DON’T BE AFRAID, 'CAUSE THERE’S STILL TIME [507]

In the 2024 film “I Saw the TV Glow”, a trailer for “The Pink Opaque”, the Young Adult Network drama enrapturing the isolated teenagers Maddy and Owen, includes the line, “It can’t hurt you if you don’t think about them”. This hits home toward the end of the film as Owen, eight years older, having resisted the call to escape his passive small-town life, tells himself, “It’s not real if I don’t think about it.”

I heard the second line when I first watched the film, but I only caught the first line on my second viewing. Owen tells himself to dismiss Maddy’s plan to take Owen back to the world of “The Pink Opaque”, to reassume his real identity as a character inside the show itself, having been banished to the “Midnight Realm” of our world by the “Big Bad” Mr Melancholy in the show’s final episode. Hearing the first line clarified to me the peril of staying blinkered to what needs to be confronted.

Films are not made to be watched like TV programmes, screen vastly reduced in size, sound compressed and funnelled down to small speakers, viewing spaces not acoustically optimised. I expected to get the most out of “I Saw the TV Glow” with a second viewing, but I had not expected to need it. So, harking back to my film studies degree, I was in a quiet room by myself, with pen, paper and (this time) a PDF copy of the script on standby, fully prepared to rock footage back and forth to ensure I hear each line correctly. It wasn’t that anyone mumbled their lines, even if the lead characters are teenagers, but I clearly didn’t have the volume up high enough on that first viewing.

I wanted to see “I Saw the TV Glow” for some time – no physical Blu-ray release has happened in the UK, so after a year I resorted to streaming the film, and I was not disappointed. The film’s allegory for the discovery of transgender identity, which I now know is also called the “egg crack” moment, preceded it, its writer/director Jane Schoenbrun reportedly having begun writing the script at the outset of their own transition process. 

The “white draft” of the script, dated 31^st May 2022, had a lot more jumping between different periods of time, which I took as evidence of the cracks appearing in the characters’ reality appeared, but the finished film proceeds more linearly to concentrate on Maddy and Owen’s relationship with the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-like show “The Pink Opaque”, a title I am guessing is deliberately, well, opaque, only because I don’t know why Cocteau Twins used it as the title of their 1986 compilation album.

Aside from self-inflicted sound issues, I had some frustration “I Saw the TV Glow” on its first viewing. For instance, there is a point where shots of “our world”, presented by the film’s regular widescreen aspect ratio and pin-sharp picture, overlaps with the squarer VHS-quality picture of “The Pink Opaque”, realities passing between resolutions. The second viewing confirmed this already elsewhere as the shots of the show’s character of Isabel are shown are repeated in both forms, and in parallel with Owen in “our world”, which I should really be calling the “Midnight Realm”. Later, as Maddy – or Tara, as she is called in “The Pink Opaque” – has an almighty long speech about what happened to her, how she crossed dimensions, and how she came back to get Owen. The script had Owen watching her monologue as intently as he watched the show, physically breaking up the long passages, but none of these reverse shots made their way into the finished film, making it look easier for Owen to dismiss the story later as a long ramble.

However, what I appreciated on the second viewing were when the parallels were drawn between Maddy and Owen, and Isabel and Tara. The pilot of “The Pink Opaque” had Isabel not knowing what was happening to her as her telepathic powers became apparent, later serving her in defeating foes with Tara, who lived in a different county – in the “Midnight Realm”, Owen can’t say more than a few words to Maddy, but they communicate via cassettes of the show, left in a neutral location to pick up. 

Elements from “The Pink Opaque” also appear in the “Midnight Realm” – an ice cream van, the ghost tattoo from Isabel and Tara’s necks – to reinforce the magic link between the worlds. I never had a show I loved enough to substitute for real life – I loved “The Simpsons” at their age, but not that intently – but with Tara being Maddy’s favourite character, and with her saying the show feels more real than real life, you are primed as an audience for when reality eventually flips...

...which is why Owen, as a character, is confounding. As a trans woman, I initially didn’t have the words for what I was beginning to realise about me, but I got them in the end, and acted upon them. Owen, however, doesn’t appear to make the connection when it is presented to him. As a teenager, he doesn’t know if he likes girls or boys, but he does like TV shows, going so far as saying, “When I think about that stuff, it feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides. And I know there’s nothing in there, but I’m too nervous to open up and check” – even when he does, he closes himself back up. 

