1966 Was All That...

 Bonus Post!

I started out yesterday intending to do no more than mention Star Trek in the introduction. You've seen how that went.

What I was going to do was riff on a post at Troy Press which lists all the other shows that premiered on the three big US networks in the same year as Star Trek. Here's the full rundown to save you clicking through, although I'm sure Troy Press would appreciate the page views.

ABC Stage 67

Family Affair

Felony Squad

The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.

The Green Hornet

Hawk

The Hero

Hey, Landlord

The Iron Horse

It’s About Time

The Jean Arthur Show

Jericho

Love on a Rooftop

The Man Who Never Was

The Milton Berle Show

Mission: Impossible

The Monkees

The Monroes

Occasional Wife

Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats

The Pruitts of Southampton

The Rat Patrol

The Road West

The Roger Miller Show

The Rounders

Run, Buddy, Run

Shane

Star Trek

T.H.E. Cat

The Tammy Grimes Show

Tarzan

That Girl

The Time Tunnel

It's a very impressive list. It gives a good impression of how rich a feast network television was back then. It's also interesting to see to what degree Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Comic Books were already making their mark in the mainstream. I'm increasingly coming to believe that the whole "the mainstream doesn't get Sci-Fi and Fantasy" argument that I've heard trotted out ad nauseam in one form or another all my life is mostly wishful thinking from people who like to feel special.

I don't recognize all of the thirty-three shows listed below (I recognize fourteen of them, as it happens.) so without cross-checking I can't be sure the ones I don't know about weren't also SFF/Comic Book shows. Even assuming none of them were, it still leaves four certainties: The Green Hornet, Star Trek, Tarzan and The Time Tunnel plus a couple that run so close to the line, I originally put them in the first group - The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. and Mission Impossible. [Edit: Also, as I was checking on something that will become apparent later in the post, I discovered "It's About Time" from the list above is a hide-in-plain-sight title for a show about time travel. Two time travel shows launched on network TV in the same year! And yet the mainstream isn't interested in Sci-Fi...)

Of the shows I recognize, I have watched exactly half:

• The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. 
• Mission: Impossible
• The Monkees  
• Star Trek
• Tarzan  
• That Girl  
• The Time Tunnel

Here's what I remember about them:

The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. - The sister show to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which was one of my favorite shows growing up, alongside my absolute favorite, The Champions. I used to get the Man From U.N.C.L.E annual every year for as long as they lasted. I still have them. If I think hard, I can see some of the covers and even a few of the panels from the comic strips inside. 

I watched every episode of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. that I could get to but I barely remember the Girl...  I do remember I liked it but I think it was either on at some awkward time or more likely it was an unreliable fixture in the schedule. 

In those days, you could never trust a show to be on when you thought it was going to be. We complain now about streaming services arbitrarily cancelling shows but in the good old days of broadcast television, shows would often just stop mid-season for no reason at all. Sometimes they'd start up again in a different time slot or on a different channel, sometimes they'd vanish for good. Often they were shown out of order or with episodes missing. It's no wonder my memories of most of these shows are fractured.

Here's what Gemini says in answer to the question "When was The Girl From U.N.C.L.E shown on TV in the uk?" 

UK Broadcast Details

Pilot Episode: The pilot episode, "The Moonglow Affair," was broadcast earlier on April 28, 1966.

Series Premiere: The first regular episode, "The Dog-Gone Affair," aired on October 27, 1966.

Scheduling: Episodes were often shown out of sequence by the BBC, and not every episode from the single season was broadcast.

I rest my case.

Mission: Impossible - I didn't see a lot of these but I liked it well enough when I did manage to catch one. Everyone knew the intro with the famous theme tune and the set-up with the ominous voice-over and the self-immolating cassette tape. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it...". People used to say that before asking you to wash the dishes or mow the lawn...

I'm not sure I ever felt the storylines lived up to the drama of that intro. I'm not even clear whether I watched the original or the 1980s remake.

I've never seen any of the movies.

The Monkees - Oh, boy! I loved The Monkees. It was part of the big Saturday evening line-up that was a ritual for most households in the UK while I was growing up and it was one of the best bits. I used to look forward to the time when it came on every week. Actually, given I would have been only eight or nine, it's just as well it was on at 6.15pm. 

I never missed it if I could help it. I liked Peter Tork the best. He was the goofiest. Davy Jones, I found annoying even as a child. Mike Nesmith I liked but he seemed like the quiet, sensible one so he kind of faded into the background sometimes. Mickey Dolenz was the funniest. 

The storylines were chaotic and anarchic, ideal for a kid of my age. There was a lot of slapstick and too many songs although even then I liked some of them. Who couldn't? 

I went on to re-watch the show in the 80s and 90s, when it kept coming round and round and it got better and better with age. By the time punk came along in 1976, my punky pals and I were very keen to make sure everyone knew just how much better we thought the Monkees were than the Beatles. And so much more punky, too. I'd still rather listen to the Monkees than the Beatles even now. It's a shame the two groups never made a movie together...

Star Trek: Done that one!

 

Tarzan -  One of those shows I watched quite a lot without ever really liking it. If I was going to watch something set in a jungle, I'd far rather have watched Daktari, which I loved. Still, Tarzan is always watchable. I bet it looked better in color though.

Hmm... That got me wondering when Daktari started. I just checked and it first aired on CBS in... 1966. So that list up there isn't as exhaustive as I thought it was. Let me just check the link on Troy Press's post...

FFS! Okay, I take full responsibility for not checking my (Troy's) sources. The link goes to Wikipedia's page on "1966 American television series debuts" and there are sixty-two shows listed, not counting animation. If you add those in, it comes to eighty-nine. 

Most of the shows that Troy Press left out are sports, music or game shows, so it looks like the list is supposed to be dramatic but two of the missing shows are Batman and Dark Shadows! What the hell? And why not Daktari? Or Blue Light, for that matter?

Let me just portmanteau those in right now...

Blue Light I never heard of until now so we can leave that one out. Dark Shadows I became aware of in the eighties through the comic-books but I didn't see an episode until the twenty-teens. It was... disappointing. Very slow. I might try it again some day. You really can't judge any TV series from a single episode, especially at the start of the run.

Batman -  Here's one that, as they say, needs no introduction. Adam West, Burt Ward, a gallery of guests stars from today and yesteryear. Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. Julie Newmar as Batgirl. Cesar Romero as the Joker. Frank Gorshin as the Riddler. Burgess Meredith as the Penguin... Didn't have to look any of those up. And that theme tune! [Edit - see Pallais' comment and my reply below for corrections and excuses!]

As you might imagine, as an eight year-old comics fan and specifically a DC comics fan at that, I was all over this, inasmuch as I got all the Annuals for Christmas and watched it whenever I could but it's hard to check when it was originally shown in the UK because it was picked up by ITV, which had a bizarre regional structure in those days. I know I watched it with my grandparents, who as Quakers had very definite views on what was acceptable viewing. Batman was very much okay with the Lord, apparently. My grandfather found it highly amusing, anyway. I don't think my grandmother had a clue what was going on but nobody was swearing so it got a pass from her.

