#oneaday Day 165: A first look at Ludwig

Like many of us, I have become increasingly disillusioned with the role of police in today’s society. I’m not an “ACAB” (look it up… actually, don’t) type, but there have been too many instances in my personal experience of a clear crime being reported to the cops and them basically going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ before spectacularly failing to do anything whatsoever. Despite this, I love a good detective drama, police procedural, anything like that. And so it was with some curiosity that I decided to start watching Ludwig from the BBC, a David Mitchell-fronted detective drama with a bit of a twist.

In Ludwig, Mitchell’s character John Taylor is a renowned puzzle author who goes by the name “Ludwig”, a nom de plume he adopted when first developing puzzles as a child while listening to Beethoven symphonies on vinyl records.

As the series opens, he is contacted by his identical twin brother’s wife Lucy, who has booked a taxi for him to take the 150-mile drive to come and see her, but refuses to tell him anything. John, we quickly learn, is not a sociable type, and dislikes leaving the house at the best of times; Lucy, having known him (and his brother) since childhood, knows very well that presenting him with incomplete information will drive him nuts enough to actually leave his house and discover what mystery awaits his solution.

Turns out that Lucy’s husband, John’s brother James, has gone missing. He left behind a curious note basically telling his family to flee as quickly as possible; Lucy, being a headstrong type, refuses to do this and instead recruits John to pose as James — they are identical twins, remember — in an attempt to discover the truth of what happened to him. The only slight snag in this? James was a detective working at the local constabulary, meaning John must sneak into an environment he has no professional knowledge of and attempt to find some information from under the noses of people that, presumably, James knows quite well.

Matters are further complicated where, upon John’s arrival at the police station, he is almost immediately dragged off to go and look at a crime scene. Caught in a situation where he is simply not able to refuse his partner, he ends up attending the scene of a murder and is completely out of his depth. After briefly fleeing the scene on the pretence of “getting some air”, he realises that the case is nothing but a logic puzzle; putting on his “puzzling” hat, he then proceeds to solve it in the same manner he would solve one of those old logic puzzles from the books with the guy in his pyjamas on the front.

His unorthodox methods net him a suspect and a confession, though his colleagues and superiors note that had the confession not been forthcoming, the complete lack of evidence would have made the case impossible to prosecute.

What then follows is John continuing to pose as his brother, working on several cases while attempting to ascertain the truth of what happened to his brother. It gradually becomes apparent that his brother left a trail of puzzle-like “breadcrumbs” to follow, leading John to believe that his disappearance was not accidental or circumstantial; it was planned out in advance. And cracking a cipher James left behind in his notebooks is going to be key to getting to the bottom of the case.

So far I’ve watched two episodes of the series with Andie and we’ve both enjoyed it a lot. Mitchell is, of course, playing a variation on the bumbling, socially awkward character he always plays, but it works well in the context. The positioning of an obviously autistic character in a professional role he is absolutely not comfortable with (or trained for) is, at times, borderline farcical, but suspension of disbelief allows you to simply enjoy the spectacle of what unfolds. They mysteries presented are intriguing and keep you guessing, and John’s tendency to follow through on his “hunches” keeps things interesting and pacy.

The music throughout each episode is absolutely excellent, too; perhaps predictably for a show called Ludwig, it’s all based on themes by Beethoven. Rather than just using the themes straight, however, they are all interesting rearrangements, with variations on Für Elise making up the majority of the soundtrack and the show’s main theme.

Genre critics might argue that each individual episode maybe wraps itself up a little too neat and tidily to be truly plausible — in both the episodes so far, the case being solved was dependent on one of the suspects “cracking” under the pressure of John’s logical deductions — but honestly? I don’t care. For the most part, I don’t engage with any form of fiction, regardless of medium, to ponder its realism; I engage with it to be entertained and to get to know interesting characters. And Ludwig certainly provides both in spades. It’s good, old-fashioned, entertaining television that strikes an excellent balance between drama and moments of levity, as one has surely come to expect from anything with Mitchell involved at this point.

It’s a short series — just six hour-long episodes — so I’m looking forward to seeing where things go. I’m definitely glad I started watching it, and if you enjoy a good mystery, I’d recommend you give it a look, too.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 132: Broadcast Television

It must seem incredibly quaint to people who grew up after a certain point to know that when we wanted to watch something on television, we used to be beholden to an arbitrary schedule that wasn’t decided by us, the viewers.

Sure, pay-per-view and on-demand services existed, but they were often extremely expensive and in some cases still beholden to someone else’s schedule.