This passivity makes Owen a character without agency, consistently immobilised from saving the day, or himself – when Maddy tells him of his initial plan to leave town, he tells another friend’s mother that he “needs to be grounded”: “You can’t let me leave here with her. I don’t want to leave home.” Through the film, we see an adult Owen in front of a fire, alone in a forest at night – in the end, he puts out the fire.

This makes one scene particularly jarring upon watching it a second time, and after reading the script. Upon seeing the final episode of “The Pink Opaque”, Owen puts his head through his TV screen. His father pulls him out, Owen yelling, “this is not my home! You’re not my father!” He vomits something, obscured by the scratchy neon effect added to it – it is not just the “glow” of the TV, it is meant to be soil, from having been buried alive. You are left to assume this horrific moment was repressed by Owen, or repressed for him.

What starts as psychological horror film becomes a tragedy. The chalk drawings are topped with the message, “There is still time”. I have heard this sentiment, in the same context as “I Saw the TV Glow”, in two songs, Supertramp’s “Take the Long Way Home” and Lisa Lougheed’s “Run With Us” – hell, throw in Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” as well. The film does not explicitly say its story acts as a transgender metaphor, although its pink and blue colour palettes acts as a guide, but when a piece of art connects with you, you will see what you need to see, eventually.

PRESS YOUR FACE UP AGAINST THE SCREEN [467]

Well, my television broke again, losing power to the screen for the second time in four years, in the same way it happened last time. With the memory of the previous two-week wait for it to be fixed rising to the surface, I threw up my hands and bought a replacement. Provided this one lasts for a few more years, I have realised this may be the last regular television I will buy.

My first personal TV was a fourteen-inch cathode ray tube TV bought for £139 in 1996, weighed seven kilograms (15.4 lbs), had two one-watt speakers, no subtitles or teletext ability, and used approximately 150 watts an hour, CRT screens holding high voltages even after turn-off. The back of it was riven with ventilation holes, because they were surely needed.

My new TV, a Sharp 32FH8KA, weighs half as much, has a thirty-two-inch LED screen like my previous Toshiba model, but this time with high dynamic range so effective that the backlight can be turned down to save power. Along with two twelve-watt speakers that have some bass, the unit is only a few inches thick – the circuit board and connectors stick out from the back of the TV, and is the only part that remains ventilated, because the screen hardly produces any heat, and because so little energy is lost through heat, it only uses twenty-six watts an hour. It is also fully Android compatible, making it pretty much a computer, into which other computers can be connected. With inflation, £139 in 1996 is now £271 – this new TV cost only £199.

Aside from the minimum expectations of a TV’s ability having greatly expanded over time, connectivity has also greatly changed. I only ever connected a VHS video recorder to the old portable TV in the 1990s, via the single SCART connector, but I now have an Apple TV box – “Android” is something that other people do – a Blu-ray player, a separate DVD player that accepts region 1 DVDs from North America, and an Atari Flashback console, all connected at once, covering all possibilities. 

While I am happy with the speakers on my new TV, a sound bar is usually the first add-on others would buy nowadays, especially if streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and the BBC iPlayer are accessible through the TV itself – apart from the Sky Glass TV, made for subscribers to that service, TVs with built-in soundbars have not appeared, as if better sound is expected to be something that needs to be added to a TV. I could easily have bought a large computer monitor with enough connectors for what I require, but these doesn’t really exist either.

The ability to just buy an all-purpose screen may arrive if no unified decision is made on the future of broadcasting. It is not clear if “5G Broadcast”, using the mobile phone network to deliver TV signals, is the ultimate choice if more of the current TV signals are repurposed for mobile use, while satellite TV, my main source for “regular” broadcasts on my new TV, may only remain if Sky commits to continuing with it beyond the end of the 2020s – if not, why should SES build more Astra satellites? If then, my TV will become that all-purpose screen, but I should never fear, for the box and manual states it supports the H.265 video codec, should any UK broadcaster decide to start using it – that’s good, I suppose.

AND I WANT ALL YOU’VE GOT [451]

“The Fox” is an album released by Sir Elton John in 1981 that I have overlooked for some time – I own a CD copy of it, but didn’t pay too much attention to it because there are no identifiable “hits” from it that continue to receive airplay, or remain in concert setlists.

