Don’t let your hard drive hold you hostage
Take the plunge and purge all those unwatched shows cluttering up your box, and your conscience, says Alastair McKay
HERE is a scene in an episode of Sex and the City that says something about how our television viewing habits have changed. Many things happened in that episode. Carrie and Berger’s dates sizzled in the restaurants but fizzled in the bedroom. Miranda became addicted to a British TV show about a romance between a black man from Brixton and a white woman from Hampstead. Charlotte considered converting to Judaism. Samantha went to a coldfood restaurant and met a hot waiter.
What I recall best is a scene where Miranda came home from a tough day only to discover that the menu of stored programmes on her TV recorder was empty, having been deleted by a nanny. No programmes about interracial romances: no Brixton, no Hampstead, nothing. It was, in 2003, a tragedy.
Miranda was merely dating a digital recording device. But, just as Sex and the City now seems like a quaint ode to shoe fetishism, so our relationships to our tellyboxes have grown more co-dependent.
There’s something cruel about a full hard drive. It mocks our best intentions and keeps providing evidence of faded passion. That second series of Broadchurch that you almost finished until something else came up — it keeps shouting at you: “Don’t worry — the bits about the lawyers will go away and Olivia Colman will come back and cry and it will all be fine.”
On the other hand, there must be a reason why you stopped watching. What if the whole thing was just a lapse of taste? You wouldn’t want this to be another Lost, would you?
And, worse: telly never stops. No sooner have you failed to watch the end of season three of House of Cards on Netflix than there’s another series of Nashville downloading into your head-space. Will it be too trashy, or just trashy enough? How do you get rid of all those halfwatched serials? You can unsubscribe or delete them but that’s an admission that all the time you invested originally was a waste.
These are the symptoms of a digital viewing disorder, in which halfdigested programmes become fat on the hips, in urgent need of purging. And so, in the interests of digital exfoliation, I ventured into my box to see what space could be reclaimed.
As an experiment in mental gardening, it was a chastening experience. There were programmes there which I had no knowledge of, and no interest in. It was like there was a ghost in the machine, albeit a ghost with a fascination with the Kennedy assassination.
There were some things I knew about, of course. Top of the Pops: 1980 is a series link I won’t be deleting, because there are endless moments when it seems appropriate
There will be a day, I’m sure, when I get to the end of the 1999 South Bank Show about Dolly Parton
to be reminded about the state of the music industry in its ridiculous postpunk, pre-futurist pomp.
There were vital documentaries that I will surely watch one day, or hire a nanny to accidentally expunge (Citizenfour, the Edward Snowden documentary, and 20,000 Days on Earth, the Nick Cave one, which is also rentable on Film4oD).
There will be a day, I’m sure, when I get to the end of the 1999 South Bank Show about Dolly Parton. Thus far, I have been unable to go beyond the opening exchange in which Dolly and Melvyn Bragg compare coiffures. It goes like this. Dolly, to Melvyn: “You have beautiful hair.” Melvyn to Dolly: “So do you.”
What was Sensitive Skin, and why did I record it? Oh, wait, it’s a Canadian version of the Hugo Blick series starring Kim Cattrall, playing an older version of Kim Cattrall, and Elliott Gould as an opportunistic physician. Maybe that’s worth keeping. But not, as yet, watching.
The Knick, Stephen Soderbergh’s drama starring Clive Owen as an opportunist physician in early 20thcentury New York? Yes, that was pretty good, so I persevered, and it was satisfying to see it through.
And then came Fortitude, a series