Henry Mallet and the Nerves

BBC TV officially began in the UK on the 2nd November 1936, although it was suspended during the war. ITV emerged on the 22nd September 1955 but at that point neither my parents or grandparents owned a TV. BBC2 was next on the 20th April 1964. By then we had a second hand TV set but couldn’t receive BBC2 on it.  It had one knob you moved to the left or right to get two pre-set channels. Not that there was much of interest on BBC2 at first. Often it didn’t start till 7pm and even then the first hour was often some highbrow Open University stuff. And life continued like that for a number of years. Virtually everyone in the country watched the same TV programmes for years. If you were unfortunate to be stuck in the house on a saturday night in the 1970s you invariably watched Kojak or Starsky and Hutch. Not that they were any good. But the only alternative at the time was probably an old John Wayne western on “the other side” that you’d seen before.

So when Channel 4 began on the 2nd November 1982, a mere 46 years after the BBC, it was a big deal. You now had more choice along with VHS home videos and also satellite TV was making inroads too. I think it was 1990 before I owned a satellite dish. I enjoyed those analogue days when along with early Sky stuff there was a number of European channels free to air. Most of them were German then. Digital TV and pay per view and encryption locked us out from European TV eventually. It’s only relatively recently that TV streaming over the Internet has taken hold for the masses now that bandwidth speeds are so much greater. Until a couple of years ago I couldn’t partake in this phenomena due to slow broadband and tiresome “buffering”.

So now we have more choice than ever before. Whole box sets and libraries of series available (at a price). Want to watch the Dick Van Dyke channel all day everyday? You can. But does anybody? There’s loads of movies. I’ve no interest in any of them. There’s loads of american TV shows but still masses of UK stuff I’d love to see again that just isn’t there. Wiped tapes? Complicated paperwork to get the rights? Who knows. Having to subscribe to so many different “apps” is tiresome. Some are free but still need to be logged into and out of which is a pain.

So I subscribed to the History Channel just to watch Skinwalker Ranch (an anti-climax) . And Paramount just to watch Frasier (rubbish!). I’m ready to unsubscribe to everything. Now I’ve finished the three seasons of Doom Patrol and can’t see any sign of Season 4 I’m clutching at straws trying to find something different that I haven’t seen before. I recently came across “Spirited”. The unlikely story of a female Australian dentist who is haunted by the ghost of a UK punk rock singer.