Today, of course, if you want to watch something you just call it up from any of the bazillion streaming services available, or raid your network-attached storage that is loaded up with pirated movies you’ve torrented over the course of the last decade.

Streaming services have their own drawbacks, of course, with the two main ones being that there are about as many streaming services as there used to be cable packages, and the dreaded “analysis paralysis”, where being given complete freedom to choose anything often causes you to end up choosing nothing.

The reason I bring this up is because while we’ve been away on holiday, we haven’t had any TV-connected streaming devices with us. And you know what? It’s been kind of nice. We’ve watched a bit of telly while we’ve been here, and it’s just been whatever happened to be on while we wanted to just zone out for a bit. And broadcast television as it exists today is more than happy to cater to this type of viewer.

You know the sort of thing: shows that require zero commitment or even attention, like game shows and reality TV programmes about traffic police. Mindless garbage, to be sure, but somehow to me will always feel less offensive than attention-deficit slop on services like TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Perhaps that’s just my age talking — and to be clear, there’s plenty of broadcast TV I find too offensively awful to even watch as background noise — but everything we’ve watched “by chance” this week feels like something I’ve actually got something from, even if it’s just some general knowledge trivia. I absolutely do not get that from “pov: u ordered a large fish and chips at wetherspoons”.

Anyway, it’s time to go home tomorrow, so it will likely be back to not watching any broadcast TV at home. It’s been a nice change, though, and a reminder that some forms of media still aren’t quite as dead as some people would like you to believe.

#oneaday Day 131: Mandela Affected

Well, I’ve been well and truly hit with the Mandela Effect today.

Earlier, I was playing Maniac Square, a puzzle game by Spanish arcade developer Gaelco. Andie overheard the music and asked, “why does that game have the Blue Peter music?”

“It doesn’t,” I said, absolutely convinced of this fact. Blue Peter, as everyone knows, has Sailor’s Hornpipe (or, to give it its more correct name, College Hornpipe) as its theme. The same one they play at the Proms every year.

Except it doesn’t.

Blue Peter, I have learned, actually uses a tune called Barnacle Bill. It’s similar, but different. Have a listen.

Here’s Sailor’s Hornpipe, with a YouTube thumbnail that resembles the Blue Peter logo, just to add insult to injury:

And here is the Blue Peter theme in one of its more famous incarnations by Mike Oldfield of Tubular Bells fame:

You will hopefully forgive me for getting the two confused. But wait! What’s this?

It’s only bloody Mike Oldfield doing the Sailor’s Hornpipe. And just to confuse matters, his rendition of Barnacle Bill for Blue Peter in the ’80s is often misattributed to being a B-side to Tubular Bells called, you guessed it, Sailor’s Hornpipe. Except that one actually is Sailor’s Hornpipe.

For anyone reading this who isn’t British, I’m sorry. I’m not sure I can adequately explain Blue Peter to you other than to say it was a children’s TV show that, during my childhood at least, made a lot of things involving “sticky-backed plastic”, and occasionally also had wild animals shitting in their studio. It’s also the origin point, for a certain generation anyway, of the phrase “here’s one I made earlier”.

You’re going to go and tell me that isn’t true either now, aren’t you?

#oneaday Day 127: What You Leave Behind

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve made it through all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine at last, and I’m pleased to report that it was fantastic. A consistently excellent show from start to finish, and a real demonstration of why ’90s Trek is so fondly regarded to this day.

I should probably add at this point that there may be spoilers ahead. I have somehow managed to go this long without having any of the latter part of Deep Space Nine (which I hadn’t seen prior to this watchthrough) being spoiled to me, so on the offchance there’s anyone in the world still left in that position, I thought I’d give you due warning. After this image of Doctor Bashir and Garak smouldering with unresolved sexual tension, anything goes discussion-wise.

One of the things I’ve always liked about Star Trek is that it strikes a good balance between being convincingly “sciencey” and having quasi-mystical elements. That’s the kind of sci-fi I like: where there’s a high level of technology and cool spaceships, but also where there’s still stuff that science can’t quite explain, or which feels like it drifts somewhat into the realm of fantasy. As someone who enjoys nothing more than an RPG where you kill God (or equivalent) at the end, I always have time for pseudo-mystical fantasy, even in a sci-fi setting; in fact, I tend to find that particularly “hard” sci-fi — that is to say, sci-fi that paints an overly practical, “realistic” image of the future without any overtly fantastical stuff, is a bit of a turn-off.

