Friday 6 August 2010

On Having A Television Again: Again

There are some further points I wish to raise about having a television again

1) I'm used to watching TV programmes at my parents' house, but these are inevitably ones which my mum recorded weeks, or, indeed, months ago.  I takes some getting used to when you watch TV live, and have to keep reminding yourself that news reports and weather forecasts are all new.  I keep watching the news, and thinking 'I never heard about that!', and then remembering that that's the whole point of news, and, when watched in real time, it is not supposed to refer to things you already knew.
Likewise for adverts: at my parents' house, the 'special offers' always ended months back; I could only watch and ponder what might have been.  I have to keep reminding myself that I can now avail myself of these things, because they wouldn't be telling me otherwise.

2) I had forgotten about my habit of flicking channels without thinking.  This leads to mass confusion, in my head at least.  Not so much if I was watching Wimbledon, and flick unconsciously to Have I Got News For You: in that case I can generally figure out pretty quickly that I must have changed channels without noticing.  But when you flick from Coronation Street to, say, Holby City, it can take a wee while to figure out why Fizz is wearing scrubs and operating on people.
Of course, confusion is only heightened when you flick between programmes starring the same people.  How did Juno's step mum end up being White House Press Secretary?  Since when has Father Dougal been a teacher?  I didn't know Miss Trunchbull was Smithy's mum!

So, as you can tell, it's going to take some time to get used to all this.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Don't get involved with those "+1" channels which allow you to catch something you didn't want to see an hour ago.

I was watching "come dine with me" the other afternoon, firstly on ch4, then, unbeknownst to me and due to an escaped-down-the-side-of-the-settee remote, on ch4+1 and then on More4... after several hours i had a distinct sense of deja vu and indigestion!