This is a shame, because it has completely captured my attention as of late. The three songs that were released as singles all managed to be different from each other: “Chloe” is a soulful song making good use of a Fender electric piano; “Nobody Wins”, originally a French-language song by Jean-Paul Dreau titled “J'Veux de la Tendresse”, is the most synthesised Elton John song I have heard, even down to a busy drum pattern programmed by Roger Linn, presumably on his own Linn LM-1 drum machine; and “Just Like Belgium” is a nostalgic, poppy track not unlike the later “Club at the End of the Street”, down to the blistering saxophone solo. 

These many changes in tone, including the more classical “Carla/Etude – Fanfare” sequence, arranged and co-composed by James Newton Howard, and the unrequited love ballad “Elton’s Song”, evoke earlier double-albums like “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “Blue Moves”, make attempting to capture an artist’s entire range in only eleven songs and forty-six minutes an experience that requires maximum attention, with some breaks.

But what I discovered were two further songs that, while they remained album tracks, are exactly the sort of gospel-tinged barnstormers that have firmly lodged themselves in my mind from the moment I heard them: “Heels of the Wind” and “Breaking Down Barriers”. The latter of these is on its way to becoming one of my favourite Elton John songs, having a drive not unlike “The Bitch is Back” or “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance!)”,and having the classic Elton John Band line-up of drummer Nigel Olsson and bassist Dee Murray, while still featuring John singing in his higher register, with falsetto as the song fades out. “Breaking Down Barriers” has lyrics by Gary Osborne, instead of John’s soul-mate collaborator Bernie Taupin, but they are perfect: “you have shown me a better way, and now I’m learning fast”,  and “I’m taking down barriers, and loving what I find”. 

“The Fox” was the first Elton John release under a US contract with Geffen Records – when John asked David Geffen about calling the album “The Fox”, he asked that a song be written for it with that title. This fact comes from a “telepress conference” for the album in 1981, which was presented as a daytime chat show presented by John himself, taking every opportunity to perform to the camera, while also keeping the show together as host, his “guests” being producers and marketing managers for Geffen Records. The tableau of desk, TV and stuffed fox that make the album cover were recreated for the occasion, the fox making its way to John’s desk. 

Intended for internal use and distributed on video tape to regional offices of Warner Bros. Records, distributors of the album, a copy of the conference has made its way to the repository of YouTube to give a valuable insight into how important this album was for the entire chain of command from artist to commercial staff.

What has also made its way to YouTube on 22^nd May 2024 were the videos for every song on “The Fox”. Separate videos for “Nobody Wins” and “Elton’s Song” had been available for a while, but they formed part of a whole work titled “Visions”, released on VHS cassette, laserdisc and CED video disc in 1982. There is an apparently a wraparound element to the videos where someone is watching them, but the songs are presented on video individually. “Visions” was not re-released after 1982, so to see these videos essentially for the first time, and in high quality, is like filling in a gap in the history of music videos. You do see some elements, like backdrops, being re-used across the different videos, but they are all different from each other, and not simply a recording of a performance. They are directed by Russell Mulcahy, whose video for The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” ushered in MTV, and continued directing for Elton John, and Duran Duran, through the decade. 

What I was most surprised about by “Visions” was, like the conference video, John’s performances to camera – in the comedic video for “Heels of the Wind”, I kept thinking I was watching Rick Moranis. However, you can’t help but compare these with John’s later avoidance from appearing in videos altogether.

ONE PILL MAKES YOU LARGER [435]

The Wachowski sisters’ film “The Matrix”, the wildly successful and thoughtful cyberpunk science fiction action blockbuster, was released in March 1999, long enough ago for my first copy of the film to be on VHS, bought from no less than Blockbuster Video. It was the widescreen release, reducing the picture resolution to only about a hundred lines – it was “letterboxed” as in like watching it through next door’s letterbox. No wonder I swapped it for a DVD at the first opportunity, and later a Blu-ray boxset of what had become a trilogy. 

I like “The Matrix” for the same reason I say that Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” is my favourite film: it has everything in it. It is visually vibrant and innovative, densely plotted, filled with action, and it stays with you after the end, withstanding repeated viewings. It was like the nature of what a blockbuster film could be had changed, something which didn’t bear fruit much beyond its own three sequels.  