Deep Space Nine had this right from its very first episode, where leading character Ben Sisko encounters “The Prophets”, aka the noncorporeal entities that live outside of linear time inside the Bajoran wormhole. And this element runs as a constant thread through the entire series, right up until its climactic confrontation, placing Ben Sisko, Emissary of the Prophets, up against his most fearsome foe: the Emissary of the Pah-wraiths, who, of course, turns out to be Gul Dukat.

Gul Dukat is a thoroughly interesting character throughout the entirety of Deep Space Nine, and played brilliantly by Marc Alaimo. Beginning as a somewhat smarmy individual that is clearly bitter about the Federation occupying the space station he used to be in charge of, the episodes that involve him reveal a character with a considerable amount of depth and complexity — and one who goes through almost as much shit as Miles O’Brien. Sadly for Dukat, he doesn’t pull through in the way O’Brien tends to; his eventual fate is unglamorous, but for him to be the “final boss” of the series, defeated by Sisko flinging himself into the fire with a Pah-wraith-possessed Dukat in tow, is entirely appropriate.

The whole Dominion War arc, which takes up a significant portion of Deep Space Nine’s complete runtime, is kept consistently interesting by allowing us to see it from a variety of different perspectives. Even the Dominion’s grunt soldiers, the Jem’Hadar, are given some complexity through episodes such as “Hippocratic Oath” and “Rocks and Shoals”. And the sinister twist of Section 31, while relegated somewhat to background lore, provides a good means of giving the Federation a bit of interest, too.

One of the things Deep Space Nine shows repeatedly is that even the forces we have previously been led to believe are the “goodies” have their dark sides — and likewise, traditional “baddies” can have solid redemption arcs, too. The narrative arc of Dumar, set up to be a character the audience is supposed to loathe when he kills Dukat’s daughter Ziyal — one of the few indisputably “good” characters in the series — is thoroughly fascinating, with his descent into alcoholism and bitterness and his emergence on the other side with a new-found determination to cast off the shackles of the Dominion’s oppression. It’s fitting that he die a martyr.

Kai Winn is another character who I was pleased to see eventually get their comeuppance. I wasn’t sure if they were going to go full-on “Evil Space Pope” with her during the finale, but it is, again, entirely fitting that she have all the power and glory denied to her at the last minute as Dukat steals the show. She was a consistently loathsome character throughout her entire run in the series, so seeing her fall to evil out of her lust for power and end up incinerated for it was thoroughly satisfying.

It’s kind of sad that the end of the series marked so many “farewells” from the regular cast, but it makes sense; Deep Space Nine was not the kind of Star Trek that would necessarily lend itself well to a movie in the same way as The Next Generation was, and so it felt appropriate for most people to go their separate ways at the conclusion. I was surprised at the inconclusive fate of Sisko himself — I was expecting him to pop back into existence, Q-style, towards the end of the episode — but again, with the buildup of him being part Prophet throughout the latter seasons, it made sense for him to at least temporarily be “at one with them”, if not actually dead.

Anyway, I’m relieved, as finishing Deep Space Nine now means I feel like I can engage with Trek media produced since that series finished. The Dominion War was such an important event in Star Trek canon that I had always been hesitant to engage with anything post-Deep Space Nine for fear of inadvertently spoiling myself, but now I feel like I’m free to explore the wider Trek universe, be that through other series or video games. And there are a fair few Trek video games I’m interested in trying.

That said, I do kind of want to see how Voyager goes for its whole run. That’s another one I haven’t seen all the way through, so as far as my Star Trek journeys go, that one might well be next on the list.

Later, though. We’re off on holiday on Monday, and I wanted to finish Deep Space Nine before then, as it would have been frustrating to have just a couple of episodes left and no means of watching them while we were away! Now I just need to finish Silent Hill 2 before the end of tomorrow and I can go away with no regrets…

#oneaday Day 96: Lower Decks

I was resistant to the idea of watching Star Trek: Lower Decks for quite some time. I was put off by a combination of some truly terrible trailers, the fairly generic-looking “adult animation” art style it uses, and the fact that its creator had some involvement in Rick and Morty, a show I couldn’t even make it through the first episode of without feeling mildly ill.

But then I got thinking: I fucking hate it when people write stuff off based on superficial things like art style, so I should endeavour to not do that either. And, discovering that the complete run of Star Trek: Lower Decks to date appears to be on Prime Video, I decided to watch an episode or two, just to see what it was like.

