#oneaday, Day 292: TV Get Bent

Most times I watch TV, I'm reminded why I don't watch TV any more, besides the occasional isolated incident of The Apprentice (which I can't really be bothered with this year, anyway). And the reason for that is that 99.87% (approximately) of it is complete, unadulterated, unfiltered dross and bollocks, and the rest are reruns of old, unadulterated, unfiltered dross and bollocks.

Now I understand and appreciate that some people enjoy zoning out in front of the TV and enjoy having things that they don't have to think about. I do the same with video games. But at least I'm interacting with video games, and even the most mindless, dumbest video game requires at least a bit of co-ordination and use of your reflexes. Unless it's Farmville, in which case you just require to be non-vegetative enough to click a mouse a few thousand times. But even that demands more brainpower than staring at the TV.

Not all TV is rubbish of course. But I find myself picking up favourite TV shows on DVD rather than watching them when they air. There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, being tied down to a schedule at the behest of an inanimate object is a pain that I can do without. Secondly, if I really get into a show, it's nice to be able to watch several episodes of it in succession to get a greater sense of "coherence" than watching a one-off. Try watching a season of 24 when it airs on TV as opposed to being able to watch several in a row on DVD and you'll see what I mean. Not that I ever got into Lost (the TV schedule thing meant I lost—no pun intended—interest about halfway through the first season) but I imagine that, with all its confusion, would be much the same.

The kind of TV that doesn't lend itself to a sense of "coherence"—random quiz shows and reality TV—doesn't particularly interest me anyway. So everyone's a winner, then. TV can keep its dross, its reruns, its uninspired crap and endless repetitions of Alexander the fucking Meerkat adverts. I'll stick to my DVDs, iPlayer and 4OD, thanks.

Will we eventually reach a stage where the concept of traditional TV broadcasting itself is obsolete? Thanks to services like those I've just mentioned, it's entirely possible to have a completely personalised staring-at-the-gogglebox experience consisting entirely of programmes you actually enjoy. And with services like Netflix, LoveFilm and MUBI offering a variety of niche as well as mainstream content, you can even populate your own personal TV and movie playlist with things that would never have been on TV in the first place.

Also there is no need to wait for Alexander the fucking Meerkat to come on screen to go and have a toilet break, either.

The more I think about it, the more this concept sounds very appealing. But will the TV studios ever go for it? The concept of "primetime" is still very firmly in the heads of most broadcasters, and so it's likely that scheduled programming will continue for at least a little while yet. But as time goes on? Who knows. Perhaps one day TV will move to an exclusively on-demand system.

I look forward to that day immensely.

#oneaday, Day 248: All Change! Again

It's been a curious few days for some people and things that are very dear to me. First up, you may have read my impassioned mourning of the apparent loss of Good Old Games the other day. Turns out that, as some suspected all along, the site was simply coming out of beta and relaunching. Not only that, but awesome WRPG Baldur's Gate is coming to the site, with more to follow. This, hopefully, means that Planescape: Torment can't be far behind. Because the one loaning incident I regret more than anything else is loaning that game to someone and never getting it back. I'm not even sure I know who borrowed it. So if you have my copy of Planescape: Torment, please return it to me. Or at least buy me a copy on GOG if/when it appears.

So that was sad and became happy, although some are still ranting and raving about GOG's handling of the situation. Okay, it perhaps wasn't the best PR stunt ever (some blaming that famous Polish sense of humour) but it got people talking about GOG, and it turns out that what they were planning was actually awesome. This isn't the place for that debate, though.

The really bad news, though, is that the gaming site I've written daily news for and called home since March of this year, Kombo.com, is folding. This is terribly sad news as the team at Kombo are some truly talented people who worked their hardest to provide awesome content every day, whether it was opinionated twists on news coverage or original content.

Former Assistant Director of Reviews Matt Green sums the situation up over at his blog, so pay it a visit and feel free to offer commiserations either there or indeed here. I sincerely hope that everyone who was involved with Kombo lands on their feet and gets the awesome writing gig (with appropriately awesome pay) that they deserve. Note: This includes me. So if you know anywhere who needs an awesome writer who is also British (which apparently adds +1000 awesome points) then let me know. You can feel free to point them to this site—I have links to samples of my work on the menu bar above—or to http://pjedi.co.uk/links, which also has said links.

