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Gareth Ellis

TV has changed

I remember when I was growing up, TV was special.

You’d sit down on a Saturday night and have your pick of four channels and you’d watch things like the Generation Game, Big Break and a host of other amazing shows.

Nowadays, thanks to streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and the like, you can watch hundreds, if not thousands of different shows at the touch of a button,

Now I’m not complaining. It’s nice to have a choice of what to watch, but I think there’s too much, and not enough time to watch it all.

Jess and I have been simultaneously watching You, Stranger Things, The Good Place, Call the Midwife, The Crown and so many others and we get sucked into binge watching things.

And the awful thing is that if you don’t binge watch some of these things then there are spoilers everywhere on social media, so you have to avoid everything just in case, you know, one day you might like to watch that show that everyone talks about. I mean, thanks to Facebook I knew a major part of the story in Game of Thrones that happened at the end of season 5. I’d never watched it and didn’t know what a Jon Snow was (I literally knew nothing) but it ruined it for me when I caught up and found out his eventual fate.

The magic of telly used to be watching something once a week and getting excited when it came on, not hearing rumours or spoilers but getting into something. Any Game of Thrones fans out there will know the feeling of that music starting (and you try and tell me you didn’t sing along to Ramin Djawadi’s opening credit music.) In fact anyone who watches a show that has a new episode every week will feel the same.

I don’t like using the phrase back in my day because it makes me sound old, so when I was a kid we didn’t have things like Love Island or X Factor or anything else that takes about three months to watch, we just had good old fashioned TV with shows that lasted about an hour, and if you missed a few you couldn’t watch four in a row on catch up, you scheduled your day around it.

The problem with modern TV packages now is that you get hundreds of channels, mainly shit, that churn out god awful TV that is unbearable.

As I’ve got older I’ve found I love a good documentary, something that is either an in-depth look at how people live their lives or something that makes you think. People like David Attenborough, Louis Theroux, Stacey Dooley – people going out there and showing us parts of the world or society that we had heard of but never really knew ourselves. Shows that get inside the psyche of a person that is completely different to myself and asking questions I would never have the guts to ask. Maybe that’s the journalist in me still screaming to get out and ask those hard hitting questions, but I’ve lived that dream.

Anyway, I’ve got to go, that new Netflix show is on and I haven’t watched the first 10 seasons.

TV
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