And you know what? It’s all right. The first couple of episodes are a bit heavy on the Gen Z-baiting manic energy, but after that it settles down a bit and starts to be a lot more witty and fun. There’s still a certain amount of that 2024 “energy” to it, which I’m sure will turn some people off, but it’s by no means a tedious Seth McFarlane-alike show. In fact, despite having a very different tone to live-action Star Trek, it actually manages to do quite a good job of feeling plausibly like what a comedy set in the Star Trek universe would feel like.

Because that’s what it is. It still has many of the elements of classic Trek: characters with a bit of depth to them; relationships that come to light over the course of several episodes; creative takes on alien races; and, of course, the all-important technobabble. It just has a rather more overtly irreverent tone than live-action Trek; this isn’t to say that live-action Trek was never funny, but rather it tended to be a more gentle, subtle sort of humour, whereas Lower Decks is rather more self-conscious about it.

Of the episodes I’ve watched so far, I think my favourite has been the third one, Temporal Edict, which is a funny take on something my wife and I discuss rather frequently: the amount of time wasted in an average day at a full-time job.

The episode concerns the captain becoming aware of the crew’s use of “buffer time”, a concept where they tell a superior that a particular job will take much longer than it will actually take, allowing them to look like a “hero” when they complete it in a fraction of the time they said they would, and also affording them time to slack off without anyone noticing. The episode explores the disastrous situation that would arise if everyone was well and truly “on the clock” at all hours of the day, and how it would almost certainly be counterproductive to try and micromanage people to this degree. It was a clever episode that, like classic Trek, takes a look at a real-life concept through the lens of sci-fi and invites us to have a good old think about it.

In short, I’m rather impressed with Lower Decks so far, and am pretty sure I’ll watch it all the way through on Prime Video at the very least and perhaps even pick up the series on disc to keep. I guess it remains to be seen whether or not it wears out its welcome by the end of five 10-episode seasons, but everything I’ve heard from people who are already fans seem to suggest that it only gets better from hereon. I’m certainly willing to give it the chance to prove itself further.

#oneaday Day 92: The Dominion War

I have watched so many episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine over the course of the last few days. I can’t remember the last time I was quite so hooked on a TV show to the exclusion of almost everything else — even gaming — but Deep Space Nine definitely has its hooks in deep.

Of course, part of the reason I’ve been able to enjoy so many episodes over the course of the last few days is because I’ve had a couple of days off work. Andie was having a long weekend away with some online friends, so I decided to take a couple of days off to just decompress and unwind also. And it turns out enjoying some quality TV and mostly staying away from the Internet has been exactly what I wanted and needed.

I’m currently on the third disc of season 6 of Deep Space Nine — yes, I’m doing this old-school, on DVD (not quite as old-school as when I was first watching the show on VHS, mind!) — and I think I’m into stuff I haven’t seen before. I say “I think” because the episode I just watched seemed quite familiar — or perhaps it’s just because it reminded me of another episode. I can’t be quite sure. I’m fairly convinced that I haven’t seen beyond season 5 before, but… well, I guess it doesn’t really matter. I’m enjoying it either way.

It saddens me a bit that TV isn’t made like this any more. Sure, there are Netflix series and what have you, but those are shot and budgeted in a completely different way, and it leads to quite a different feel. It’s rare for a new streaming show to last more than a couple of seasons, and some folks describe them as “8 hour movies”. One of the reasons Deep Space Nine in particular works so well is that while it is serialised and has definite arcs — particularly at this point in its run — it also isn’t afraid to spend an episode on just being a character piece, or doing something a bit weird.

This is good for the mood and helps the show feel varied. The Dominion War overarching storyline could easily have just gone unrelentingly bleak and worked well, but I feel it works even better with interludes like Worf and Dax’s wedding, or Kira dealing with the Mirror Universe counterpart of her deceased lover, or Julian contending with genetically modified humans who didn’t end up quite as well-adjusted as him.

I’m looking forward to seeing how some aspects of the series end up. Gul Dukat being utterly broken by the death of his daughter was without a doubt an incredibly significant moment for the series, so I’m looking forward to see what happens with him from there. And of course, there’s still plenty to resolve with Sisko that I suspect will continue right up until the very end.

It’s easy to see why this is such a well regarded series, and one which many people consider Star Trek’s absolute peak. I do find it quite funny that when it first started airing, some people considered it “the boring one”, though, and many of those folks didn’t come around until season 4. Part of the show’s strength is that slow build; while I’m sure it could have told a similar story over far fewer episodes, it wouldn’t be the same show without us just having the opportunity to live with these characters for so long.