 

The comparative box office failure of 2021’s fourth instalment, “The Matrix Resurrections”, may have put pay to the chances of the original film’s twenty-fifth anniversary being officially recognised, but it remains important to me. The anniversary cannot be marked by the US Library of Congress adding it to the National Film Registry for future preservation, because that already happened in 2012, when it was inducted alongside “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, “Dirty Harry” and “A Christmas Story”. 

 

Cyberpunk was a subculture still current in 1999, but also nearly twenty years old, and the combination in “The Matrix” of technology, music and fashion, with added martial arts and gunfire, may have redefined that term in the mainstream, the nature of “the matrix” as a simulation and distraction of the real world of the film prepared its audience for when the World Wide Web would become exactly that. The Wachowski sisters’ innovation of “bullet time”, freezing action to move around it before continuing, has been copied endlessly, as has the “digital rain” of phosphorous green code and text on a black background, itself inspired by the 1995 anime “Ghost in the Shell”.

 

Much was made at the time of the use of postmodernist philosophy in the story of “The Matrix”, either to put the film above the action-fare characterised as mindless, or to say that it was too complicated for audiences to understand. The Wachowskis issued copies of postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book “Simulacra & Simulation” to the cast and crew. Baudrillard himself said the film had nothing to do with this work, which was more about the breakdown of distinctions between reality and simulation until the latter takes precedence, but then again, it is also about the implosion of meaning in the media... well, at least that sentence appears in my copy of his book.

 

I will admit I had problems following “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions” when they were in cinemas, but the epic nature of the story allowed you to get lost in it. Having already been used to the layering of references and meaning in “The Simpsons”, to be uncovered as your knowledge increased, I thought “The Matrix” will be the same. Only in August 2020, when Lilly Wachowski said that she and Lana had written and directed a trilogy with implicit transgender themes, my thoughts were, in order, (a) I wish they said that at the time, (b) how did I miss that, (c) 1999 may have been too early to say explicitly, and (d) that makes the films so much easier to understand, what with Keanu Reeves’ character Neo being alerted to their true nature, as well as that of the world around them, along with the villain Agent Smith only referring to Neo by the name the Matrix gave them –this would also apply to Trinity, Morpheus and so on.

 

When I saw “The Matrix Resurrections”, I took issue with criticisms of its internal commentary, and replaying of scenes from the original film: “To make a new ‘Matrix’ film is to comment on what has happened to our representation of the world in the last eighteen years, because that is the only acceptable way to do it.” It is my favourite film of the now-tetralogy, just as my favourite film of the “Back to the Future” trilogy is the second one.

 

We are now at a point where cyberpunk may now be understood as a historical period in popular culture, just as the dystopian worlds depicted in its literature and films resemble reality greater than they ever did. With “the matrix” now being misappropriated for personal gain by whoever Andrew Tate thinks he is, and “taking the red pill” being used as by right-wing groups as a term for “freeing” themselves from what they believe is a simulation of the world created by liberal ideology, a celebration of “The Matrix”, and what it really is about, couldn’t be timelier.

 

I now need to square how a previous film that also starred Keanu Reeves, the critically derided “Johnny Mnemonic”, came to influence “The Matrix”.

MY HEART WENT DOWN SOUTH [414]

Recent history can still turn to dust without anyone noticing, and if that history reflected your local area, that stings further.

Television South (TVS) provided ITV programmes for the south and south east of England from 1982 and 1992, back when Southampton, and TVS’s second base in Maidstone, was as major a producer of television shows as Bristol, Leeds, Birmingham or Newcastle, places reduced to outposts for regional news as ITV merged itself into a national company based primarily in London and Manchester. Travelling into Southampton took my family past the TVS (formerly Southern, later Meridian) studios, and it commanded my attention every time.

TVS sold its news output to Meridian when it took over the southern ITV franchise, but the rest of its programme library is currently missing, believed lost or destroyed, creating an eleven-year gap covering children’s programmes like “No. 73”, “Motormouth”, “How 2”, “Tugs” and “Mr Majeika”, dramas like “C.A.T.S. Eyes” and “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries”, game shows “Catch Phrase” and “All Clued Up”, comedy shows by Bobby Davro, “Summertime Special”, the sitcom “That’s Love”, international co-productions including the UK segments of “Fraggle Rock” and a 1987 film about Nelson Mandela starring Danny Glover, along with a large number of documentaries and local public affairs programmes that could have visited my local town.

