X Rated

The arrival of a teevee box set on iTunes is always something to be celebrated.  For five quid, you can have days of entertainment, the sort that requires you to lie motionless on the couch only moving occasionally to visit the kitchen to forage for sustaining snacks.  This is the sort of activity that lends itself more to the sporting of pyjamas in the daytime and DVT stockings rather than athletic wear, or proper clothes.  Essentially, it's a return to the halcyon days when Test Match Special was on the proper telly.

Of course, unless it is made with the confidence of late night shopping, no entrainment purchase is made without at least some internal debate which, with the advent of streaming services, has become somewhat fraught.  Do you buy now, or do you wait until it's even cheaper, and what if it doesn't get even cheaper, but what if it appears for free on Netflix, but what if it vanishes from Netflix unexpectedly before you have finished watching it?

Suggested solution is purchase the damn thing and live with the self loathing.

At least one no longer has to factor pirate streaming services into the consideration.  Once a swashbuckling way to thumb your nose at the faceless monolithic entertainment corporations who produced your favourite shows but always, always, were worthy of your contempt because they would one day cancel a beloved show or, worse, allow it to continue when it was plainly past it's best, experiencing a sort of series senility, pirate streaming sites allowed one to enjoy postcard sized low-res episodes of your favourite shows with the added bonus of Korean subtitles.  Today, they are a gateway to more viruses than a hooker's wet wipe and best avoided unless you have a computer you can put in quarantine.

If you believe the media, you would think that box sets were a recently recent invention.  And they are, for mainstream telly.  However, any geek will tell you that genre television has known and embraced the box set for many, many years.  I recall visiting homes where the bookcases would be home to Buffy box sets.  I didn't criticise, as my own bookcases contained VHS box sets of The X Files.  This was like Buffy but crucially was for adults, and had a much fitter female lead.

The thing about box sets is that they require effort to watch.  This is not another blog entry about how modern technology has ruined it for everyone and kids today don't have an appreciation of how the arts should be enjoyed, but anyone watching telly on their iPad on a train should be flogged.  How are you supposed to enjoy plot, pace, tension and characterisation with station announcements every three minutes and the screen reflecting  everything going on around you.  It's not just vampires that sunlight is harmful to, it's atmospheric lighting on set too.

Box sets require investment.  The best reason to purchase one is to binge, to exhibit your mastery over the schedules and to pull up from that cliffhanger.

Geeks have time.  That's why Buffy and the X Files were so popular on VHS back in the day.  It's probably also why Ally McBeal box sets were so popular.  These too were watched by people in pyjamas, it's just that these people were women.

There will be people who are now considering the purchase of box sets online that they previously owned on VHS and also possibly on DVD.  The's an argument that these people should be able to download for free and that anyone who went the VHS/DVD/BluRay route should get a free download and a refund.  Seriously, if this is the fourth format you are going to buy in, you have to be wondering whether it's worth skipping downloads and waiting for the next iteration of box set.

I had a few series of the X Files on VHS, purchased at huge expense and thrown out a few years ago, as charity shops no longer accept VHS tapes as donations.

So, obviously, now is the time to replace those box sets, clear the schedules, launder the pyjamas and prepare for hundreds of hours of broadcasting excellence, all the while marvelling at how young Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny look in series one.

U2 can't even give it away

Ah, Bono. 

Ah, the other lads in the band. 

What have ye done now?

Like many men, I have a relationship with U2.  As a young man, I bought ‘Rattle and Hum’.  You had to, it was the law, like belonging to the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany but slightly less regrettable.  Achtung Baby was an important album.  It must have been, as I don’t think I bothered to remove it from my CD player for about two years.

Then came the later albums and, even though I am partial to Flood as a producer, the band’s move to megalither status was never quite ironic enough to convince me that U2 had not sold out. 

Then they went so far up their own arse that it needed a prospecting proctologist to locate them, aided by the light that Bono by now thought shone from there, or so we were led to believe.

The sound became less edgy which, given the moniker of their lead guitarist, was ironic.

Then came this.

In an act of stunning philanthropy (unless that’s the one to do with stamp collecting) or, alternatively, the greatest act of piracy since Cap’n ‘Beardless Nancy’ Coot captured an entire Spanish silver fleet at the mouth of the Amazon single-handedly (literally, the left one had been eaten by a shark, instead of the traditional hook, he sported the much more practical, and piratical, corkscrew), U2 gifted their latest album ‘Songs of innocence’, to the nation, or at least that portion of the nation that has iTunes.

I downloaded and listened and it’s not bad.

Some people, however, are not happy.

Presumably some are unhappy because they take the same view of a free U2 album that I took of getting a free ‘Times’ delivered with my groceries whether I wanted it or not; at free, it’s overpriced.

But more were unhappy because this was an affront to their personal space and an assault on their taste and was clogging up their new iPhone with unwanted music.