I suspect I will cry at the finale, whatever form that takes. I have remained unspoiled on that for many years now, though, so I’m looking forward to finally experiencing it for the first time when I do eventually get that far.

Should probably sleep now, though. Or maybe one more episode…?

#oneaday Day 73: Stylised TV

One of the things that I’m finding most striking about watching through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is how the show is, on the whole, willing to experiment with structure, presentation and the entire way an episode’s story is told. I don’t know if it’s just that I haven’t watched a really good TV show for a long while or if things really were a lot more ambitious in this regard in the ’90s; either way, I’ve found it very striking.

There are several episodes that defy the conventions of what I think of as “regular TV” — or perhaps it’s more accurate to say what I perceive as the “norms” of the show. The first of these that springs to mind is the early fourth season episode The Visitor, which is frequently held up as an example of the show at its absolute best. And interestingly, it’s an episode of the show where it’s at its least “sci-fi”, outside of one significant aspect.

Spoilers ahead, though this episode is nearly thirty years old at this point, so I’m going to assume most of you reading this who might be interested in watching it will have probably seen it by this point.

In The Visitor, we are introduced to an old man who lives by himself. It’s a dark and stormy night, and a young woman comes knocking at his door, seeking shelter from the rain. The old man introduces himself as Jake Sisko — but at this point, we, the audience, know Jake Sisko as the 18 year old son of the show’s lead, Captain Benjamin Sisko.

The old Jake explains to the young woman that at some point after he turned 18, his father died.

Boom. Right in there with the intrigue. Had Star Trek: Deep Space Nine really killed off its lead in the second episode of its fourth season? No, of course it hadn’t, and everyone watching knew that was the case. But it was still one hell of a way to get the audience’s attention prior to the opening credits rolling.

The Visitor continues with old Jake telling the story of what happened to his father — apparently an accident aboard the USS Defiant pushed Ben out of sync with reality, causing him to “time jump” at various intervals. He’d return to Jake for a while — sometimes a few days, sometimes just a moment — and Jake would be older, but he’d not have aged a day.

Long story short, Jake spends his life trying to figure out what exactly is going on with his father, and how he might be able to save him. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that the only way for him to prevent his father from springing through time, attached to him by an invisible thread, is for him to die. And so, it gradually becomes clear over the course of the episode, that old man Jake Sisko is going to die, and that this is the only way for Ben to return to his own time.

The way this episode is presented is beautiful. It cuts back and forth between Old Jake simply telling the story to his companion, and us actually seeing what was going on at various points in Old Jake’s “past” — including some delightful “aged up” takes on Dr Bashir and Jadzia Dax. It’s just so unusual and beautifully directed that it remains one of the most memorable episodes of the series to this day; I remembered it fondly from when I first saw it on VHS tape roughly when it was “current”, and it hasn’t lost any of its impact in the intervening years.

I’m now getting into episodes that are less familiar to me, because I drifted off watching Deep Space Nine partway through the fourth season. Not because I wasn’t enjoying it, but because I didn’t really have the money or space to keep investing in VHS tapes with just two episodes on each!

Recently, I watched an episode called Rules of Engagement, and this also does some interesting things with its direction. The concept of this episode is that Worf is facing a hearing for supposedly destroying a civilian vessel during a confrontation with the Klingon Empire, who are, throughout the fourth season, being A Bit Of A Dick, to put it mildly.

Similar to The Visitor, a lot of the narration takes place in the “present” through the words of the participants in the hearing, but it also cuts to scenes that are being remembered by the people involved and the witnesses. In these instances, there are situations where the characters are going about their business as they did back in the way, but narrating them as they go — and even speaking directly to the “viewer” at various points. Seeing a character in a TV show directly address you, as if you are a participant in proceedings — in this case, casting you in the role of one of the participants in Worf’s hearing — is quite unusual, and it’s used to striking effect in this episode.

I’m sure from some perspectives both of these framing devices can be looked upon as a little cheesy. But I was struck by both of them as being thoroughly unusual and interesting. Like I say, it’s entirely possible that I just haven’t watched any “good TV” for quite some time (I can’t remember the last series I watched from start to finish. Possibly Fringe? And that was years ago) and thus haven’t seen anyone being particularly ambitious with direction and storytelling. But it doesn’t really matter; what matters is that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine still stands out as spectacularly good television, even nearly 30 years later.