Most of my memories of the show, which I remember a lot better than most of the entries in this post, probably come from the 1990s, when it was shown again on Channel 4. I certainly recall watching most of the run in color and we didn't have a color television at home in the sixties or most of the seventies.

Daktari - I have fairly clear memories of watching Daktari, too, and those definitely come from when it was first shown on BBC from 1966 onwards. It had a prime slot, after the evening news on Mondays on BBC1 and it was appointment TV for me and my grandparents (We all lived in the same house - I wasn't just always round there, visiting.)

I often talk here about how much of a comics fan I was as a child but another of my big interests was natural history. I was particularly interested in zoos and vets and collector-adventurers, all of which were big in the media of the sixties and especially the seventies. 

I read all the Gerald Durrel books, all the James Herriots and several by the much less well-known (Over here, at least.) Daniel Mannix. Even now I can remember how Mannix had a pet fruit bat that clung around his neck under his sweater and how he had a tame cheetah that behaved like a dog. I really, really wanted a big cat as a pet but I would have liked a leopard. You can't really make a pet out of a leopard, Bringing Up Baby notwithstanding, but cheetahs are very much more dog-like than any other cat and they can be trained in much the same way. Of course, you need several square miles of land to keep them in...

Daktari was a kind of comedy-adventure show with animals as the stars. My favorite, inevitably, was Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion although the undoubted star of the show was Judy the Chimpanzee. I have never liked monkeys or apes, though, so Judy's supposed charms were largely lost on me. 

I've never re-watched Daktari but I can't help thinking it might be... problematic in the 21st Century. I was eight, though, and it was the sixties. I'll take a pass.

That Girl - This is the outlier in the set. I had never even heard of That Girl until a few years ago. Not only did I not watch it in the '60s, I don't recall it even being in the schedule. 

And do you know what? I just asked Gemini again and it told me

"There is no official or documented record of the 1960s American sitcom That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, ever having a mainstream network broadcast or a verified premiere date on television in the United Kingdom during its original run or subsequent decades"

Wow! Just... I mean... wow...

How is that even possible? It's widely recognized now as an iconic sitcom, historically significant in the development of the form, a huge influence on the creation of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (Which we did get...). How the hell has it never been on network TV in the UK?

In fact, I believe it was when I was reading a book about the importance to the medium of the Mary Tyler Moore Show that I first came across That Girl, which I then found out was on one of the streaming services I had access to. Netflix, I think. 

I watched a lot of episodes. I started at the beginning and I think I got about two-thirds of the way through Season 3 before I drifted away. It was getting a little samey by then. (I have to confess the same happened when I tried to work my way through the entire run of the Mary Tyler Moore Show on DVD.) 

If you don't overdo it, though, That Girl is a really excellent sitcom. Marlo Thomas is just sublime and the supporting cast are all very strong, albeit in that intensely irritating fashion so prevalent in '60s sitcoms. Her boyfriend, especially, needs a good talking-to. With a lump hammer.

The Time Tunnel - Another of my absolute childhood favorites. I remember this being on in the early evening and me being glued to it every week. I can remember the intro very clearly but what actually happened in any of the episodes I have not the slightest clue. I imagine they went back in time and got into trouble then fixed some problem and came home. I bet they almost never went into the future. Time travel in those days always went backwards, not forwards, with the notable exception of Dr. Who.

I remember thinking that Quantum Leap in the '80s was pretty much a remake of the Time Tunnel, except I don't remember the two leads in the Time Tunnel being lost in time. I think they went out and came back each week, which was why you saw them walking into what looked like the label on a Black Sabbath album every time. 

I just checked this and it's mostly wrong, which is why you should always fact-check your memories. I leave the preceding paragraphs in as a warning.

It turns out they were lost in time. The project was going to be canned for running spectacularly over-budget so the two guys volunteered to demonstrate it to prove they had a working prototype, even though it hadn't been fully tested. And it did work... only just one-way. They went out into in time and couldn't get back. None of that did I remember but it's all on Wikipedia.

And there we are. A completely pointless post but a lot of fun to write, as was the Star Trek one. I might do more like this. Consider yourself warned. 

Out Of The Past, Into The Future: Sixty Years Of Star Trek

As you may have spotted from the odd blog post, this week marks the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast episode of Star Trek. It was on September 8 1968, to be exact. 

I am not now,  nor have I ever been, a Star Trek fan but I like bits and pieces of the franchise well enough. It's one of those IPs that seems to be able to reinvent itself endlessly without entirely diluting the brand, a good trick if you can pull it off. 

In recent years I very much enjoyed both The Lower Decks and Prodigy,  neither of which is what you'd call Core Trek but both of which I've watched all the way through, not something I can say about most of the shows. And there are a lot of TV shows and movies set in the Star Trek universe. Two dozen of them according to IMDB. 

Of those two dozen, here are the ones I've seen at least an episode of, together with my comments on what, if anything, I can remember about them.

 Star Trek - Now often referred to as Start Trek Original Series or STOS.  

This is the one whose anniversary we're celebrating. There were three seasons and seventy-nine episodes and I'd guess I've seen most of them. Out of order and sporadically, to be sure, but most of them. 

The show didn't get an airing in the UK until 1969 and I would be guessing if I said I saw it on it's first UK run. I mean, I might have...

I do remember I was still at school because I can recall watching it on a weekday evening in the house where I grew up. I also have a vague memory of making a bit of an effort to be in when it was on, meaning I must have been quite keen to see it. It was be there or miss out in those days, where TV was concerned, of course.

I think I must have done most of my watching in the 1970s or 1980s, when they were being regularly, if incoherently, re-shown. The show must have had some cache at the time because it was on BBC1 in a close to prime-time slot. I saw it again in the mid-80s, by when it had shifted to BBC2, suggesting it was regarded by the schedulers as a niche interest by then. 

I used to watch it fairly often, at first, as an adolescent, fairly avidly and later, as a twenty-something, somewhat ironically. One thing I very definitely do remember was that by the time I was old enough to care about my image, it would have been very uncool to admit to watching Star Trek, even - or perhaps especially - when talking to other Sci-Fi fans. Trek, in common with almost any TV show or movie, was considered "not real science fiction" by pretty much every SF fan I ever met, an attitude that persisted well into the 90s. I think The X-Files might have been the watershed moment for acceptance into the canon.

I mostly thought of the original series as a sort of sitcom. It certainly had a lot of jokes. When it wasn't being funny, it was mostly soap opera and melodrama. It went into the same bucket as the Waltons and Dallas for me, which is actually a compliment. I've watched the entirety of the Waltons twice, from start to finish, and Dallas was a must-see on a Wednesday night for a few years.

