a mangle or a poker.
Mind you, my parents bought a smart telly a fortnight before lockdown – and the steaming services genuinely played a part in their mental well-being.
God knows how we’d have coped with lockdown with 70s or 80s entertainment technology!
You’d be stuck with the last video you’d got from the rental shop – and would have been lumbered with it for four months.
Imagine if it was one you and your other half didn’t agree on (which to my memory, was all of them). You’d be stuck watching either Dirty Dancing or Driller Killer until one of you cracked and banished yourself to the spare bedroom to watch the test card on the black and white portable!
Fast-forward 40 years (and I mean a proper video fast-forward with hissing clicking tape noises that takes ages) and I’m living in the future.
The cable and streaming people are offering more channels than the Nile Delta.
I can watch everything from several scary seventies serial killer series (beat that for alliteration) to the Kazakstan Sunday league highlights in high definition.
By the way, I can’t get my head round HD. Why would I want a clearer view of some of the tripe that’s served up today.
What if you are my age and don’t have HD eyes? Thank the big man we didn’t have high definition when the late Lemmy – the much-loved front man of rock group Motörhead – appeared on top of the pops all those years ago. Kids would have needed trauma counselling if that battered mug had been made any clearer! HD Motörhead? Givowwer! Lemmy himself admitted: “Nobody in the world could possibly be as mean as I look, could they?”
He looked like somebody had set his heed alight and then put it out with a shovel.
The irony is that so many of the channels just show the last 40 years’ repeats anyway.
You feel like a time-traveller watching a non-stop loop of Only Fools and
Horses, Steptoe, Poldark, Bullseye and The Fifteen Streets.
It’s almost like I start watching as a nine-year-old, sprout a mullet and white socks half-way through and end up back as myself by bedtime.
Pre-lockdown, the one thing the streaming and cable guys hadn’t figured out was how the Sam Hill we were ever supposed to find the time to actually watch all the stuff we’d recorded on our clever black boxes or that lay in wait in the streaming parallel universe.
It’s almost like they subconsciously predicted the approaching lockdown - otherwise we’d have had to had a national holiday that would enable the whole country to finally catch up on all those episodes of Come Dine With Me, The Crown or Ozark (you’ll have to leave the Game of Thrones episodes until the other half’s out at the gym).
To all those who entertained us and kept us going through those dark days – we salute you!