#oneaday Day 15: Station on the Frontier

Right! Yes. I was going to talk about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, wasn’t I. Okay, let’s do that.

I love Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but I had a bit of a curious introduction to it. I grew up watching the endless reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on BBC2 at 6pm; that tended to coincide with family dinner time, so we’d often watch it on the kitchen TV while having our food. When Deep Space Nine launched in 1995, though, I feel like our family were initially a bit resistant to it. It was, after all, very different from what had been, at that point, the only two prior Star Trek series; for one thing, there was very little actual “trekking”, what with it being all set in one location, and the tone was very different from the optimistic nature of The Next Generation.

I kind of drifted away from it because of this; I personally hadn’t really found anything to dislike about it, but the fact my parents didn’t seem to enjoy it as much meant that I didn’t derive quite so much pleasure from it if it happened to be on around dinner time. (And of all the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine is arguably the one least appropriate for dinnertime viewing — not because it’s particularly gory or anything, but simply because its rather bleak tone and uncompromising look at certain less glamorous aspects of life among the stars made it more of a “primetime evening” sort of show.)

I watched the odd episode here and there, but I didn’t keep up with it. That all changed, however, when I spent a couple of weeks in London with my brother for my Year 10 work experience placement. Rather than be placed in the boring old local industrial area like most of my peers, I made arrangements to do my work experience in the PC Zone offices, since my brother was editor there at the time. I had a thoroughly enjoyable time, but that’s probably a story for another day.

No, the thing I particularly remember from that trip, besides my time in the office, was some discussion over Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s fourth season — which had recently started being broadcast on Sky satellite TV at the time, as I recall; the BBC’s reruns were a few seasons behind — and was just starting to come out on VHS cassette. I heard such enthusiasm for the new episodes from my brother and his peers that I wanted to find out a bit more about it for myself. So one lunchtime, I took a trip to the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street, which was within walking distance from the Zone offices on Bolsover Street, and picked up video “4.1: The Way of the Warrior”. And I watched that feature-length episode that evening on my brother’s TV.

Not my copy; this is from a listing on eBay. I won’t lie, it is tempting to grab this for old time’s sake.

I was blown away; this was damned good TV, though I was quite conscious that I had clearly missed some rather important story beats somewhere along the way. Who were the Dominion? Why was Sisko now a captain, not a Commander? Why was he bald and bearded? Who was Kassidy Yates? What was up with the Klingons being all weird, after years of them being “no longer the bad guy” in The Next Generation?

I was confused, but enthralled nonetheless; after I got home, I started collecting the VHS cassettes from season 4 onwards. In retrospect, this was an enormous waste of money and space, since each tape only included two episodes and cost about £14.99, but as a teenager living out in the country, I didn’t have much else to spend my money on at the time other than video games. I built up quite a collection, and also, on someone’s recommendation, picked up the “3.1” volume “The Search”, which helped me understand a bit better who The Dominion actually were.

After some time, though, I drifted away from Deep Space Nine again. As before, it wasn’t that I disliked what I was seeing, but there were other factors at play — perhaps most notably the dawn of DVD as a distribution medium. By the time I got to university, DVD players were becoming much more accessible, and I was excited by all the movies I could now watch in what was, at the time, spectacularly good picture quality. I think at that point, collecting VHS tapes started to feel a bit less desirable — particularly since, as a student, I was living in a relatively limited amount of space.

As I recall, it took quite some time for all the Star Treks up to that point — The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager — to make it to DVD, and I just sort of got out of the habit of watching them. There was always a little voice at the back of my mind, though, that said “one day, you should watch all of Deep Space Nine and Voyager“. (I had, by this point, seen all of The Next Generation multiple times.)

I never quite got around to doing that. I started watching Star Trek on US Netflix for a while, but got fed up with having to use a VPN to do so, since they weren’t on UK Netflix at the time. Then I pretty much fell out of the habit of watching long-form TV and movies altogether; I much preferred the more active sense of entertainment I was getting from video games.

Cutting out many intervening years in which nothing of any real relevance to this story occurred, for my birthday this year I was fortunate enough to receive a box set of Deep Space Nine from my brother, who, true to what he had always said, left a note saying “it’s still the best one”. And so, having set up my now-mostly dormant PS4 (my PS5 plays all my PS4 games now) in the bedroom, I decided to start watching an episode or two before going to sleep of an evening.

As I type this, I’m about two-thirds of the way through Season 3, and I am absolutely loving the show. It shows its age in some ways — an episode set in “the future” of the time when it was broadcast turned out to be 2024, for example — but it’s definitely got it where it counts. Strong characters, excellent acting, compelling storylines, and above all, plenty of variety.