I'd happily watch any random episode of original Trek right now, so that's a recommendation. It was always a fun show and it hasn't aged that badly, mainly because it never seemed to be anchored to any specific real-world timeframe in the first place.

Star Trek: The Animated Series - I have only the vaguest memory of this being on TV. Looking it up, it was part of the BBC1 Saturday morning schedule in the mid-70s. I was in my mid to late teens then and at that sensitive stage when you don't want to be thought of as a kid any more so I probably wasn't watching a lot of Saturday morning TV. (I got heavily back into it as a student, naturally, and after that Saturday mornings were all about the shows from the early 80s right into the mid-90s.). 

I think I must have caught the odd episode but I remember nothing about it at all. I wouldn't be adverse to catching a few episodes on YouTube to see what I missed.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - I saw this at the cinema on release, which suggests I must have been pretty keen but in fact I made a point of going to see every big, new SF or comic-book movie back then. They all seemed like events. Some of them even were.

Not this one, though. I remember it being very dull, an opinion I've heard and seen shared many times since. I think I might have watched it again on TV at some point. Wouldn't want to watch it again.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - I think I also saw this at the cinema but I'm not sure. I definitely watched it on TV. I quite enjoyed it but it was very hammy. I remember Shatner screaming "Khan!" and  Nimoy under-selling his death scene and that's about it. I don't think it has the best reputation among the movies these days but I could be wrong.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock - I saw this on television at least once. I can just about recall some of the plot. Okay, no I can't.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Watched on TV, twice. Kirk and Spock as hippies. Hard to forget. 

Except that apparently I made that up. I went looking for a clip and it turns out they didn't go to Haight-Ashbury at all. It appears to be set in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Here they are, enjoying some of the typical punk music of the time and discussing contemporary literature of the day.

I could have sworn they were hippies. I mean, they talk to whales...

Star Trek: The Next Generation - This was a minor disappointment for me and I suspect may have marked the moment when I went from being a mild fan of the franchise to a mild skeptic. I remember being moderately excited about the prospect of a new Trek series and I watched it from the start, when it was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1990. 

I made it all the way through Season One and into Season 2 but it suffered from one of the worst faults any show can have; it was dull. I remember it starting out quite well but quickly bogging down in what felt like a lot of talking and very little action. 

If there's one thing you can say for original Trek it's that it was rarely boring. Something was always happening, usually involving the cast staggering from one side of the set to the other or some crucial part of the Enterprise being on the verge of exploding. In TNG, everything on the ship was tediously stable, including most of the cast. 

I remember Worf, the Klingon who looks like Lon Chaney as the Wolfman, Data, the anaemic android and Geordi LaForge, with the cool shades. I think there was a female doctor and her son. 

Actually, I know there was. I can even remember their names - Beverley and Wesley Crusher, the latter played by Will Wheaton, who has a recurring part as "that guy who used to be the annoying kid from Star Trek" in the Big Bang Theory. And of course there was Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, the Kojak of the spaceways.

In fact, if I look at the cast list on IMDB, which I only just did to make sure I wasn't getting any of this wrong, I can remember a full fifty percent of the characters named as the "Top Cast". I guess I was more into it than I remember. I wouldn't mind watching it again. I might not find it so slow now, at my advance age.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - I watched a few episodes of this when it was first shown in the UK on a channel you didn't have to pay to watch. It started out on Sky in 1993 but began showing on BBC2 a couple of years later. I remember next to nothing about it, probably because by the mid-90s I was barely watching any TV at all. I remember Sisko, Bashir and Quark though, so I must have seen enough for them to stick in my memory. I'd give it another go but I'd have to be very short of other entertainment options to do it. 

Star Trek: Lower Decks -  My favorite Trek show by a wide margin. In a review here, I described it as "smart, funny, intelligent, well-observed" and "a great animated show in its own right". I would happily re-watch it. I'm just sorry they stopped making it.

Star Trek: Prodigy - Reviewing this one, in a post where I reassuringly said much the same things about my relationship with the franchise as I've said here today, I called Prodigy "fast, funny, exciting and very coherently plotted." Once again, I'd be pleased to see it again and I regret it's early demise.

That's nine shows and movies out of twenty-four. Everything I didn't mention, I haven't seen or at least can't remember seeing. Although as I keep saying, I don't consider myself to be any kind of Star Trek fan, I think it's plain I do have a considerable amount of time for the franchise. I'd be quite interested in watching pretty much any of the fifteen shows or movies missing from this list and I'd for sure watch - or re-watch - any of them in preference to anything connected to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. 

The defining feature of Star Trek over the sixty years it's been around has been accessibility. It's just an easy franchise to get into and enjoy. It has a lot of characters who could just as easily be in an office or hospital-based sitcom or drama. The fact that they're in space doesn't always seem to have a lot to do with anything. Compare that to most other big SF and Fantasy franchises and they seem a lot more sciency and fantastical, which is quite ironic given Trekkies have long been synonymous with the geekiest extremes of geek culture.

Even now, sixty years on, I bet more people who have no interest at all in Sci-Fi could recognize Kirk and Spock than could put a name to Han Solo or Obi Wan Kenobi. What's more, I'd also bet the Star Wars characters with the highest recognition factor among non-SF fans would be Darth Vader and Yoda - effectively a monster and a cartoon animal.

The crew of the Enterprise are all immediately recognizable as regular people, the kind you might know from work or around the neighborhood where you live. I think, as much as anything, it was that level of familiarity that allowed NBC to get away with broadcasting an unreconstructed science fiction show for three seasons back in the 1960s. 

And look what they started!

Friday In My Mind

Friday again? Didn't we have one last week? Oh well, here goes...

Twitter Goes Boom! Again.

Thanks to Firefox Monitor, I bring you news of yet another in a never-ending stream of data breaches. Seriously, these will literally never end. Even though it's really tempting just to ignore the notifications, I always feel I ought to do something...

It does get particularly irritating when the source is 

a) Something I signed up to a decade ago

and

b) Have pretty much never logged into since

not to mention

c) Have no intention of ever logging into again.

So, this morning I dug out all my Twitter details, which, yes, I still have, thank-you, and changed all of them. Should I ever want to use Twitter, which will never happen, I now have a specific email address just for that. It will not be used for anything else, which means it will never be used at all. 

Now no-one will be able to steal my unused Twitter account with no followers and no posting history and pretend to be me, someone no-one has ever heard of. Phew!

So Long, Tracy Hyde

Here's the timeline:

Ten years ago: For Tracy Hyde form in Japan "as a solo project for Natsubot".

One week ago: I "discover" For Tracy Hyde, while searching for something entirely unconnected on YouTube.

Three days ago: I share my discovery with the world - or at least the infinitesimal part of it that reads music posts here. I'm less than effusive, observing "It may be shameful to admit it but this is exactly the kind of song I'd probably skip over if it was by an English or American band."

One day ago, morning: Pitchfork reviews For Tracy Hyde's latest album, Hotel Insomnia, giving it a big 7.6 thumbs up under the headline "The latest album from the Japanese shoegaze band shimmers with restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest."

