Double Vision
Please stop showing us what we’re about to watch
Given the pace of technological advance, there will come a time in each of our lives when we’ll feel left behind.
For me that moment came a while back, when Netflix announced they were releasing the American adaptation of House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey.
A big fan of the original BBC series and its dark yet brilliant anti-hero played by Ian Richardson, I’m sure I’ll love the series when I see it. Were it not for the hamster on my roof that runs to provide my internet connection, I’d already have watched it.
Suddenly I felt a little left out and I didn’t like it.
That perception of being excluded bought back memories of the days when there were only three TV channels in England; when you dared not miss the big show that everyone else would be watching. There was no taping, no rewind or pause. You had to be in front of the TV to see it, so if your parents didn’t happen to like M*A*S*H, you’d be fighting with your brother for control of the tiny and ancient black and white portable upstairs.
It was vital you watched what everyone else in your social sphere was watching at exactly the same time, or the next day at school would be a miserable exercise in bluffing away the fact you had missed both Monty Python and M*A*S*H.
Those excited chats everyone used to have about last night’s telly are what they now call ‘water cooler moments’. Away from live sporting events and soap operas, they have almost entirely disappeared.
Unless you’re a fan of either balls or balls-ups, watching television is no longer in any way a sharing social experience. We’re all doing our TV differently.
While you’re catching up on the latest Storyville documentary on BBC 4; your friend is working his way through series 3 of his Breaking Bad box set; your mum is watching the gardening programme from last Tuesday; and the kids are off on You Tube, glued to the live broadcast of a pet chipmunk performing open heart surgery on its owner.
With the very welcome arrival of what’s known as ‘Long Form Drama’ (West Wing, The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones and so on), the stars of the big screen have drifted from cinema to TV, attracted by quality scripts and massive budgets.
For once the viewers are winners, as technology in the form of digital TV and DVD has freed us from forced-watching of mindless dross. Have to admit, I absolutely love digital TV, as apart from news and sport, I hardly ever watch live TV. My digibox is loaded with everything from Cheers to Simon Schama, so whatever my mood, there’s always something there I feel like watching.
No longer a slave to commercials, I’m king of the fast forward button, straight through the ad break, luvvly jubbly! Series link? Yes please!
The change of the season is heralded by the TV networks advertising their Autumn schedules. Whatever wonderful or woeful programming they offer, of one thing we can be sure: they will be treating us like idiots.
Since the arrival of the TV remote control (yes kids, there was a time…) our attention spans have shrunk to something comparable to a squirrel on speed, but that doesn’t mean our brains have become indistinguishable from walnuts.
So why do the networks feel the need to talk down to us as if we’ve all had frontal lobotomies? The first five minutes of every programme consist of a preview of everything we’re about to see, so that in effect, we don’t actually need to watch the programme at all.
Indeed, if we do decide these tasters are appetising enough, we tacitly accept that by choosing to watch the show, we are condemning ourselves to seeing all those clips again, represented to us as if we’d never seen them before.
The other night, at the start of RTE’s Six One News, Sharon Ní Vol o’Vent squiggled on her seat as she ran through the day’s headlines.
We were shown a long and tedious clip of yet another crooked politician somehow found innocent, reading a statement on the courthouse steps. It was painful the first time, but one minute later we had to watch and listen to the gobshite reading the same mind-numbing nonsense all over again.
As far as ‘dumbing down’ goes, the BBC are no better. I recall Fiona Bruce reporting on their 6 o’clock TV news how census results showed that Scotland’s population is growing.
“Experts say that this is a result of more people being born than dying in Scotland, and more people coming to the country than leaving it.” Thanks Fiona – if you hadn’t explained that to me I’d have lived the rest of my life thinking that new Scots were spontaneously erupting into life, or being grafted onto planet Earth by space aliens.
Thankfully there are still some channels which offer the mind stimulation. Ah look, there’s that nice Tony Robinson chap, about to present a Timewatch special about Stonehenge. Oh no! Please no! He’s at it too.
“Coming up – we’ll reveal faaaascinating secrets about Stonehenge that nobody has ever seen before, except you now, in this preview. In fact we’re going to show you the key points of the whole programme in 30 seconds, so here’s the interesting bit about the stones being a healing place; now we’re telling you how the blue stones came from Wales; there’s the skeleton we found of a significant archer and a man murdered by Druid security.