This is, once again, a case of “lost media” meaning an archive is lost, and not just unavailable online. Many off-air recordings of TVS programmes have been put online by members of the public, but finding them is difficult, as searching the straightforwardly named “tvs” or “television south” is often counterproductive.

TVS is the only ITV company whose output is unavailable, with other former franchise holders having their programmes taken over by the companies succeeding them, or by local archives and businesses. However, the owner of the TVS library, wherever it is, has been The Walt Disney Company since 2001, after a long process of company takeovers that involved evangelical Christian preacher Pat Robertson and “Power Rangers” producer Saban Entertainment. This process appears to have shed the paperwork associated with the library, crucial to making the programmes available to view on home video or online, the last such incidence being the release of “The Ruth Rendell Mysteries” on VHS cassette in 2000. 

Later enquiries made by people to Disney about the location of the tapes themselves has led to the unsatisfactory conclusion that they are unavailable or lost. It is not likely that the tapes were “wiped” because the price of broadcast-quality cassettes had declined enough by the 1980s to avoid a practice of reusing them, and because the potential of revenue from home video necessitated retaining them, just as when Pat Robertson launched a UK version of The Family Channel using TVS repeats. 

It is not known if these tapes have been mislaid, or simply thrown away, and the perceived worth of the archive to The Walt Disney Company is also unknown – I cannot imagine they had much use for a daytime magazine show titled “Not for Women Only”, but someone may do, if only for research purposes.

This could be an argument for needing an audio-visual equivalent of the British Library – the British Film Institute has a vast archive, which includes some TVS programmes they have received over the years, but they do not act in that sort of capacity. When a programme’s worth cannot be foreseen, being unable to make that decision because it has already been lost is difficult to take – even if is a Bobby Davro sketch show so “of its time” that the cultural references make no sense, it would be useful to see why.

This situation required a campaign to find parts of a major international show made in my lifetime, “Fraggle Rock” – the UK wraparound segments filmed by TVS starred Fulton McKay and later John Gordon Sinclair as a lighthouse keeper. Only twelve episodes were known to exist in broadcast quality, later raised to twenty-nine after the search – the remaining sixty-five episodes exist as off-air recordings made by members of the public.

I only got rid of my VHS cassettes because I knew I did not own anything that didn’t otherwise exist. This cannot be confidently said for anyone owning a recording of a TVS programme.

YOU HAD YOUR TIME, YOU HAD THE POWER [389]

On the afternoon of Saturday 8th August 2015, I sent nine rubbish bags to my local recycling centre in what was, at the time, a very lucid and easy decision.

The bags contained over two hundred and fifty Video Home System (VHS) cassettes of off-air TV recordings I had amassed from 1997, none of which were able to be recycled at the time due to the black plastic used in their composition. I had intended to digitise their contents for future use, but after realising the size of the task, and that all I had recorded on them, from obscure films that helped with my degree studies to whole series of the BBC comedy quiz "Never Mind the Buzzcocks", will continue to be available online or from archives.

My habits with recording programmes to VHS also meant you were unlikely to find anything special. I recorded in Long Play mode, reducing the maximum 240 lines of picture quality to 230, something that made very little difference when recording episodes of “The Simpsons”. I also eliminated continuity announcements and advert breaks as much as I could, their comparatively ephemeral nature now making recordings of them more highly prized. Safe in the knowledge that nothing was going to be lost from the loss of my collection, it was easy to let it go.

The big regret I still have was getting rid of the VHS recorder as well, perceiving there to be no more use for it. The random analogue glitches of an authentic VHS recording are more acceptable than the hazy VHS-like filter that can be applied to a digital video file to produce a degraded or nostalgic effect, and because making videos was not a consideration I had at the time, I saw no reason to hold the recorder back. Not readily having the ability to recreate that prized look with authentic equipment was an oversight on my part.

Changing rituals from “time-shifting” by recording programmes to watch later, to streaming everything at any time, makes it easy to forget that VHS was once the only way most people owned moving pictures, other video tape and disc formats notwithstanding. This was mainly the result of the Japanese government attempting to force manufacturers to adopt a single consumer tape format, and by JVC providing their VHS format as an open standard others could use without licence, something Sony was not willing to do with their technically superior Betamax format, its smaller cassette size also limiting their available recording time.