One day ago, afternoon: Pitchfork reports "For Tracy Hyde, Japanese Shoegaze Band, Break Up".

I  hope it wasn't anything I said...

I Like Cartoons

No-one calls them "cartoons" any more, do they? If it was good enough for Top Cat...

Once again, it seems I'm watching a lot of animated television. I swear it's not intentional. It just keeps happening.

I mentioned how frustrating I found it, not to be able to footnote my entries in last year's musical Advent Calendar. Case in point, Day Nine, which featured Woofin' and Meowin' by Inventory Full favorites Superorganism.

This tune was written specifically as the theme for the Christmas Special of a show called Housebroken, a Fox animated comedy featuring Lisa Kudrow as "A dog named Honey who runs group therapy sessions to help neighborhood animals manage the neuroses brought on by their owners and each other." I had never heard of the show before the song popped up on one of the music feeds I follow but pretty soon I'd seen every episode.

Luckily for me, since the show has no distribution in the UK, some kind-but-arguably-irresponsible person has posted them all on YouTube. Even more luckily, as yet no-one has put a stop to it. 

I wasn't expecting great things, as I'm sure you won't be if you just watched the awkward, official Fox trailer at the head of this section, but I was substantively impressed. The show's way better than I imagined it would be. 

Housebroken is a smart, funny. well-written show that frequently goes in directions I didn't anticipate. The characterisations are solid, the situations believable-for-sitcom and there's a delirious sense of surrealism hanging around the whole thing. Highly recommended, especially for anyone with pets.

Sadly, I've consumed all the Housebroken content that's available right now but I have two other much longer-running animated shows on the go, both on Amazon Prime. One's a very old favorite that I belatedly realised I'd never really seen that much of; the other's a show I'd never heard of until a couple of weeks ago, almost certainly because it's Canadian. 

It took a combination of the worldwide web and the growth of streaming services to reveal the depth and breadth of Canadian popular culture to the world. Now the curtain's been lifted, it's catch-up time. This particular revelation is the animated spin-off of a live-action show I really want to track down as well. 

They're both called Corner Gas. I imagine some people in the US may know the show but as far as I can tell it never had distribution in most of Europe (Finland and Cyprus being the exceptions). Instead, for some arcane marketing reason, it showed mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. 

The animated version reminds me very strongly of King of the Hill, a show I watched in the '90s. It also has some similarities to recent Canadian sitcom hit Kim's Convenience and US classic Newhart, although in none of those shows was the main character a comic-book fan, something that automatically puts Corner Gas ahead on points.

The other show will, I'm sure, be familiar to most people reading this. It's Daria.  

I watched a few episodes of Daria on Channel 4 in the '90s but they were mostly out of sequence and I remember little about them. What I mostly remember Daria for is the voice-pack for Baldur's Gate I downloaded and installed that made my character speak only in phrases sampled from Tracy Grandstaff's performance as the title character, Daria Morgendorffer.

As you might imagine, that gave my first play-through of the game a certain edge it otherwise wouldn't have had. I lost that voice-pack when I changed computers and my second run at the game was nowhere near as compelling without it. 

It's been a revelation to watch the show from the beginning, learning who all the characters are and how they interact. I'd remembered it as something close to a monologue but it's really more of an ensenble show, as are most really good sitcoms. The animation is incredibly minimal, as was the unfortunate norm of the time, but the script and voice acting more than makes up for the lack of visual finesse.

Renewal Patrol

While we're on the subject of TV shows, I just finished the third season of Doom Patrol. As is my practice, I immediately tabbed over to Google to find out if there was going to be a fourth. Question expecting the answer "No".

To my amazement, not only was a fourth season commissioned, it's already showing on HBO Max. Given the frequent reports of cancellations to various DC projects following the appointment of James Gunn as Studio CEO, it seemed to me, having watched with increasing amusement the extent to which the showrunners of Doom Patrol were willing to subvert the entire concept of superheroics, there would be little chance of a slot in the supposedly more commercially-focused New DCU.

Then again, given the timeframes, I guess Season Four is already legacy product. Season Five has to be the one that's in doubt. I have yet to watch any of the current, fourth, season, which has no UK distribution at present, but it would be deliciously ironic should it turn out to be the final exposure. 

Doom Patrol holds the record, as far as I'm aware, for longest set-up for a superhero team. I thought two seasons from Cloak and Dagger was pushing it but we've watched these characters bicker and equivocate for three full seasons over whether they are - or even want to be - any kind of team. They don't even get a collective name until the final episode of Season Three, when Cliff "Robotman" Steele comes up with... Doom Force. 

Personally, I'd like to see a spin-off show featuring Dorothy and the Dead Boy Detectives, the team of paranormal investigators (Two ghosts and a medium.) with whom she leaves the show in Episode Three of the third season. Maybe they'll be back in Season Four. I hope so.

And that's about all I have for today. Another Friday afternoon ground down to dust.

Onwards!

Getting Settled In

A sure way for me to tell if I'm genuinely excited to play a game or I'm just logging in because I think I might get a blog post out of it is whether I fire the game up right after breakfast, even when I have other things I should be doing instead. That's what happened this morning, so I guess I really am up for the latest EverQuest II expansion, Renewal of Ro, even if I had completely forgotten it was going to launch yesterday.

I did have other things on my mind, of course, not least my winter migration from the upstairs room where I usually play (and write this blog) to the one downstairswith the gas fire and the big window that gets the sun most of the day, making it much easier to heat and keep warm. 

With all the dire warnings of fuel charges escalating out of control plus the sudden change in the weather, meaning it actually feels like winter at last, not late spring, I decided it was no longer tenable to spend most of my time in what is indubitably the coldest, least insulated room in the house. Much of yesterday was spent relocating and reorganizing. 

I'm still not entirely settled in my winter palace. I'm not crazy about sitting with my back to the window, facing a wall, and the table I'm using instead of my computer desk, which is too much trouble to move, is a couple of inches too high for ergonomic perfection. It doesn't help that my ancient swivel chair, the one I inherited from my stepfather, who must have died at least fifteen years ago, while still generally sound and comfortable (The chair, not my deceased relative.), no longer goes up and down like a good computer chair should. 

There's also so much stuff under the table - around four thousand comic books I boxed up to sell years ago but then couldn't find anyone who wanted to buy them, or at least not at a price I was willing to accept - that I can't stretch my legs out straight. I'm probably going to have to come up with a better solution if I don't want to get cramp in the middle of a boss fight.

Then there's the issue of connectivity. Years ago, when we had a new router installed by our ISP, I got them to put it in the upstairs room I was using as a study at the time. That's now Mrs Bhagpuss's craft storage room. You can barely get in the door. It's also right at the front of the house, which means the wifi signal barely reaches the back of the house.