“Now sit back and enjoy the fact that when you see all those juicy morsels in a wee while, they’ll already be memories rather than revelations.” The best show in town never changes: hitting the off button; watching the fire’s flames lick over the turf; listening to the wind howling outside and the dog snoring at your feet.
A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The crowds that flocked into the centre of Dublin last weekend provided the clearest indication yet that, thank God, a cure had been found for Covid.
The masses dancing and hugging on the streets was vindication that all of the self-isolation had been well worth it, when you could now congregate as close as you like to each other, to your little heart’s content.
Or so you’d think.
One weekend of slightly relaxed licencing laws was all it took, and in the blink of an eye thousands of revellers were up and at it like this was Paris in 1945 after it was freed from the Germans.
The newly-imposed regulations for relaxation would suggest that all of these bouncy people at least had the benefit of a nine-euro meal inside them – how else could they get served?
So, we’d better brace ourselves for when they go out on an empty stomach.
Much has already been made of the fact that pub life will never be the same again – and that might well be the case.
Social distancing is bad news for the publicans, limiting their ability to wedge the entire student population of NUIG and GMIT into the equivalent of a phone box.
But it’s great news for curmudgeons – particularly for those whose capacity for imbibing alcohol is shot.
Advancing middle age has seen the tolerance of the early twenties reduced from the equivalent of a sizeable plastic bucket to an amount that once wouldn’t have even pass the standard definition of being out.
Three pints? That’s what you’d order when they rang the bell at closing time.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
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Double Vision with Charlie Adley
More than any other time of the year, when we sit around our dinner tables on Christmas Day, we are aware of who is there and who is not. At the age of 17, having performed impressive acrobatics with my Yamaha 250, a saloon car, a ditch and a barbed wire fence, I spent six weeks in hospital over Christmas and New Year.
My femur was snapped in two, which is no mean feat with thighs like mine, and my tibia had a crack or two as well.
Bed-bound, with my leg in traction, I developed a bronchial chest infection after an emergency operation.
Every two seconds for six weeks I coughed in hacking spasms, thus shaking my smashed leg, which was hung in a sling, supported by a metal pole they had driven through me, just below the knee.
Suffice to say I came to terms with pain.
In our part of the ward, there were four beds and three bikers with broken bones.
There was Kev, who had fallen off his sleek and mean Suzuki GT750 (a two stroke 3-into-1, since you ask), and opposite us two was brick shithouse Yorkshireman Gary, ex-SAS, and mighty embarrassed, having survived several covert tours of duty in Northern Ireland, to have to admit to falling off a Honda 125.
Compared to the other patients in the hospital the three of us were well off.
We were not sick. We’d had our operations, and apart from antibiotics for wounds, and pain killers for broken bones, we needed very little medical attention.
We were young, male, bored, and allowed to drink beer. Naturally, we tried to attract the attention of the student nurses as much as possible, and equally, they were happy to have a bit of a laugh with lads who were not ill, physically, at least!
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
Double Vision with Charlie Adley
Saying “I love newspapers!” feels these days like buying a ticket for the next David Bowie gig, but I do: I love them. When I read a newspaper, I’m not a slave to the algorithm. Were I ten years younger, I’d read all my news online, on apps that I’ve set to my personal preferences.
Even when I visit media sites I’ve never been to before, there are cookies and bots and gordknowswot working away to offer me more of what the algorithms think I want.
Every link off each page is tailored to please me, but that’s no good.
I don’t want to be fed things that only fit into my areas of interest and opinion.
Sitting at my living room table, mug of tea and two slices of toast (peanut butter, since you ask), and a paper – any paper – open in front of me, I can see the full wonder and horror of the world, as interpreted by The Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Irish Times or Daily Mirror.
As I browse into the heart of the paper, far from major news items, I let my eyesight fall all over the place, because each page is full of varied items, and, here on page 14, I’ll find the big story that’s being buried: the story they have to report, but are under instruction to dampen down.
Also here are stories that no algorithm-driven link would ever lead me to. Quirky little tales, able to dissolve an adult brain in seconds.
When driven sufficiently doolally by what I’m reading, I tear that particular piece of madness out of the newspaper, placing it on top of the wobbly towering stack of other torn madnesses by my desk.
There are dark torn madnesses and fearsome ones, but today I’m in the mood to prowl the ones that force me to furrow my brow, gasp for breath, pout my lips and grunt “What the -?” at the universe.
Notes are seeds, from which every writer will grow different fruit. When that writer is working for the Daily Mail, the fruit need bear only minuscule relation to the seed.
To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app
The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.
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