The goggle’s back — and I’m loving it
G ‘While there is a lot of good stuff on Netflix, there’s a lot of crap there, too’
OD almighty, there is so much television out there. I actually don’t know where I’m going to get the time to watch all the stuff I need to watch. And they keep making more — more and more must-see TV every season. And I haven’t even caught up with last season’s yet.
My mistake was that I stepped out of the game for a while. I think if you step out of the game at all, you never really catch up again. I’ve mentioned this before. It wasn’t one of those deliberate decisions. It just happened. We moved house and we just kind of neglected to get The Channels set up in the new house. The children were happy with watching the same few movies and things over and over again, and various other bits of rubbish on YouTube. And the adults had Netflix for the hour an evening of TV we get. So we just drifted on for a while.
There was general agreement that we should maybe get The Channels before I was back on the TV. There seemed to be something particularly brazen about being on TV but not actually having the TV channels myself. So that became a kind of a deadline for us. And in the meantime we relaxed into not having The Channels. And I got my news from the radio and from the papers. And when there was any kind of a “Did you see...?” watercooler moment in the office or the pub, I would stay quiet and check it out later on the player.
We actually weren’t too out-ofstep with the world. I don’t think the kids were weirdos who were shunned in school, the way you might have been back in the day if you didn’t have The Channels. There aren’t many collective TV experiences for children these days. The main thing was that we would have to have The Channels before the Toy Show rolled around again. My elder daughter is a big fan of Ryan Tubridy, or ‘Ryan’ as she calls him. She used to call him Brian. I like to think her love is mainly based on the so-called midnight feast she has at eight o’clock on the night of the Toy Show. But it could be more than that.
In school recently she had to make a collage that represented her life, and they all brought in various magazines to cut pictures out of. So she had all the usual stuff that represented her little life — a bike, a scooter, roller skates, etc. And then, bang in the middle of it is a giant picture of ‘Ryan’. It was great, she told her mother delightedly. There was a big picture of Ryan in her friend’s magazine, so she was able to put him in. I hasten to add I have no problem with this, that ‘Ryan’ is the only human being she saw fit to put in the collage of her life. I’ve been there to wipe her bum and carry her around and all the rest of it, and she has watched Ryan present, what, five Toy Shows in her short life, but he’s in the collage. Fine. I’ll remember it.
Anyway, we rumbled along fine without The Channels for a while; we even missed the deadline of me being back on TV. But finally we have got the Sky, and frankly, I don’t know where to start. On one hand I’m thinking: how did I live without all this? But on the other hand: how am I going to live with it?
It has also made me realise that while there is a lot of good stuff on Netflix, there’s a whole load of crap on there too, and I was starting to seriously eat into the crap. You can tell yourself that you are better off watching a documentary about Nina Simone on Netflix, or watching some alarmist feature-length thing about the evils of Big Food, but the fact is that since we got The Channels I haven’t gone near Netflix. The struggles of Nina Simone have taken a backseat, as I romp through immature comedies like remakes of National Lampoon’s Vacation and the deceptively weird Bad Bromance with Jack Black — trust me, that film takes a very awkward turn. Tonight I’m planning on binge-watching the other five episodes of Julia Davis’s Camping, a sitcom that Sky seems to have made while I was off the air, which, on the evidence of the one episode I’ve watched, is a darkly comic masterpiece. And that’s before I start catching up with Silicon Valley and Ray Donovan.
I even get to sit down like a real Dad and watch the nine o’clock news. Bottom line is that I didn’t feel any huge lacking in my life when I didn’t have all this stuff, and I occasionally felt a little bit superior. But the truth is, now that it’s there again, I’m loving it. And I know I can stop any time I want.