Finally
Finally, at the age of 36 - 37 in a couple of weeks - I am no longer able to programme a video recorder.
Trying to tape four programmes this week, I succesfully taped one of them, and got two completely unrelated programmes as well. Admittedly, this is all my own fault, as part of it was failing to press a button, part of it was getting times wrong, and part of it was forgetting about the clocks going back. But there was one particular disappointment, and it really shouldn't have happened.
You see, it turns out that I don't understand BBC Three as I am two years too old for its target demographic, presumably.
BBC Three has some pretty good programming. It broke Little Britain, it's bringing us Torchwood, and The Smoking Room and Nighty Night rank as two of my favourite comedy shows of the last couple of years. But it's programming policy comes across as verging on the schizophrenic. Maybe I am just too old to understand it.
Take "Funland", which I recorded last Wednesday. I taped episode 1, watched, it last night and enjoyed it, foolishly thinking that episode 2 might be tonight. No, it isn't. I was lulled into a false sense of security by the channel's old policy of airing a show four or five times in a week, then airing the next episode, then airing the previous episode again a couple of times so people could catch up. Not Funland. I've already missed episode 2. And episode 3. And their repeats Tonight's showing is episode 4, and episode 5, with episode 5 repeated tomorrow and episode 6 the day after that. They've only recently added schedule information to their Funland Page so I can work out when the episodes I missed actually were on. Last Friday.
I was out anyway, and if I'd set the video recorder I'd probably have taped the wrong channel anyway.
And now I'm left wondering when they'll be repeating the whole series as a Funland Sunday Marathon. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
2 November, 2005