It didn't used to be a problem until I bought a smart TV a couple of months ago. Modern television sets are basically computers, something that had passed me by in the twenty years since I last owned a TV. I did a lot of research before I bought this one and still pretty much got it wrong, to the point that I'm now thinking of buying another. 

The one I bought is nothing much more than an oversized android tablet and like any tablet it needs an internet connection. I knew that when I got it but I didn't realise how inadequate my existing wifi would be for the task. I already had a booster but even that didn't make much difference, so I got a proper router to replace the infamously poor modem/router supplied by my ISP (I'm sure anyone in the UK will be able to guess immediately who that is.)

It turned out to be one of those lucky mistakes. I'd been meaning to improve the wifi for a couple of years but it was always one of those "it'll do for now" situations. The TV brought things to a necessary head and just in time, too, because I really didn't want to have to run yet another 30m ethernet cable through the house. 

Instead, I just put the extender next to where I now sit downstairs and connected it to the PC with a regular, 2m ethernet cable because apparently my desktop PC doesn't do wifi. Of course, the connection it's using now is wireless until those final two meters. Don't tell my computer.

I was curious to see how well it would work compared to the wired connection I've always used until now. The surprising answer is very well indeed. As far as I can tell, it's exactly the same. I literally can't tell the difference. 

I played Noah's Heart last night and EQII this morning and they both felt smooth as butter. Lord of the Rings Online was laggy but when isn't it? Going back to LotRO recently has felt like going back in time a decade and a half, to when mmorpgs and internet latency were synonomous. Seriously, if Standing Stone is a part of Daybreak, can't they borrow some better servers from EverQuest or something? Or at least get some advice on how to fix the problem?

Anyway, I'm kind of getting there, although I still need to do some work before my new lair feels as cosy as it should. The main thing is, I'm warm now and it isn't costing us a fortune.

As for Renewal to Ro, so far it's exactly as expected. I've seen maybe two-thirds of the first zone, done a handful of quests, already replaced two of the items I only equipped earlier in the same session and generally had a very good time. 

Following the standard practice of recent expansions, flying is disabled until you reach a certain point in the Signature questline. There's a lore-apporopriate reason for that, which looks as if it'll feature in the story, somehow. The landscape is fairly flat, anyway, so travelling on foot hasn't presented any problems.

One major departure from the last expansion is that I was easily able to kill the first solo overland named I happened upon. That's something I'd always expected to be able to do - until Visions of Vetrovia, where I never managed to kill a single one. 

There were supposedly solo weekly quests in VoV for overland names -  or"major threats" as they're called - just like in every other expansion since 2014's Altar of Malice, but even by the end of the expansion cycle I still couldn't get any of them below half health before they either killed me or I had to retreat. I'd still love to know what that was all about...

I was so pleased with myself to have triumphed, I took three screenshots; one just before Tickrupt the giant tick bit the sand and two more after, both when the achievement popped and when my merc observed, somewhat sarcastically in the circumstances, "Your demise was the only conceivable outcome.". For once, he wasn't looking at me when he said it.

The real test of the solo-friendliness of the new expansion will come when I reach the point where I have to enter the first dungeon. That can sometimes come as a bit of a slap with a wet fish. I'm optimistic that it'll be fine this time, though. Everything so far seems well-tuned and expansions where the level cap doesn't change do tend to be easier.

Before then, I have a lot of behind-the-scenes work to do . It's only when a new expansion drops that I really realise just how far I've let things slip. It's time to stop hoarding all those rares I stockpiled last year and get on with crafting all the spell and combat art upgrades I never got around to making, for a start. I looked at my Necromancer this morning and realised she still has Apprentice level abilities right across the board.

And that's why it's the Berserker who gets to go first, yet again.

Waiting For The Future, Staring At The Past.

Regular readers who pay attention (there must be some...) might well have expected the final post in the Pitchfork 25 series today. Unfortunately I haven't written it yet. I had enough trouble sidling up to Chemtrails from behind in yesterday's post. I'm not nearly ready to take on Norman Fucking Rockwell (again) quite yet.

I also have Blue Banisters on my mind. Is it going to match up to the last two? If it does it'll be a trio to stand with Bowie's Berlin trilogy or the first three Roxy Music albums, air not many get to breathe. 

You might think I'd be in a position to judge by now, what with the album having been out for a couple of days, but I'm doing everything I can neither to listen to any of the songs or read any reviews, which is a lot harder than you might think.

It's a bit like the classic episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the one where Terry and Bob try to go a whole day without finding out the result of a football match. Here it is, if you haven't seen it, or if you have and you'd like to again. And who could blame you?

 

That's a reference that both dates me and geo-locates me. I'm pretty sure I've seen exactly the same plot in a U.S. sitcom, though. Can't remember which one it was or I'd have used it instead. It sounds like it ought to have been an episode of Seinfeld but I don't really like Seinfeld so I wouldn't have thought I'd know it if it was. Do feel free to tell me what it might have been in the comments. Or, better yet, what it was.

I expected reviews to crop up on the various music news channels I follow - Pitchfork, Stereogum, N.M.E -  and they have, although it's easy enough not to click through to read them. Website monetization policy dictates everything has to have some kind of clickbait heading, though, so even glancing at the feed these past couple of days has been a ride.

It seemed safe enough to take a look at Lana performing Arcadia on Colbert. That's one of the tracks I've already heard. It's been out in the wild for weeks. I guess we could have that now.

If it sets the standard we're in safe waters. But why am I trying to avoid hearing the album anyway? You may well ask.

Bad timing. Mostly that. Bloody-mindedness. Masochism. A bit of those, too.

I put it on my wishlist, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. I should just have pre-ordered it like I did Chemtrails and NFR. But no, I thought it would be nice to get it for my birthday. Which is in mid-November. So now I have to wait. Like an idiot.

Of course, I don't have to wait. I don't have to own it, let alone buy it, or have someone buy it for me, to hear it. I subscribe to the official Lana del Rey YouTube channel and every track on the album is up there, in full. 

I've been reading science fiction since I was ten years old but it never prepared me for this. I knew we were promised jetpacks. I knew we were going to be living on Mars. I knew we'd have wall-screens and the people on TV would talk back to us (Oh, wait, that happened, didn't it?). No-one told me all music would be free.

 

Is it though? I mean, I imagine someone makes some money from those tens of thousands of views that no doubt will soon be hundreds of thousands then millions and if someone's making money someone must be paying. Just not me. Still, you'd think the record company would want to give the actual album a head start.

Only no-one buys albums any more, do they? I think we went over that yesterday. We all just listen to songs on streaming services. And yet here they are, the albums, still popping out as though it was 1977. And getting reviewed the same way, too, as though they matter. Strange times.

Ah, 1977. The year the Clash told us there's be no more Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, just as  some guy named Hans Fenger finally gave up his dreams of being a rock star and turned his guitar hand to teaching classic rock songs to kids in the Canadian school system instead. I could tell you the story but I'd just be cribbing from this piece on Stereogum. Go read it and come back if you have no clue what I'm on about.

