Welcome to the cheap seats

I don’t watch a lot of TV anymore and I certainly don’t sit there with the remote in hand looking for something to watch like I did as a kid. The stuff of interest I can find online (and usually torrent) while things outside of my usual remit normally get mentioned to me via Twitter. With homegrown stuff this means I can have a quick look on the iPlayer to make up my mind if a show is worth torrenting.

I’d use the iPlayer a hell of a lot more if it didn’t have the dumb one week only* rule attached to most of its content. Although it’s growing on me slightly since this morning when I noticed that the thing goes all the way up to 11. Dangerous joke that though when the iPlayer is so very reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge…

Being without my Macbook did mean that I regressed slightly and spent at least one evening last week trying to find something to watch. Needless to say it was all swill, but that made the BBC4 documentary Truly Madly Cheaply all the more enjoyable when I stumbled across it half way through. Matthew Sweet even got to dress up while hanging around a mock cinema in between the clips of mostly forgotten British B movies ala Alex Cox and Moviedrome.

Now if only the Beeb had the balls to give us a full season of this stuff instead of pasting so much of it into a single 90 minute slot. Fair play for following the doc with Psychomania, but out of all the films mentioned that’s the one that’s had the most screenings. I still have a video copy from when Cox showed it as part of Moviedrome and it gets dusted out at least once a year.

Sweet makes a good argument for re evaluating these lost gems while at the same time teasing the audience with the stuff in snippets. If the Beeb wanted to give the iPlayer a run for its money it should pull out the majority of the films mentioned and have them available online or at the very least organise a season of the damn things. Chucking Sweet an extra couple of quid a month and asking him to blog about the movies would mean I wouldn’t have to Google this shit and end up reading about it over on The Guardian instead.

I’d much rather watch Harry H Corbett menace cover girls while wearing bizarre eyewear than just about anything currently being pushed at me by the Beeb.

*You can watch the doc here, but only for 5 more days (unless you torrent it or have something handy like Snapz Pro X to hand).