On TV
Today is the first part of the digital TV switch over in the Granada region - if you have Freeview already then it doesn't feel like it, as there was some Freeview faff last month as well.
I actually don't watch that much TV (stop sniggering Alex). I have no idea what is happening in any soap other than Neighbours (and you can go months without seeing that, come back and watch for 5 minutes and be back up to speed), and when people at work say "did you see [x] last night", my answer is almost always "no". But this digital switchover feels, actually, now it is here, like quite a big thing.
When I was a kid we had a big wood effect TV in the back room. You had to stand up and walk over to the set and press some chunky buttons to change the channel. There were all of three to choose from then, and even they didn't broadcast all the time - you had no choice but to turn off your TV set and go out and do something less boring instead (can you imagine such a show ever being commissioned now?). Our TV was "future proof" and had buttons for an extra BBC channel and two extra ITV channels. Well, it didn't quite work like that, but Channel 4 came along before long, and at about the same time, Breakfast TV.
We had a small black and white in the front (dining) room, which eventually, when I was a teenager, found it's way into my bedroom. I wasn't supposed to watch it after bedtime, but one day I found the headphone (singular!) for it, and discovered that with a draft excluder wedged right behind my bedroom door, the light from the screen couldn't be seen by my mum and dad! It didn't have buttons, it had a dial, and you had to manually turn the dial to tune into whichever channel you wished to watch.
And so things continued until I went to Uni, and, having in the first Easter to stay up until denial am in order to catch a flight to the Berlin Film Festival, I went and bought a TV made by some people called 'Nokia'. It is still going, albeit at the moment it is in my spare room, as I squeeze the last drops of life out of Ed's TV which has a bigger screen.
The TV has a strange place in all our lives. It has gone from being a pleasant diversion, where popular programmes were watched by half the population, all at the same time, to a disparate smorgasboard of hundreds of channels, many catering to a very niche market, and many of them often showing different 'seasons' of the same programme in competition with each other. Apart from the odd special show at Christmas, very little attracts the sort of mass audiences of my youth - and perhaps this is what in some way has led to the loss of a sense of community which The Daily Mail loves to report with increasing frequency.
The Digital Switchover bids farewell to us knowing what frequency our channels were broadcast on, to childhoods of turning the dial to tune in and drop out, to shows that genuinely attracted the whole family and the whole country. No more will we have to decide which button to allocate a new channel to, or have a dispute over which channel to watch now that we 'all' have PVRs to record hours of shows (which we never quite get round to watching).
The Digital Switchover now means that TV is just *there* blaring away in the corner of our lounges, rarely really watched, but hard to live without.
I actually don't watch that much TV (stop sniggering Alex). I have no idea what is happening in any soap other than Neighbours (and you can go months without seeing that, come back and watch for 5 minutes and be back up to speed), and when people at work say "did you see [x] last night", my answer is almost always "no". But this digital switchover feels, actually, now it is here, like quite a big thing.
When I was a kid we had a big wood effect TV in the back room. You had to stand up and walk over to the set and press some chunky buttons to change the channel. There were all of three to choose from then, and even they didn't broadcast all the time - you had no choice but to turn off your TV set and go out and do something less boring instead (can you imagine such a show ever being commissioned now?). Our TV was "future proof" and had buttons for an extra BBC channel and two extra ITV channels. Well, it didn't quite work like that, but Channel 4 came along before long, and at about the same time, Breakfast TV.
We had a small black and white in the front (dining) room, which eventually, when I was a teenager, found it's way into my bedroom. I wasn't supposed to watch it after bedtime, but one day I found the headphone (singular!) for it, and discovered that with a draft excluder wedged right behind my bedroom door, the light from the screen couldn't be seen by my mum and dad! It didn't have buttons, it had a dial, and you had to manually turn the dial to tune into whichever channel you wished to watch.
And so things continued until I went to Uni, and, having in the first Easter to stay up until denial am in order to catch a flight to the Berlin Film Festival, I went and bought a TV made by some people called 'Nokia'. It is still going, albeit at the moment it is in my spare room, as I squeeze the last drops of life out of Ed's TV which has a bigger screen.
The TV has a strange place in all our lives. It has gone from being a pleasant diversion, where popular programmes were watched by half the population, all at the same time, to a disparate smorgasboard of hundreds of channels, many catering to a very niche market, and many of them often showing different 'seasons' of the same programme in competition with each other. Apart from the odd special show at Christmas, very little attracts the sort of mass audiences of my youth - and perhaps this is what in some way has led to the loss of a sense of community which The Daily Mail loves to report with increasing frequency.
The Digital Switchover bids farewell to us knowing what frequency our channels were broadcast on, to childhoods of turning the dial to tune in and drop out, to shows that genuinely attracted the whole family and the whole country. No more will we have to decide which button to allocate a new channel to, or have a dispute over which channel to watch now that we 'all' have PVRs to record hours of shows (which we never quite get round to watching).
The Digital Switchover now means that TV is just *there* blaring away in the corner of our lounges, rarely really watched, but hard to live without.