 

I probably heard my first track from the Langley Schools Music Project on the radio back around the turn of the millennium. I think it was the Beach Boys' depressive classic In My Room. By then those recordings were already over twenty years old. Now it's the twentieth anniversary of the time someone found a copy of the original, self-released vinyl album and decided it might be of interest to someone apart from the families of the kids who played and sang on it.

I own a copy. Not of the original vinyl version obviously. That would be unbelievably weird and also cool enough that you can bet you'd have heard about it long before this. Not even of the 2001 CD. No, I have a copy on cassette that my friend Andrew kindly made for me when I asked him to.

Clearly I didn't pay for my music then, either. And clearly I had no more shame about it than I do now. Home taping killed music, by the way. It's dead. There is no music any more. Just like we all go to work in flying cars and eat three-course meals in pill form while wearing silver jumpsuits with a big zip up the back.

There's a TV documentary about the whole affair that I haven't seen. Or hadn't, until now. It's on YouTube. I have it on in the background as I write this. You can watch it, too, if you want. Here's the first part.

 

There was a radio documentary about it on the BBC, as well. I heard that when it was broadcast. All of it. You can too, if you want, assuming the BBC allows you to, where you are. I know they don't always. In case they do, here it is.

I hadn't thought about the Langley Schools Music Project in a decade. I haven't listened to it in at least that long. Like all such things it lives mostly in my memory, for what that's worth.

Listening to some of it today, I think it stands up. Not every track. Honestly, I always found it a bit much to listen to as an album, end to end. Since I only had it on a C60, though, I didn't have an awful lot of choice.

If it had been discovered today, I wonder if anyone would bother playing it that way, start to finish? Who'd have the patience?

And maybe it would always have been better, a song here, a song there, an off-kilter chorus drifting in, out of place on some curated playlist, ghosting like a radio station from another dimension, some place people listen to music like that because that's what music sounds like, there.

It's the past, filtered through that past's past, filtered through the past of that past's past. It's a future that never happened even though it already has. Don't cross the streams. 

Or do. 

Probably do.

GW2 Halloween Mount Rental Can F Itself

Once in a while I'll find myself wanting to write about something for no better reason than it's been on my mind or because I like it and want to talk about it. Which is fine if I have something to say about whatever it is, but not so fine if I sit down, look at the screen and realize I have no real clue what I'm doing.

When that happens, the sensible thing would be to put that topic to one side, at least for a while. Write about something else instead. I tend not to do that. 

I tend more towards this, what I appear to be doing right now, namely typing and hoping. Hoping something will begin to fall into place. Hoping I'll somehow spontaneously generate some sort of insight or inspiration, frame a thesis or an argument or at least come up with a wisecrack or two.

The source of my troubles today isn't a video game. I have a few posts I could throw together about those. Mostly about New World, no surprise to anyone, since I seem to be spending almost all my gaming time there right now. As I mentioned last time or the time before that, I'm not short of ideas for things to write about when it comes to Amazon's mmorpg/survival crossover hit (Currently basking in the warm glow of a "Mostly Positive" rating on Steam.)

Even though it's my blog and I have no obligation to keep anyone entertained and amused other than myself, I do tend to get a little self-conscious if I find myself focusing exclusively on a single title day after day. God knows why. It's not like I haven't done it before - and often.

In recent years it's happened with WoW Classic, Valheim and to a lesser extent with many others. Bless Unleashed, anyone? And it's not as if, with New World, it wouldn't be justified. It's not every year we get a major AAA mmorpg from a Western publisher, let alone a pretty good one.

Still, I'd like to break things up a little. Get some light and shade going. Variety, spice, all that stuff.

And there are other things I could be posting about. Something mildly annoying happened to me in Guild Wars 2 today, for example, that I might have used as a peg for a minor rant although really it's so trivial it would barely merit a tweet on that Twitter account I don't use.

Oh, maybe I'll give it a couple of paragraphs, anyway. It's mount-related, which I'm sure won't shock any longtime readers. My antipathy to mounts in GW2 isn't any kind of news around here.

Mrs. Bhagpuss is doing all of the Halloween content on three accounts this year, as she usually does. That wouldn't directly affect me, only there's a mount race. Ever since mounts were added to the game there's always a mount race.

I actually like mount races, believe it or not. It's content specifically designed for mounts that doesn't de facto screw over the rest of the game. And while I'm not very good at them (I never win or place until late in the day, when most people who actually know what they're doing have gotten all the rewards they wanted and moved on to other things.) I'm not terrible, either. I can get round in the timers required to get the achievements, handily enough.

So could Mrs. Bhagpuss, if she didn't get motion sickness just from looking at a mount. I am not exaggerating for effect there. Today she actually got motion sick just from talking to me about them.

What always happens is that I do the mount races for her. As I said, I like mount races. It's a pleasure for me to run a few extra. Or it is anywhere other than in the Mad King's Labyrinth.

At this point, anyone who plays GW2 is probably imagining I'm going to complain about the endless stuns, snares, and knockbacks, the insane mob density and the extreme hazards of Steve and his frightnight friends jumping out in front of you at any second. Nope, that's all just par for the course, to mix a sporting metaphor.

Here's the problem: to do the race in the two minutes allowed to get the annual Halloween holiday achievement you need a mount. Obviously. It's a mount race. Duh! And to have a mount you need Path of Fire, which is fair enough in content released during and after that expansion but which might be considered unreasonable in content that was around before. 

ArenaNet think so. They'd really, really like for every GW2 player to buy PoF but they hate to leave money on the table and they don't want to look like big meanies so as soon as they started to introduce mount races to holiday events they also added the option for anyone to rent a temporary mount for a few silver.

That means we can do the full smorgasbord on all our accounts, should we so choose, not just the PoF ones. Only there are strings. Of course there are. If the rented mounts were as good as the real ones, what would that say about the game? (That GW2's a generous and open-hearted kind of game? Nah. That everyone who'd paid for the expansion had been ripped off, of course!)

The mount you get is always a raptor and with no masteries it waddles along like an eggbound duck. It's slow and awkward but it is fast enough, just, to get you round in time if you really go at it. Well, in all the other races it is.

In the Lab there are a couple of extra hurdles to jump. Not literally. That would actually be easier. The first is the mount rental vendor. It's not a permanent fixture. In thematic keeping with every other utility vendor on the map, someone has to pay the Mad King's Herald to get the mount guy to spawn. 

Hiring the vendor costs the outrageous price of one gold, which is a lot of money when you realize the vendor only hangs around for about ten minutes. Meta, isn't it? You literally have to rent the guy who rents you the mount. 

What's more, unlike every other holiday event, where you can use the rented mount over and over again even if you lose it, in the Lab you get one go and that's it. If your raptor gets clawed to death by griffons or torn apart by skeletons as he almost certainly will, he's gone for good.

