Many years ago, when I was just a lad (this is the point in my stories at which Little ‘Un’s eyes begin to glaze over), there were only three television channels and four, maybe five, radio stations - most of both run by the BBC. Someone, somewhere (mostly at the BBC) decided what was on and when it was on and you were either in front of the TV or radio when it was on or you missed it.
While that was rather limiting - and quite a pain if two things were scheduled against each other or you happened to be out doing something else when the programme was aired - there was also something quite nice about it. Those were the years of 24 million plus audience figures for things like The Two Ronnies or Morcombe and Wise. There was a sense of occasion about certain shows, a sense of sharing something with the rest of the country. All of us of a certain age can remember the Christmas EastEnders when Den served Angie with the divorce papers; it’s not exactly a Kennedy assassination moment, but it’s pretty close.
And then something happened. In the eighties, video recorders became commercially available and cheap enough to be within the reach of my family. After much nagging, my father eventually relented and bought one - a top-loading VHS machine with great big, chunky, lever-like buttons. It was a revelation. We went from believing that this machine was an impossible luxury to quickly being convinced that it was a complete necessity. In fact, how did we live without it?
Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the BBC and ITV, people stirred nervously. they still scheduled what we saw but they were beginning to lose control over when we saw it. Now we, the viewer, had control over that aspect: we could record their programmes and watch them whenever we liked, at a time convenient to us. It was the beginning of what is known today as timeshifting and it has drastically changed the way we “consume” media.
Fastforward to today. I have a Sky Plus player. This is, without doubt, the pinnacle of human civilization and it is completely impossible to imagine life without it. I exaggerate, of course, but only a little. It has completely changed the way I watch TV. Nowadays, the only things I watch when they’re actually broadcast are the Formula 1 races and new episodes of Doctor Who - and only those on every other weekend, when Little ‘Un’s around. The rest I watch whenever I have time and what I usually do when there’s a series on I want to watch, is set the “series link” option, forget all about it, and then watch the whole series back-to-back, like wading through a box-set of DVDs.
The same hasn’t really been possible for radios until a few years ago, when I discovered podcasts. The BBC make available for download a whole range of excellent programmes, as do the World Service, the Guardian and a whole bunch of other providers, covering just about any and every topic you can think of. Quality programmes, available for the princely sum of... nothing. Free of charge. All you have to do is subscribe to them and iTunes will do the rest. And so, just like I did with the TV serveral years ago, I’ve all but stopped listening to the radio - the programmes I want to hear are delivered to my iPod, for me to enjoy when I want to.
That little man in the BBC is all but redundant for me, now; I control the schedule, whether it be TV or radio. And that’s great - it’s the freedom to choose exactly what you want, when you want it. But I can’t help but feel that, in all this freedom, a little something has been lost. It’s harder to generate that sense of occasion that some programmes had, that sense of sharing something with everyone else. Fortunately, it still happens to a degree. I didn’t watch the programme but I had an awful lot of fun watching Twitter watch the X-Factor final this weekend! More fun than I would have had actually watching the programme, I suspect!
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