So, with that said, I think it's time for a little light relief. The Internet provides many means of light relief, not all of which are appropriate for public consumption. (Hey, what you look at in your own time is your business. You pervert.)

By far my favourite means of light relief that the Internet provides is cat, monkey and/or dog videos, however, so I shall now share a few of my favourites. Thanks in part to Alex Connolly and Chris Person for having a link war on my Facebook profile earlier.

May I firstly present to you, courtesy of Dave Gorman on Twitter, an elephant playing darts:

Followed by the charmingly literal "A Monkey Washing A Cat."

And then… er… this.

How about THIS?!

Andross's enemy is my enemy!

And finishing with indisputably the best cat video on the Internet.

I thank you. For those who have had a nightmarish, difficult or stressful few days, I sincerely hope the sight of the above has cheered you, if only slightly. May tomorrow be a better day.

One A Day, Day 42: TV Time Machine

Jane and I have been watching some old TV recently, thanks to the magic of YouTube Shows, YouTube's new(ish) section that now contains TV shows officially uploaded by the broadcasters, and not broken into 9-minute chunks. Okay, there are irritating adverts at the beginning, midpoint and end that inexplicably always freeze at exactly the same moment, but it's a small price to pay for a huge amount of content from Channel 4 and, should you have ever found anything worth watching on there, Five. The big plus over the BBC's iPlayer service is that it's not just for catching up on programmes up to seven days after they've been broadcast. No, the new YouTube page is a replacement for Channel 4's old 4OD (aka "4 On Demand") service, which used to only work on PCs via Windows Media Player and some proprietary software to log in to the service. The move to YouTube means that you can watch these programmes on anything that can "get" YouTube, including devices like the PS3 and Wii.

I've been watching a few different things on there, including Whose Line Is It Anyway's gradual change from British comedy showcase (including early sightings of Stephen Fry, John Sessions and numerous others) to the almost-fixed cast of Colin Mochrie, Ryan Stiles and the rotating "other two" that is more familiar to those who picked up on it quite late.

Most recently, though, Jane and I have been watching Drop The Dead Donkey, a satirical newsroom-based sitcom which ran from 1990-1998. It was prepared and broadcast at incredibly short notice so it could always be bleeding-edge topical. Each episode on YouTube helpfully starts with a brief summary of that week's news events, so when the characters name-check the things that went on (as they frequently do) you have at least a vague idea what they're talking about.

The funny thing about …Donkey is that, despite being twenty years old (a fact which my wife is not at all happy about) a lot of the things in there are still just as relevant today. In particular, we have the interfering management busybody "Gus", who habitually shows up with a smarmy "Hello! Remember, I'm not here. I am just a sort of managemental support unit" whom is a fine example of everything that is wrong with corporate usage of the English language these days. We also have roving reporter Damien's blatant attempts to "spice up" his on-location reports, including one wonderfully perverse sequence where he is being bothered by people wandering past in the background waving, so he borrows a grenade from a passing soldier and lobs it into the background to cause a panic.

These things are still relevant today, as Charlie Brooker's Newswipe (all of which can also be "unofficially" found online – with the full knowledge and appreciation of Mr Brooker, I might add – thanks to this fine chap on YouTube) frequently comments on. It's always nice to find something that is still entertaining after a good few years, particularly if you never got the chance to catch it first time around, like I didn't. …Donkey clearly had such a low budget (both in terms of time and money) that it is all about the characters and the situations, and that's what makes it such a success. There's no special effects to laugh at, and everyone's hairstyle and clothes are (relatively) normal. These things make it somewhat timeless – so if you've never seen it, why not give it a shot?

On a side note, if you want yet another online TV site to check out, you can do far worse than check out SeeSaw, which also has a ton of content from the BBC, Channel 4 and Five. ITV's content is conspicuously absent from both SeeSaw and YouTube, but that's no great loss, given the fact that most programmes on ITV are enough to make you want to kill yourself.