Press play no more, the VCR is history
RIP the video cassette recorder. Once a groundbreaking form of home entertainment, this month it finally expired from loneliness, having been predeceased by Betamax tape.
Some of us of can map our lives by VHS tapes and recorders. Our family held out on buying a recorder until I borrowed a portable VCR from the TV society and took it home for the Christmas holidays.
It was the size of a suitcase and as portable as a Steinway but for the first time it opened up a universe of movies on demand.
Admittedly, membership of Blockbuster Video in Dundee translated this as a demand for a universe of Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
Blockbusters also had a marked fondness for Highlander, with six copies always available, plus a Betamax edition around the corner. Never has the winning immortal’s motto, ‘There can be only one’, seemed more meaningless.
VHS was enigmatic. How much tape was in there? What would happen if you lifted up that plastic flap across the top? Why could you never fast forward and freeze frame to the exact moment of the scene that you were looking for?
Despite the counter, by the time you hit ‘play’, Burt Lancaster’s helicopter had already landed, fuzzily, on Arisaig beach in Local Hero in front of bemused villagers.
Later there were boxed sets and special editions. When my brotherin-law landed a job abroad, my pregnant sister stayed home with my folks, just as world cinema videos turned my father into a passionate fan of luminously melancholy Chinese cinema. ‘Every night it’s another day in the cultural revolution,’ she reported sadly,
WE also made our own movies, recording birthdays, marriages, kids’ first steps and goofy gatherings, but there were already signs that VHS would soon be Gone With Rewind.
When Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith came to video, it was available only on DVD. As Yoda himself might say: doomed the format clearly was. The 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin confirmed the news: even a nerdy salesman at an electronic shop rejected the VCR. ‘It’s a dead technology,’ the movie character explains to a customer. ‘It’s like buying an eight-track player.’
I still have a VHS player, though mostly to enable a small Museum of Me: cassettes of a TV arts series I did for STV which confirms me as a regular clothes horse, in the sense that I appear to care about stylish clothes about as much as a normal horse. The padded boxes sit on a shelf in a hall cupboard, above DVDs that stop around 2012, when I started stashing films and TV shows digitally, on a hard-drive or the Cloud.
In the age of DVDs, Blu-rays, film downloads and iPlayer, it’s remarkable that VCRs hung on until this month when the last one rolled off the production line in Japan.
No memorial service is planned, although if you still have a VCR, it would be a nice touch to adopt the international sign of a recorder with the power cut off, and blink ‘12:00’ in tribute.
The life of the clunky cassette has finally unspooled but let’s celebrate the many good times we shared. Let’s do that soon, however, or there may be a late fee.