I have little new news to share about my cancer. We have been in Portugal for almost a year now, welcoming visitors and building new activities and relationships, and for all of that time my medication and treatment regime has been constant and I continue to feel well. Some symptoms are becoming a little bit more apparent, and each treatment has a sort of use-by date, but perhaps our good luck can last a bit longer. Or perhaps not.
In general I am very happy with the lifestyle imposed on me by medicine and other limitations. My wife is able to develop her dancing and volunteering and is making friends. I join her when I can but also spend more time at home. Days with morning pottering, a long siesta and an afternoon swim are fine with me, thank you very much. Let us hope this phase can last a bit longer yet.
One temptation of this type of lifestyle is to watch too much TV. I deploy various weapons to control my TV hours. I try to keep the TV off until Pointless comes on at 5.15; after that I can happily watch until my early 10pm bedtime. My wife is equally content with that regime, adding two or three hours of relaxation before her own bedtime.
Our main challenge with TV is technical. We have a gizmo that offers an enormous number of channels, but it is a bit unreliable, so we often find ourselves flicking through channels and other functions on our various remote controls. The problems are usually our own fault, and many of them disappear of their own accord as well if we show a bit of patience.
Still, thinking about how watching TV has changed during my lifetime, I have to accept that there have been huge improvement due to technology. When I was a child we only had a couple of channels, and content was only starting to emerge in colour. Often the channels were even more limited because of technical glitches, and we would often tune in to live broadcasts of low quality. Still, we loved it.
When I was about twelve a school teacher asked us to list our top ten favourite programmes on TV. What was interesting is that at least three of the most popular choices would still be front-runners in the same poll today. Top of the pops, Match of the Day and Dr Who have all retained their popularity, despite all the technical advances. Especially sport is covered much more comprehensively these days. Just twenty years ago most soccer matches only really captured goals, and remember poor Peter Alliss and Henry Longurst desperately trying to cover the last three holes of a golf tournament with a handful of cameras between them. Cricket, moving slowly and with its niche audience, was a bit of a glorious exception.
If technology has been to the benefit of TV and those trying to watch it, there os always the risk that technology becomes a problem. TV has not suffered that as much as film, where nowadays even medium budget movies seem to revolve about the graphics more than the plot or characters. It is striking how most really good movies consciously play down the role of computer graphics. Some TV shows (we will give a pass to Dr Who) make the mistake of giving too much importance to graphics.
Based on the sort of low budget stuff I tend to watch, I’ll divide TV into categories of sport, drama, quizzes, comedy and reality shows.
Sport is a big win for improved TV over recent years, so much so that I ration myself in how much I watch.
I am not sure that drama has improved very much. We have to thank John Thaw and some others for the 90 minute and two hour formats that dominate these days, some of which (take a bow, Vera) are excellent. But does every drama have to involve dead bodies and police? Please, give us some more human drama, shows like Last Tango in Halifax which really broke the mould. We can probably add Breaking Bad and Orange is the New black to the list of truly quality dramas, but that list is far too short.
Quizzes have become the time-fillers for older people and have the luxury for producers of low budgets. We watch many quizzes, but that doesn’t stop me complaining. My main complaint is that most formats resort far too easily and far too often to celebrity shows. There are whole armies of actors who seem to do little else but host or take part in celebrity quizzes, some finding niches as host assistant as well. Some quizzes would be quite good if the celebs were ditched in favour of Joe Public.
My other moan about TV quizzes is how many of them have been dumbed down so much that you can hardly label them a quiz any more. When I first watched University Challenge or Mastermind, it was rare that I could know more than a smattering of correct answers, and that sure is not because I have become smarter.
Comedy may have improved mildly, but there is not enough quality around. At least the thirty minute format has been retained and not ruined by dead bodies or aliens, but there seem to be few quality characters written for quality actors. One nice touch is that there seem to be spaces in British schedules where not much drama intervenes, and we can just enjoy the humdrum lives in a slow-moving scenario. I can’t imagine US TV achieving this type of effective comedy show. My favourite example of the last ten years or so is Detectorists, a lovely shows where the lead characters are such lovable losers. The sub-title “nothing ever happens” would be entirely apt but only additive to the quality of the script and scenario. One goo judge of a comedy show seems to me to be how desperate it seems for the inclusion of canned laughter. In general, no canned laughter opens the door for more comedy. That applies to films too and there are some good examples out there, sadly overwhelmed by the mediocre.
I seem to be in moaning mood today, and my biggest whinges emerge from the final category, that of soap or, related, reality shows. How we embraced Big Brother when it started and how tired it became how quickly, especially when the celebs took over. There is Strictly, captivating for a time but now exhausted, and so many other examples too. The genre seems to dominate the schedules, and just offer cheap junk. It is hard to defend any claim that TV has improved in the last generation when the primary development has been so poor.
Sorry for such a moany blog. Perhaps I am not the only one fancying a change from a cancer diary. But I would like to close with a list of the TV that I have appreciated the most since moving to Portugal. A lot of it is comedy, and a lot is the happy result of a policy from BBC4 to repeat old shows a couple of nights per week.
Just this week I have greatly appreciated back to back shows (seventies?) of Call my Bluff and Face the Music. It is hard to credit how Robert Robinson and his producers put together the line up of the former. Frank Muir and Paddy Campbell were on great from, and there was only one guest I did not know. Incredibly the others were Derek Jacobi, Richard Briers and Joanna Lumley. Compare that with the so-called celebrity specials shown today.
Those two shows were a highlight, but every week we are offered the Good Life and Yes Minister, and we have also been offered Porridge, One Foot in the Grave and, maybe my favourite, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. If they could give us Fawlty Towers as well, what more could we want?
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