I’m not sure why my parents and I ever thought Deep Space Nine was “boring”. Because it absolutely is not, even in the first three seasons, which are commonly regarded as “the bit before it gets really good”. Some shows are epic in scale, while others are tight, character-driven pieces — and beneath it all, there’s a sense of coherence that The Next Generation didn’t really nail until its later seasons. This latter point is perhaps best exemplified by how, for quite some time, the best way to get The Next Generation VHS videos was not on an episode-by-episode basis, but in box sets that were each themed around a particular element of the show, such as Data, Q or the Borg. (I had several of these; they were cool display pieces as well as being pretty good value!)

The Data box set. Again, not my copy; this image is from fan wiki Memory Alpha. The back of the box opened up to reveal three VHS cassettes, with their cases designed to look like the positronic circuits inside Data’s head.

Deep Space Nine is from that point where American television really seemed to latch on to the fact that audiences enjoy serialised stories. Sure, it’s a risk — with heavily serialised shows, you run the risk of alienating anyone who isn’t on board from the start — but Deep Space Nine manages to remain mostly accessible throughout, as shown by my jumping in at The Way of the Warrior all those years ago, while truly rewarding those who are in it for the long haul.

It’s been a real pleasure to return to a series that, in retrospect, I’ve always liked a great deal. I feel I’m getting more out of it now than I did when I was younger — and this time, this time, I’m going to make it all the way to the end. I’m just a little sad that I never did so before several of the cast members passed away. But their memory shall live on.

The TikTokification of comedy

I fucking hate TikTok. I hate “short-form content” in general, which means I loathe YouTube Shorts, Instagram/Facebook Reels and anything anyone feels the need to send me that is in a 9:16 aspect ratio. So if you’re considering it… don’t. I won’t watch it.

My reasons for despising short-form content are numerous and varied, so I won’t go into all of them here, but one thing in particular vexed me so when I stumbled across it yesterday that I felt the need to get this particular rant out of my system. And that is what I call the TikTokification of comedy — or, to put it another way, the divorcing of comedic moments from context purely so that idiots can quickly and easily steal them and share them on their mindless social media.

I’ve actually been thinking about this for a while. The first time I was particularly conscious of it was when I started seeing that a number of comedians had started upping their YouTube presence. And all their videos had a few things in common. Take a look at these thumbnails:

All of these are completely transparent clickbait. And while a certain amount of clickbait is a necessity on a platform as saturated with material as YouTube is, I really detest the whole “half a sentence” thumbnail format. I didn’t click on this one, which has almost certainly floated across your YouTube recommendations at some point, either:

This, to me, is the YouTube equivalent of the Twitter engagement bait (that thankfully seems to have died a bit of a death… along with the rest of Twitter) where a brand would go “[our brand] is _________” and expect people to “fill in the blank”. And people, dumb consumers that they are, absolutely would. And it didn’t matter whether they were filling it in with obscenities or bootlicking nice things, it was engagement. It made the numbers go up. That’s all that mattered.

It’s the same with these comedy clips. I like all of those comedians above, but I don’t want to click on their videos because it’s rewarding manipulative behaviour, and also encouraging the main problem that I want to talk about today: encouraging people away from enjoying a creative work in its entirety and towards a grab-bag full of “best moments” that completely lack their original context.

Good stand-up comedy makes the entire show into an event, and runs a narrative thread through the whole thing. Not all comedians do this, but the best comedians, in my experience, make you feel like you’ve enjoyed a complete story by the time you’ve left the room. Sure, there may have been some deviations along the way, and the story may not have made all that much sense… but there was still a sense of narrative progression. A beginning, middle and end, if you will. For some great examples, check out Rhod Gilbert’s show Rhod Gilbert and the Award-Winning Mince Pie and pretty much anything by Eddie Izzard.

When you slice a show up into little bite-sized bits, you lose that context. Sure, the individual moments might be funny on a superficial level, but you lose the added depth of them being part of something bigger. And that’s a real shame. And this leads me on to the real reason I’m writing this today: my discovery yesterday that Friends, a TV show I absolutely adored during my formative years, has its own YouTube channel.

And yes, you guessed it, the Friends YouTube channel looks like this:

The stand-up comedy thing I can sort of forgive. While I much prefer seeing an entire stand-up set and enjoying that feeling of context and narrative, there are sometimes just single jokes or routines that you want to share with someone. And you can probably make the same argument about Friends.