Wait, it gets worse. When you pay the Herald, the vendor spawns at the foot of the central ramp, close to where the race begins and also near to the NPC who allows you to take a time trial when the race isn't up, a trial that also counts towards the achievement.

Sounds fine, doesn't it? Unfortunately "close " isn't the same as "close enough". You can't talk to either of the NPCs from the vendor. They're too far apart. 

Never mind! It wouldn't make any difference if you could. You have to register for the race or the time trial, whichever you want to do, but if you rent your raptor first, when you speak to the NPC the raptor despawns. You can't re-summon it so you have to go back to the rental guy for a refresh.

For the race proper that's not so bad. There's a couple of minutes wait before it begins so you have plenty of time to get set. The race, though, only happens once every fifteen minutes or so and you need to do it successfully, within the two minutes, three times for the achievement. If you did it perfectly you'd need to be there for 45 minutes and you'd have to pay three gold for the rental (well, someone would - if you're lucky it might not come out of your pocket every time.)

You'd be very lucky to succeed three times out of three on that clapped-out lizard. Chances are you'll need more goes than that. And that, too, would be fine if you could just pop the time trial and keep going over and over until you got the three Silver finishes it takes.

Except the time trial begins the moment you accept, at which point you do not have a mount because, even if you did, speaking to the time trial guy made it despawn. You have to leg it up the ramp, click on the vendor and accept the dialog option to make the mount spawn. That takes several seconds and you're still a second or two from the starting gate.

The timing on the rented mount is so tight those few seconds are more than enough to make you fail almost every time. I say "almost" because I know for a fact it is possible to get silver on the rented mount since I did it today. Once. With just under two seconds to spare. 

If anything, knowing it's possible makes it even more annoying. It means you can't just write it off as a total waste of time. It can be done so it's got to be done. It's just not going to be done with any pleasure or enjoyment or good grace, more like with a lot of cussing and in a temper.

It also means ANet would be perfectly within their rights to shrug like Mad King Thorn and walk away. Not everything has to be fun and anyway you should have bought the expansion if you wanted a mount. The race is easy enough with a real one.

Halloween in Tyria goes on for a very, very long time. Over a month. I have until 9th November to get that race done, successfully, five more times. It will happen. I don't like a challenge but I will accept one, once in a while. 

I think someone could organize the whole thing better, all the same. How about stopping the mount from despawning every time you speak to an NPC? Oh, wait, all mounts do that. Terrible design but I guss we're stuck with it. 

Okay, how about allowing the player to resummon the mount from a hot key instead of having to go back to the vendor? That shouldn't be beyond the abilities of someone to code in, surely?

Or maybe you already can and I just don't know how to do it. Maybe there's a keyboard shortcut. Y'know, I just bet there is. I probably should have looked into that before I started ranting.

I would have, too, if I'd known this was what I was going to write about today. Turned out to be more than a couple of paragraphs, too, didn't it? And I never even got around to mentioning that original topic, the thing I said I'd been wanting to write about but didn't know what I was going to say about it.

It was Kevin Can F Himself, the metafictional postmodernist sitdram starring Annie Murphy from Schitt's Creek currently showing on Amazon Prime, by the way, just in case you were wondering. I guess you got that?

It's a shame, because something did start to come to me as I was hammering out those opening paragraphs, just like I hoped it would. Something that would have tied in with yesterday's post, too.

Oh well. Too late now.

Binge Watch Sorrow?

Wilhelm has an excellent post up at TAGN, looking back at a year of what he describes as "binge watching" but which I would probably just characterize as normalized twenty-first century viewing habits. It's such a well-structured piece I mentioned in the comments that I planned to steal the headings for a cover version. And so I have.

• No commercials is pretty nice.

Yeah, that's one thing we already kinda know, here in the UK. I grew up watching tv without commercials (or, as we used to call them, and as older people still do, "adverts") because about ninety per cent of everything I watched was on the BBC. It was a class thing to some extent, the way everything in Britain is a class thing (everything in the world, actually, only most cultures aren't as comfortable about saying so, openly). It was also an education thing. 

My family being weirdly muddled about class the way a lot of families were in the sixties and seventies, we used to watch ITV sometimes but we felt bad about it because watching "the commercial channel" was something the lower classes did. (We only had the one back then and come to think of it, why did we call it "the commercial channel" but call the commercials "adverts"?).

Actually, that's post hoc rationalization. I was a child and I didn't think about stuff like that and my grandparents, with whom I grew up, were Quakers from a rural and working-class background, who I never heard mention "class" at all. My mother wore mini-skirts and rode around on a Lambretta like she was expecting David Bailey to pop out of a hedge at any moment so I don't imagine anyone around me was heavy into sociological placement theory. We just didn't like our shows being interrupted by commercials. Seriously, who does?

• I still won’t buy pay-per-View.

Me neither. In fact, to date I never have. I've thought about it a few times but so far there's never been anything I felt I couldn't wait a little longer to see. Or a lot longer. Or never see at all. 

I will buy virtual, though. I don't like to. I prefer to buy on DVD (Yes, still. And I don't even have a Blu-Ray player so it really is DVD) for reasons that I'll cover in a later bullet point. It annoys me that, as Wilhelm says, you never really own anything you buy digitally and in practical terms I'll probably never get around to re-watching stuff I buy that way anyway, so the difference between buying the one-off option to watch it on pay-per-view and "owning" it is notional at best... but there you are. I never said I was rational. 

 

• There are too damn many streaming services.

So infuriatingly true.  There are way too many streaming services, each with their own exclusives, but worse still they aren't all available in all territories and even when they are some of them operate local programming. I would dearly love to be able to watch all of the shows that used to be on DC Universe but before that even got rolled out to the UK it got rolled up into HBOMax, which is unlikely to launch here until at least 2024 because of HBO's existing contract with Sky and I am damned if I am going to subscribe to Sky in this or any other lifetime, not even to watch the Legion, which I think got cancelled before it got made, anyway.

Then there are the sub-streams. What even is "Starzplay"? I already subscribe to Amazon Prime. How is it they're showing me stuff from a supposedly separate service to which I have to subscribe yet again? Do they own it? If so, why isn't included? If not, why is it even there? I managed to get around it the first time by taking the free trial for a month so I could watch the only Starzplay show that interested me, Doom Patrol, before cancelling without having to pay but that trick won't work for Doom Patrol season two, which I have variously heard is better/as good/not as good as the first. I'm going to have to wait until it comes out on DVD.

I already have too many subscriptions. Let's see... for games I have Daybreak's All Access and I haven't cancelled World of Warcraft yet although I probably should. For media I have Amazon Prime and Netflix. There's also a hosting service for Mrs Bhagpuss's business website, which I pay for, for some reason, and our ISP, which she does. Do I want any more? No I do not. But I bet I'm going to end up with some, anyway.

• Finding things is hard.

