Seen, Not Heard

There are clear disadvantages to having the stubborn farming mindset that means you don’t bother seeing a doctor unless you’ve coughed up a vital organ or severed a limb. Because of that I’ve spent the past nine days with an increasingly irritating ear infection. The lack of hearing was no big deal and I figured it would all sort itself out when I was dead, but once it started to feel like I was being repeatedly stabbed in the side of the head with a white-hot stiletto and my sense of balance went a little screwy, I began to get just a little bit pissed off.

Although an occasional distraction, I wasn’t going to let it stop me from enjoying the annual Missing Believed Wiped event at the BFI Southbank, which, as expected, threw up some very unusual and enjoyable oddities from the past. Some of the material I was familiar with but most was new to me, originally broadcast either before I was born or too young to watch, and in equal measure hilarious, engrossing or just plain odd. So, in a way, it was no different from television of today. It may have become a cliché but you have to agree that there really are times when the more things change the more they stay the same.

The usual crowd was there and once the event was over we tramped back over the Thames and shuffled up to the bar of our usual haunt. Somehow I hadn’t seen most of the chaps since early summer, if not before, so there was a lot to catch up on. Luckily, because it was a Sunday night, there were fewer customers than usual. Without the loud din of numerous overlapping voices I had a better chance of hearing what people were saying.

The conversation ebbed and flowed over numerous topics, although rather than finding out how people were doing and whether they were well, the first, most important, question was whether they had seen the new James Bond film and what they thought of it. The consensus was good, even if H didn’t like the opening title sequence. As one subject turned to another, it was interesting to discover that as the pieces came together it turned out that not one of us could give a shit about Blu-ray.

I know that we should all raise a banner high and merrily applaud the onward march of technology. After all, every step forward makes our lives easier and happier, bringing a big sloppy grin to all our faces. But in this instance, not one of us cared one jot about high definition. It’s not that because as we become middle-aged, whether we feel like it or not, or even like it or not, there are far pressing matters on hand. It’s simply because we grew up at a time when home entertainment consisted of a television and a stereo. The arrival of affordable video cassette recorders was a big deal because before they turned up, if you missed a programme, you had to hope that some years down the line it would be repeated, otherwise it was gone.

So taping these programmes, buying films and television shows on cassette that we had missed was a really liberating experience. Then years later along comes the digital versatile disc. The sound and picture quality was spectacular compared to even the best images on video cassettes that had been repeatedly run back and forth over the years. For us this was like manna from heaven. From what we had had before, this was far more than enough. The image quality of Blu-ray might be better, but DVD ticked all our boxes. So did any of us what to upgrade? Nah, fuck that, we got another round in.

It may have been a tenuous link of sorts but the DVD issue connected to what good films we had seen that year. When that question was asked a few titles were blurted out to begin with but mainly it resulted in a lot of head scratching. First, because going to cinema seemed to be a rare thing nowadays. There is the travel time involved getting there and back. There is the rising cost of tickets and overpriced snacks. There is the fact that you get stuck in a room full of socially inconsiderate disease-ridden proles (which was my chief grumble).

When all those considerations are factored in, the last thing to do is pray that the film is going to be half decent. To go through all that ordeal just to end up watching a pile of dog snot like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, it’s no wonder people are avoiding the cinema like it’s a medieval plague pit. Why go through all that crap anyway when the DVD release now comes virtually on the heels of the theatrical release? When I was in my early twenties, I’d go to the cinema something like 70-odd times a year. This year I think I went five times.

Watching a movie at home on shiny disc may be a far more comfortable option but it meant that we ended up asking ourselves if the titles that came up in conversation had actually come out this year. All I could think of were releases like Iron Man and Quantum of Solace that I had caught at the cinema, forgetting titles like No Country For Old Men, In Bruges, the headache inducing Cloverfield, or the simply godawful Wanted that I had eventually watched on DVD.

Still, it didn’t matter whether I had remembered them or not because there was one film that stood head and shoulders above everything I’d seen during the past months. As the awards season begins, it’s nice to see it getting the due respect it so obviously deserves. That movie is this