Essential viewing
James Delingpole
The thing I really hate about going on holiday is the way when you get back you realise your life is collapsing about you and that the relaxing break you thought would improve things has actually made things worse.
The week I've just had in Cornwall, for example. It was so obscenely wonderful that if I told you about it you'd puke with envy. But really there's no need. In the time I've been away, you've had seven whole days to steal a march on me, to make more money than me, possibly even to conspire against me. Also, you'll be pleased to hear that none of the things I vaguely hoped would happen while I was away did happen. No newspaper has asked me to do a family life/me column, even though I'd be sodding brilliant at it. I haven't won on the premium bonds. Our house hasn't acquired a bigger garden or moved to Primrose Hill. The local crack estates haven't accidentally been taken out by a rogue missile.
What's worse is that there's all this TV I'm supposed to watch and I can't ignore it because we're no longer in the 'How the hell am I going to find anything decent to review this week?' season. We've now entered the 'Quick, quick. We need more blank videotapes. And let's cancel all further evening engagements or we'll never catch up' zone.
Here are just a few of the things that I would consider absolutely essential viewing this week. The Office (BBC 2) because it's the funniest thing on television and Ricky Gemise is comedy God: The League Of Gentlemen (BBC 2) because it's the other funniest thing on television, though probably better on about fifth viewing when your initial nausea has worn off; Live With . . . Chris Moyles (Channel 5) because, a bit like his producer Chris Evans, Moyles is an edgy, bullying braggart whom it's hard to love but even harder not to watch with a kind of appalled awe; and Faking It (Channel 4) because for my money it's the best of all the makeover programmes: each episode they transform an unlikely candidate into his or her polar opposite (e.g., classical cellist into dance DJ; gay, publicschool country boy into pub bouncer; etc.) and almost every time they do it so well that a panel of experts fails to spot the fake.
Oh and there's also White Teeth, whose second episode I annoyingly managed to miss in Cornwall, because we were too busy playing Boggle and table hockey. One night, I tried persuading everyone that we should watch Total SAS Killer Bastard — or whatever it's called; you know, the new thing with Ross Kemp. But I was overruled by my friends, who only seem to watch improving documentaries about Jane Austen and the Michael Cockerell one about the Special Relationship, both of which they'd brought down on video. I was particularly worried to find myself applauding Harold Wilson's tenacious resistance of America's bullying attempts to get Britain to commit itself militarily to Vietnam. Could it he that deep down I'm a girlie peacenik?
Anyway, I got back home thinking to myself: Well, at least my TiVo machine will have cleverly videoed all the programmes I missed. But it hadn't. Annoyingly I'd accidentally unplugged a vital plug and it had got stuck on the History Channel, so that even though its 'Now Viewing' section claimed it had videoed the programmes I
like The Simpsons, Six Feet Under etc. — all that appeared on my screen was shaky black-and-white footage of torpedo bombers and such like.
If you don't own a TiVo this won't make sense, so I'd better explain. For about three months now, I've been borrowing one of those clever, tape-free new video machines which records everything onto a hard disc and even tries to anticipate your tastes by working out what programmes you like and then recording more of the same.
Once you've tried one (and they're quite cheap: around £300), you'll never want to be without it — not least because of the invaluable feature where you can programme it to record a whole season of your favourite series. e.g., The Sopranos. But it does have its flaws. The most irritating is that there's no function where you can set it to record purely military history programmes.
Also, unless you're a teenager, you simply won't have the time to watch all the things you've recorded, which means that, since it has only 40 hours of recording space on its hard disc, to make way for new recordings you find yourself endlessly erasing old ones you meant to watch but now realise you never will. Which gets kind of depressing.
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