Disc Two - Digital Versatile Opinion

"DVDs are the new Television"

I sit here literally knee deep in poorly constructed metaphors. I am also surrounded by DVDs. I have my fair share of films – less than I used to have but perhaps more than I’ll have in the future – and lots and lots of television programmes. The Doctor Who ones you know about and no doubt many of you can regard your own shelves and empathise. It goes without saying that they are superb pieces of work, have rightly won awards, and knock spots off any television presentation of the stories. Nothing can quite match the excitement (probably) of watching brand new episodes – not even a Barry Letts commentary track – but it is fair to say that it is better to watch a well polished DVD of Carnival of Monsters than it is to get up early and see it on UKGold (if they still bother with the Tom Baker-free Pertwee era).

The reason I’m writing this is that I’ve just bought the first two seasons of "Alias" on DVD from Amazon’s latest apocalyptic sale. I can’t yet say whether it will join the likes of The West Wing (one and two) on the Pending pile or if it will be devoured with all the naked enthusiasm of the latest Ultimate Fighting Championship to pop through my letter box. But it is evidence of the way DVD has changed the way we watch television.

In the old days there were videos. Think vinyl only with more corners. If you wanted to collect a cult series like Star Trek or Babylon 5 you paid your ten, eleven or twelve pounds and got a tape with two episodes on it. This process would be repeated once or twice a month until you had a whole season. They took up a lot of space, they cost you well over a hundred quid and you had annoying waits between episodes. There also, and you might have to use your imaginations with this bit, weren’t lots of rival online shops offering big discounts. Worse still, not every show which got a release lasted until the end of the run. Poor initial sales scuppered many a series. I’d swear to you that the same eight episodes of Department S were released three or four times and each new owner of the ITC catalogue tried to get the people interested in Peter Wyngarde and his amazing Technicolor wardrobe. Along came DVDs and you could fit an entire season into a box which needn’t be any bigger than a single VHS. The canny shopper can, to return to the Star Trek example, buy a whole year for thirty or forty pounds of the sterling realm.

But you know all this. Am I ever going to get to a point? Well, Alias is a point. It highlights many and various problems with television today. Firstly, it was on Sky One and they are crap. They make it unbearable to watch anything. Adverts every ten minutes, voice overs which start BEFORE the end music, cuts, on screen logos and their habit of starting every new show in the same week thereby not letting things breathe and find an audience amongst the overwhelmed viewership. Perhaps the only things worse than being shown on Sky One both happened to Alias. The ratings weren’t deemed strong enough so it got shifted about and then unceremoniously dumped, and then it got picked up by Bravo. Who have longer and more frequent ad breaks and even worse on screen logos.

The picture on DVDs is also far superior to that of television. Once upon a time, VHS provided an inferior picture to a well tuned television. But the greed of the digital TV companies means more and more channels are being squashed into a limited space so bit rates are low and pictures are blocky. With action shows like Buffy and Alias this is especially noticeable. It won’t change. Even High Definition television – if it ever happens – will be spoilt by greed. Quantity is more important than quality as the former can be defined and the latter cannot. The world today is obsessed with numbers and targets – if it cannot be quantified, it does not matter.

I mentioned before about Sky cutting shows. They lie to us about their censorship but it is obvious what they do. First, they schedule shows at unsuitable times so they have to cut them. To give two examples, Xena (15 cert on video) was put out at lunchtime on a Sunday so had six or seven minutes removed from each episode. Family Guy is a cartoon and therefore MUST be a children’s show. So they cut out the swearing and the adult humour and make it a children’s show. Second, they like showing adverts and trailers so they shorten the programmes in order to have more time for promos. Granada Plus are particularly guilty of this. Not for them the sensible UKGold up-frontness of giving a 30 minute show a 40 minute time slot so they can add adverts. Oh no – G-Plus buy 30 minute shows and cut them down to 23 minutes so they can fit adverts. It isn’t strictly relevant here but I want to mention ITV’s shocking practice of having two prime time schedules – the public schedule and the internal schedule. The publicly released schedule is deliberately wrong by five or ten minutes so people will tune in and see more adverts.

I used to wonder what kind of person bought a series on video when they could just tape it off the telly. It seemed like the worst kind of over-paid madness. You’d be watching something like The Fast Show and a trailer would follow it promoting the video. It seemed insane. At best they might get a few people who had missed episodes and who wanted to see the rest. Now I understand it only too well. Television is rubbish. The whole way it does everything is so frustrating, cynical and greedy that just being exposed to it ruins any pleasure that can be drawn from the programmes. Until someone does something to curb their excesses it isn’t worth the hassle. Take on screen logos – two or three of them on screen at all times. They tell you the channel, tell you that this is a brand new episode, tell you about the themed weekend coming up in three days time, tell you what is on next… This is the twenty first century. When you tune in to a channel you get the name of the channel and the Now & Next box on screen. You know all the information you need to know. There is no reason for Sky or Living TV or Bravo to constantly tell you. And yet they do because they can.

So I’ve moved away, only half realising it as it happened, from watching television. The few things worth seeing are available in a vastly superior and infinitely more convenient form a few months later and generally at a price which makes them hard to resist. TV simply isn’t worth the agro.