Finding an album already installed for free on your new iPhone and thinking ‘meh’ rather than ‘woo-hoo’ is, I would contest, one of those ‘first world problems’ that are supposed to exist.  If there is a problem here, it’s twofold.

The first is that anyone who doesn’t like what is essentially a free gift must have a sense of entitlement so vast it has its own gravitational pull.

The second is, if you have just bought a ‘phone that has something installed on it by the manufacturer that you don’t like…then maybe you made a mistake buying an Apple product.

Really.

Because I don’t know if you did any research before you spunked what I’m pretty sure was more than a fiver on your new ‘phone, but Apple, who make the lovely, desirable and apparently bendy iPhone, do have something of a reputation for installing shit on their devices that you need the cyber equivalent of penicillin to shift.

For years, we had Google maps on our iPhones.  Now we have Apple’s own mapping system.  This is because either:

a)    the data that Apple can collect about our roaming habits has to be worth something to somebody; or

b)    Apple have been paid eighty galizzion dollars by the people who make maps to make paper maps relevant again by making a mapping app so unreliable, you’d be better off packing a sextant and a compass than an iPhone if considering a trip.

All in all, U2 did a good thing in a cruel world.  The album is good (the best for a whole actually, maybe because it was free, maybe not, but what the hell) and the intention was too.

As for those who complained..the Department of Homeland Security thanks you for your feedback on what happens when you overtly install benign compulsory technology on a device that can track your movements and monitor your calls, txt messages and e mails.  And that, Congressmen, is why we install monitoring software, in all ‘phones, covertly.

Oh come on, why else do you think your brand new ‘phone comes out of the box with 0.4GB memory already used?

I look for forward to songs of experience.

Que the music...and the inevitable pop-up radio station

It used to be that if you wanted to set up your own radio station, far from the corrosive influence of The Man, so that you could play the records that you wanted to play, you needed a ship floating in international waters and a bloody big transmitter mast.  This got you beyond the reach of broadcast licensing (and, some might say, the reach of any law enforcement agencies that might want to take a close look at the activities of the crew of ‘The Singing Nonce’).  Obviously, when the BBC was looking to crew its, appropriately as we now know, youth orientated radio, it took DJs from the pirate stations, a sort of reverse press-ganging.

Radio 1 torpedoed Caroline and others, and the next shift in pirate radio was when even commercial radio refused to play endless twelve inch acid house mixes.  Pirate stations popped up, playing music and telling people what fields they may want to gather in that weekend to either dance in, or make crop circles in, or both.  This still required you to tune in to the crackly end of the dial.

Then came the podcast and the true meaning of pirate radio was revealed.  It certainly wasn’t to allow you to listen to music that nobody else was listening to, that had been happening for years thanks to C30, C60 and C90 (Go!) cassette tapes circulated in schools, you know, the things that were supposed to kill the music industry instead of, as they actually did, generate interest in bands and allow people to share there enthusiams.

This, and the fanzine, was analogue social media.

What the podcast does is allow a radio show to be produced without any of that tedious music to prevent the presenter stoking their ego by talking about their favourite subject for thirty minutes.  Podcasts are now like the magazine shelves of WH Smiths, there is a podcast for every hobby and pastime, no matter how obscure.  There are probably podcasts about how to knit presentational jackets for wine bottles.  If there isn’t there bloody well should be.

And that should have been it for the pirate radio station.  Killed off by being legalised and available everywhere.

However.

Small, temporary stations are starting to become something of a vogue once again.  In the village every Easter, the local Christians run a radio station for a couple of weeks, and jolly good fun it is too.  Who gives a flying frick what the traffic is like over some bridge many miles away, I want an update on what the queue is like a) at the crossroads and b) at the check-out at Threshers, both of which are visible from the front of the café the Christians broadcast from.

But, say the hipsters, how can we make this even cooler?  I know, let’s appropriate the idea, put the word ‘pop-up’ in front of it, and pass off the idea as our own.

Hence, festivals now come with their own pop-up radio stations.  Nothing new there, but the twist is that these ones are being run by national broadcasters.  For instance, Radio 2 and their recent ‘Eurovision’ pop-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think pop-ups are a great idea.  Pop-ups make things more fun, ‘book’ and ‘penis’ are just two of the tings that can be improved by having the words ‘pop-up’ in front of them.  But radio station?

Having said that, there’s a great deal of charm in something that is only in existence for a short time and is dedicated to one particular subject, and if it’s the only way we get to hear what is, essentially, the Eurovision B side, then it’s probably of some cultural significance.  Probably.

But is it as good as being slipped a cassette in the playground, or as thrilling as happening upon a new tune emerging from crackly static at the top of the dial?

American Pie

Have finally got round to sorting out a new play list on iTunes. (this despite the fact that ‘Patience’ may well be the greatest record ever recorded, ever.) and loaded on an old CD favourite – ‘American Pie’ by Don Williams. Possibly the most perfect song of heartbreak ever written, bar none. Also, top value on the Juke Box as it goes on forever!