Isn't it, though? Wilhelm was talking more about the problem of knowing what to watch next but as I said in the comments, I've found other bloggers to be a more than adequate source of recommendations. No, what I find unecessarily difficult is navigating the totally useless interfaces someone seems to imagine are aesthetically pleasing and functionally valid. Which they are not.

Seriously, can anyone find anything on these these shuffleboards? It's all lines of categories that make no sense even if the same dozen shows didn't just replicate over and over across all of them. Why is it we hear so much about algorithms and AI and how they're going to replace human thought and yet at the same time everyone complains constantly about how fecking useless they are? 

All I really want is a basic, searchable a-z list. Is that so hard? I want to be able to type "sitcom" into a search field and get an alphebetized list of every sitcom on Netflix. If I could then narrow down my search by keywords, like "1990s" or "US" or "New York" that would be aces but honestly I'd just settle for plain, vanilla a to z.

Someone's going to pop up the comments explaining how I can already do that, I bet. I hope so...

 

• I am torn on weekly versus all at once content.

Me too. Although "torn" is putting it a bit strongly. I'm skewed heavily towards "all at once". In theory I have some lingering nostalgic affection for the days when I'd meet up with friends and we'd get drunk arguing over the latest plot turns in some tv show or other. Or when a conversation would start up at work about some sitcom relationship development and everyone would take sides.

Was that really all that great, though? Or was it just something we did? And people still do do it where I work only they do it about shows I don't watch and movies I haven't seen. And really, it doesn't make any of them sound all that interesting. The people or the shows.

Against that, there's the truly huge benefit of actually being able to remember, in detail, what happened not just in the previous episode but the previous season. In the days when we all used to watch this stuff as it was broadcast it would have been a week since you saw the last episode and maybe a year (or several) since you saw the season where the current plot developments were set in motion.

Condensing a decade of broadcast television into a few weeks or even a few days of concentrated viewing is a genuine, intellectual paradigm shift. It brings the architectonics of the form into clear relief. I can see how the whole thing works and that's glorious. It adds a whole new level, creates a deeper texture, makes everything matter more. 

Movies always worked this way. You commit yourself to their reality for a fixed period as your own slides into the background. Emotional connections and reactions are heightened. Reality bends. It's one of the reasons cinema was taken so very much more seriously than television for so long. Now that gap has narrowed. About all that cinema has left is the communal experience and since the pandemic not even that.

• We have been biased towards shows versus movies.

Following on from the last point, what tv shows have that movies don't is length. A very, very long commercial movie (shut up Andy - I said "commercial") might run three and half hours. Even a very short tv series runs twice that long and many hit three figures. There used to be a trade-off between length and quality but those days are long over. Now you get movie quality at tv length and there's a feedback function whereby sustained quality for longer produces even higher quality, at least in terms of emotional engagement. 

I could hammer out a list of fifty, a hundred movies that I love and which have affected and moved me deeply but in all but a handful of cases I can't pretend I have an imagined emotional relationship with their characters the way I do with the dramatis personae of Buffy or Parks and Recreation or Roswell or Bojack Horseman... or even frickin' How I Met Your Mother, which I'm seven seasons into right now and all of whose characters I would happily slap, vigorously and repeatedly, with a wet fish, and yet who feel, bizarrely and disturbingly, like people I somehow actually know.

So, yes, tv shows over movies for me, right now. It'll change if and when I want to get my emotional hit in concentrated form rather than slow release. Bound to happen, sometime.

• I could cut the cord were it not for sports.

Well, for a start, I don't have a cord. We don't have any kind of cable contract and never have had, even though we do, quite literally, have "cable". We've had a fiber-optic connection since the mid-90s, when the city we live in was an early adopter of the technology. It's one of the reasons we haven't moved yet. But we've never used it for anything other than the internet.

As for sports, the only one I'm really interested in is cricket and I only like to listen to that on the radio.

• It really sucks when the internet goes down.

Yeah, it does. Fortunately, that's very rare in our house. And we do have other options, namely several hundred DVDs. Because we're old people, so we still buy those. In fact, we buy DVDs of the same things we watch on streaming sevices and then we watch them on the streaming services and don't watch the DVDs, which often we don't even take out of the shrink-wrap. Because as well as being old people we're also pack-rats and we like stuff we can touch. And hoard. And paw over.

Of course, as anyone who's ever played an mmorpg knows, the moment you lose access to something you can't think of anything else other than that thing even if before then you weren't thinking about that thing at all. So having a load of offline options really only works when the internet isn't down so, yes, it really sucks when that happens. 

 

• It does not replace the theater experience.

No, it does not. But then, it's been a long time since I went to the theater. Actually, it's been a very, very long time since I went to the theater, because over here "the theater" is not what we call the place they show movies. We call that "the cinema". The theater is where people walk about and project and you have to use opera glasses if you want to see their expressions (Except, naturally, it's not the opera, either. Who names this stuff?).

In the 1980s I went to the movies every week or two. In the nineties that dropped to every couple of months and by the turn of the millennium I was down to two or three times a year. Of late it's been an annual outing with my friend on one of our birthdays and some years we don't even manage that. And yet, I agree, watching movies at home doesn't quite equate to seeing them in the dark with a bunch of strangers. Will that ever happen again? For some people, surely. For me, this last year may have broken my habit for good.

On the other hand, my mother, who is eighty-eight years old, has been going to the cinema almost weekly since the 1940s. She's the one who's been missing the live cinema experience during the pandemic. So it's not just a young person's thing. Maybe I'll follow her example and get back to the cinema on the regular when I retire. If there are any cinemas left by then.

• I still cannot watch exactly what I want on demand. 

See above. This is a real problem because we are all spoiled babies who have to have everything we want right now. Or maybe because in an age of digital technology it should be possible to have all of human creativity immediately accessible to everyone at the click of a button. One of the two.

And, honestly? I'm okay with some shortages in the supply chain. I grew up in a world where you counted yourself lucky if you even happened across an article in a magazine that mentioned some movie or tv show or record album or book that sounded like it might be something you'd get excited by if you ever managed to find it, which you had to assume you never would if it was any older than that year, or that month, or that week, depending on the medium. 

Your chances of experiencing almost anything first-hand were infinitesimal and you knew it, so imagine how utterly stoked you'd feel when, once in deep blue moon, incredibly, unbelievably, serendipitously, you'd stumble, in a flea market or a yard sale, upon a copy of something you'd only ever heard about. Or when you switched on the tv late at night and saw an elusive title roll across the screen....

Yes, I'm very much happier that nowadays I can discover anything from the last hundred and fifty years from the comfort of my chair, read about it in depth and in detail, for free, then order a copy to stream on my screen immediately or be delivered to my house the next day. That's how it should be. But it's still nice, just once in a while, to have to work for it. And maybe it's good to know that, just very occasionally, there are a few things that will remain forever out of reach.

I mean, we can't always get what we want, right? But we can try. And, sometimes, we get what we need. Kinda...

Yeah, no. Gimme it all and gimme it now.