Well, my television.
I’ve been saying I’ll do it for years now, and this time I am finally going to follow through, though technically the license doesn’t expire until Monday, so I could still lose my nerve and dash down to the post office with a cheque clutched in my sweaty hand.
Why? Continual annoyance that I’m shelling out nearly £150 a year to fund a service I hardly use. Most of the programmes I watch are on C5 or C4. Apart from “Silent Witness”, a few films and the occasional treat, such as the “New Year’s Day Concert From Vienna” I don’t watch the BBC at all. I could spend the money saved on DVDs or even visits to the cinema and still be quids in.
And that’s another thing – I’ve been buying DVDs like they’re going out of fashion and although I’m no longer at the 160+ unwatched levels of a few years back , when you bung in the unwatched tapes, it will still take me at least a year to clear all the stuff I’ve stockpiled. I’m an obsessive compulsive purchaser of DVDs.
I figure that in a year’s time I’ll have watched all or most of these, C5 will be repeating the programmes I’ve missed, and the whole thing with digital TV will have worked itself out (it caused me heaps of trouble in the first stage in September 2009, so I’m not looking forward to the transfer this November). I can then get a new license and HD ready TV, or carry on without if I find it agrees with me.
And yes, I do know there are plenty of holes in the logic behind that argument (where’s that cheque?).
Every time I’ve watched a programme this week there’s been a sense of finality about it – last “Silent Witness”, last “CSI” etc.
And I’ve also found that the adverts annoy me more. In particular I don’t like the John Hannah voice over for the Co-operative, especially the insinuative lilt he gives the word ‘good’ at the end, and I have similar reservations about the Bob Hoskins (or BH soundalike) delivery of ‘Wickes’ in their advert. They both sound like they’re coming on to me.
The one that has really got my goat though, is the advert for a new soap dispenser. Apparently the plunger on regular soap dispensers is packed with germs, so when you press down with the pad of your finger you’ll get infected with ebola or worse. To save us from this and make a quick buck, some genius has marketed soap dispensers with a sensor, so we don’t need to press down at all. Pardon me, but if you press down on the plunger to get some soap it seems reasonable to assume that your next action will be to wash your hands, in which case aren’t the germs taken care of? And if they’re not, what do we need your product for anyway?
In a few weeks’ time I’ll be feeling nostalgic for stuff like this. Not.
Trumpetville 
Blimey! Good for you. 🙂
Did an inventory of my ‘to be watched’ pile last night, and discovered that I have 78 films, 7 TV series and about a dozen concerts/specials to watch. Yipes!
Some of the DVDs are so old the stores have gone out of business.
I can’t even contemplate counting up the ‘to be read’ pile 😦
I think we have more unwatched than watched DVDs; many of them subtitled films… I keep buying Beat Takeshi films but never find the right time to watch them.
We’re doing our bit for the economy through conspicuous consumption. There should be a medal for it, or something.
Got rid of my TV a couple of years ago and life has never been better. An extreme statement perhaps (which reminds me, I still haven’t found any lemon and blueberry muffins) but now I get to point my furniture at anything in the front room and I can write more, read more, talk – you know, old fashioned stuff like that. You’d be amazed at how shocked visitors are when they see walls without flatscreens and kitchen corners with actual cooking things in them. Strangely I still seem to know what’s happening in Eastenders and that ‘simples’ is how merecats speak – there exists a horrible kind of osmosis, I think.
And by merecats I mean Meerkats, as opposed to expressing any contempt for felines.
I’m now having visions of visitors to Chez Cluley sitting on a couch and staring out of the picture window for ten minutes, then looking round for the remote to change the channel 🙂
Years ago I spent the weekend with a friend who had the television on all the time, whether she was watching it or not. She claimed that she found the sound of it in the background comforting.
And you’re right about the osmosis. We’re still going to know who Cheryl Cole and Simon Cowell are, alas.