If you wanted to record a TV programme back in the “old days” (God, I’m sounding older than 27 here!) it was a little fiddly. Ten years ago, you had to put a video tape into a machine, set timers (or enter a code, if you had and trusted Videoplus) and hope that your show either didn’t start late, run late, or get bumped from the schedules.
Fast forward to 2010, and we’ve been through a litany of changes. Video tapes were briefly replaced by DVDs, then hard drives, until now we are in the position of things like Sky+ being in a large proportion of our living rooms. Gone are the days where you set timers, now it’s all a “highlight your programme in a list, press a button and you’re done”. There’s even apps for your phone that let you record a programme on the move – perfect for the time you’ve gone out and forgotten to record the football.
Where does this all fit in? Well, right now, until the big move, my personal TV recording option is a Panasonic DVR. Nothing too fancy, a Freeview DVR with an option to dump recordings to DVD… except there’s a bit of a bug with it. Freeview isn’t best known for updating its “elastic” schedules – so if, say, BBC runs a little late because of their live golf coverage, or just because they feel like running late so a later show gets a ratings bump, you’re screwed.
So last night, the planned “birthday meal out” got delayed to the point where I knew I wasn’t going to be able to catch Top Gear “live”. No problem, the Sky downstairs has it Sky+’d, but I’ll set a recording on the DVR as well so I can watch it before bed. Or so I thought. We get back home at 8.50, with ten minutes left – and the first thing we see is that the Sky+ box doesn’t have the recording light on.
By the time we realise that it’d lost its “series link”, it’s after 9, so thankfully the upstairs DVR recording has finished. Yet somehow, for a show that’s scheduled to run for an hour and five minutes, after 59:59 ticked over on the display, the recording ended. What the?
Luckily all I’d missed was a studio link, but what was the point of it all? The whole point of DVRs is so that you don’t have to worry about missing parts of your show. Granted, the “elastic” schedules is a big feature of Sky that you can’t get on Freeview, but as long as this Achilles heel exists, Freeview recording will hae a long way to go before they can even dream of challenging Sky+ for ease of use and simplicity.
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Sunday night marked something that even a few years ago would have had me excited.
WWE’s Money In The Bank PPV was the first WWE PPV to have fallen on my birthday. Back in the day, watching a WWE show live would have meant staying up til gone 4am, and with the vast majority of those not falling on Bank Holidays (back when I was at school/college/Uni), it meant going the next day on no sleep.
So what about now, here, in 2010?
Well, aside from following results, I don’t care much about wrestling now. Yeah, I still subscribe to the Observer and follow the results, but there’s no “I gotta see that” emotion tied to wrestling any more. Save for WrestleMania, the last full TV show that I sat down and watched non stop would have been the ECW and SmackDown tapings in Miami back in 2008!
Part of it could be that wrestling just isn’t my cup of tea anymore – WWE has gone too much towards the PG market that it just ain’t believable for a 27 year old; while TNA… at times just isn’t fit for human consumption! It certainly isn’t because I’m not in a position to watch wrestling – for the first six months after my move down London, my wrestling watching was limited to Youtube and WWE.com videos.
Without going into too much details (when the time is right, my friends), let’s just say that when the things you hate about wrestling start “crossing the line” from escapism into your real life, it’s time to get totally detached. For all of the podcasts I’d done and stories I’d written about another of my childhood heroes passing away, when the “wrestler I liked when I was a kid” turned into “my friend”… it’s time to walk away.