But for me, and regardless of what you and/or the general public might think of it now in 2023, Friends was always about more than just the jokes. Friends was a phenomenon. Friends was about us spending 10 years alongside these characters in an important, turbulent part of their lives, and watching them grow and change. Friends was about us simultaneously being envious of these twentysomethings somehow being able to afford massive apartments in Manhattan, but also feeling like the moments they shared were relatable in their own ways.

And an important part of the entire experience was context. While Friends actually starts kind of in medias res, halfway through a member of this pre-existing friendship group telling a story in their favourite coffee shop, it still makes an effort to introduce us to everyone through the way Rachel enters the picture as a formerly estranged friend of Monica.

We feel included. We feel like we’re learning who these people are — and over the course of the subsequent ten seasons, we really get to know everyone. And while the age of the show means that life in general is quite different for most folks right now — look how infrequently anyone on the show uses a mobile phone or a computer, for example — it’s still relatable to anyone either going through that “20s to 30s” part of their life, or who has already been through it.

These characters grow and change as a result of the things that happen to them and the simple act of getting older. They enjoy amazing high points and some heartbreaking low points — although nothing too heartbreaking; this was a primetime comedy show, after all. But everything that happens helps to define these characters and make them more than simple, mawkish, two-dimensional representations of a single personality trait.

Slice all 236 24-minute episodes up into one-minute chunks, though, and you have content. You have individual moments that, in many cases, simply don’t really work as standalone “jokes” because they rely on you knowing and understanding the characters and their relationships. And you have no sense of that ongoing growth and character development, because all these clips are posted in a seemingly completely random order determined by whatever the person running the Friends YouTube account felt like putting up today.

I realise this is a bit silly to get annoyed and upset over, but it’s frustrating to me to see something that I loved so much in its original form and its original context be treated as fodder for the mindless content consumption machine of 2023. It irritates me to think that there are doubtless some people out there whose only contact with Friends will have been minute-long clips on YouTube, and through those they will likely have formed a totally different opinion of the show than someone who watched it from start to finish.

Is this elitist and gatekeepery? Not really, since Friends itself is easy enough to watch in its entirety via either streaming services or undoubtedly cheap DVD box sets that no-one wants any more. It’s just the latest symptom in a disease that blights society, where no-one believes they have “time” for anything any more, so watch badly cropped minute-long 9:16 clips on double speed while they’re doing their daily quests in Mindless Gacha Bullshit X, rather than settling down, taking some time to relax and just enjoying something in its entirety.

I hate it. Hate it. And while I’m aware there’s nothing stopping me from doing what I describe above — I think I even still have my Friends DVD box set somewhere — it’s exhausting just to be around all this short-form garbage, and frustrating to live in a world where seemingly no-one has an attention span longer than a TikTok video.

My new TV show obsession is Inside No. 9.

After greatly enjoying The Cleaner — which, I’m pleased to say, I continued to really like after the first few episodes I wrote about in the post linked — I decided that I should really try and wean myself off mindless stupid YouTube videos and watch some more things with a bit of substance to them.

So I decided to take a look at Inside No. 9, which is a show I’d seen a number of people talking about, but knew absolutely nothing about. For some reason, I’d developed the assumption that it was something to do with politics (I think I’d made the unprompted mental leap from “No. 9” to “10 Downing Street” or something) and thus hadn’t really paid it much mind.

But then I saw this news story shared by someone I know. (Caution: The Mirror. Also spoilers.) If that was the kind of show we were actually dealing with… then I was absolutely, completely on board. I love this kind of gleefully experimental, darkly humorous stuff, and it seems like I’ve missed out on rather a lot of Inside No. 9 since it first aired in 2014.

I’m going to try not to talk too much about specifics of the show in this post, because it really is one of those series where the less you know what to expect going in, the more effective it is at what it does. So for now I’ll simply say that it is the work of Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, two members of the League of Gentlemen, and it is some absolutely masterful television.

And I’ll leave that there for those who are sufficiently intrigued to check it out for themselves. It’s a BBC show, so you can watch it on iPlayer (or, presumably, BritBox in the States) and I think it has also had physical releases. Based on the three episodes I have watched so far, I have nothing but the highest praise for it, and highly recommend it.

For those who want to know a bit more and aren’t too concerned about mild spoilers (which I’m still going to try and keep to a minimum), I’m going to drop in a “read more” tag here, and you can join me after the jump to find out a little more if you see fit.

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