Telly Talk: Screen saver
When I was a kid one of the shows I loved was Telly Addicts. No big surprise there. I was studious, buckled down and did my homework and was rewarded with nights in front of the TV and occasional omnipotence over the remote control. There were four channels, I knew what I liked on each of them, and my grandmother kept telling me I was going to get square eyes from watching too much television.
Fast forward into the twenty-first century and to be deemed an expert on what’s on TV you must know not only what’s on the 30 odd channels you might get with your Freeview box, but also what you’re missing on the premium channels (I still really want to see Big Bad World and can’t find a pal with Paramount I can hijack the sofa of for an evening), and what’s coming up. By that I mean release dates Stateside and over in the UK, helpfully delivered by several websites, depending upon your oeuvre of programme. Clearly we had to mourn the end of Breaking Bad long before it actually came to a close. It was months in the coming, as the final season was announced, then the fact that it would be released in two parts, and then finally the awe-inspiring end. Oh, but it was cushioned by the soft release of the fact there’s going to be a spin-off, so we won’t all have to go off and try and find our meth-selling-teacher story arch fix elsewhere.
These days watching TV has become less of a thing you do quietly at home and more of an event discussed at great length before (never during) and after. It’s become cinematic – almost geeky in the details there to embrace. When I went on the trip of a lifetime to New York I did not forget to drop into both the HBO and the NBC shops. Did you know that you can buy a full scale Game Of Thrones sword that actually opens up into a golfing umbrella? And rather fetching ‘Bada Bing’ caps referencing one of the main iconic shows of the last decade, The Sopranos? There’s a silhouette on it your mother would be none too pleased with. Personally, I’d like to find a Don Draper ashtray to give to my dad next birthday. The point is that television shows are no longer on after the news, they now make the news. Telly Addicts would be able to take over a whole channel with its spin-offs and genre-twisting categories. Noel’s beard would frizz at the sheer enormity of the task.
The good news, from this state of affairs, is that there is always someone somewhere who can tell you about the next box set you should be requesting for Christmas or when you next are bedridden with a busted leg. The bad news is that sometimes the programmes without the massive publicity and hype machines behind them can get overlooked in the schedules. If you’ve TVO’d all of your favourite show, when are you going to end up stumbling upon something utterly random simply channel-hopping through the cosmos of an evening?
Essentially, my plea to you is to take a moment, once in a while, to step out of your timetable of honest-to-god recommended classics and take a punt on some unknown viewing. Be a televisual explorer once in a while, boldly going where no critic has recommended you go. You might just find some glorious treasures amongst the haul.
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