While we have not lost the right to make home video recordings for personal use, the ability to do so has mostly been lost. There is no open ability to download and keep programmes from streaming websites, and neither would they accept that, and while my television can record off-air video to a USB stick, it will only play back on that one television. Very occasionally, a TV station may also show a programme that has been out of circulation for decades – I am still waiting for the BBC to show John Berger’s original 1972 series “Ways of Seeing”, never issued on home video to my knowledge, instead of relying on the tie-in book.

Attaching some sort of video capture device to my television is starting to sound like good proposition, especially now the bulk of VHS cassette storage can be avoided.

I SAW THREE SHIPS COME SAILING IN [379]

You never question what you are watching on television when you are only five or six years old, and I saw absolutely nothing wrong with watching a children’s drama series set in a 1920s New York-like city about a fleet of anthropomorphic tugboats.

“Tugs” was created by Robert D. Cardona and David Mitton, the former an American TV scriptwriter and producer working in the UK on shows like “Crimes of Passion” and “Emmerdale”, and the latter a special effects technician for Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation series turned director of TV advertisements. Their production company, Clearwater Features, developed the TV version of “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends”, producing the first two series – one thirteen-episode series of “Tugs” followed, using the periscope camera system developed for “Thomas” that could film at the models’ eye level.

I remember being enraptured by “Tugs”, watching it every week on its run from April to June 1989, because I like ships anyway – I think it might be the crossing of the eternal sense of adventure, elegant design, and a massive scale of engineering. I have always lived in the Solent area of the UK, with the Royal Navy and car ferries of Portsmouth Harbour on one side, and the ocean and cruise liners in Southampton on the other side. Tugs are naturally found in both harbours moving the larger ships around, and here they were on TV, doing exactly what I saw in real life.

I saw the premise as what I now know is a Hitchcockian “MacGuffin”, the driver of the plot that is not important in itself. The Star Fleet, owned by the human Captain Star and comprised of main character tugs Ten Cents, Sunshine, Warrior, Top Hat and More, are competing for contracts with the villainous Zero Fleet, comprising of Zorran, Zug, Zip and so on. Captain Star, also the narrator of the series, is represented only by a megaphone talking to Star Fleet from a harbour building – no humans are seen on screen in “Tugs” perhaps to distance itself from the set-up of “Thomas the Tank Engine”. The stories took place in and around the Bigg City (spelt with two g’s) port, and essentially was a workplace comedy.

I don’t remember seeing any merchandise at the time, although figurines, annuals and VHS cassettes did appear, and while a second series of “Tugs” never materialised, I had two Lego ships to be getting on with, and real tugboats a matter of minutes away. Every so often, a mention of the show would appear, or a picture would come up, and my love of the show as a child became a running family joke. 

Then the YouTube videos appear asking the same questions they did of “Thomas the Tank Engine”, questions I never thought about: because the ships have faces, are they alive? Do they procreate? Does Captain Star use the tugs as slave labour? Isn’t Captain Star’s voice the same used for the “Protect and Survive” videos and “Two Tribes” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood? (Yes, the last one is Patrick Allen.) The faces never bothered me, as I was already used to trains with faces by then, and the tugs were painted in the correct colours – you may as well ask why they were all wearing hats.

Fortunately, I still think of “Tugs” as being a great show, with high production values and breezy storylines, so long as you don’t think about it any harder than that.

COLOURS OF THE WORLD, SPICE UP YOUR LIFE [360]

Left: digitised VHS source. Right: colour boosted in video editor.

Having completed my video about Memphis furniture [link], I am confident I have made a well-structured piece of television with good use of archive material, but I also learned how terrible the Video Home System (VHS) really was.

Having decided to include a fake advertisement break that reflected the influence of Memphis design, I realised that the recordings I used literally paled in comparison to my photographs of the real-life furniture. I already needed to boost the colour of the Weetabix ad I used, using a different VHS copy of it for reference, having being unable to find a copy that was higher in resolution and also not muddy in colour, but then I realised the colour of Warninks advocaat is yellow, not cream, and the swimming pool ladder in the Kitekat ad had to be brighter to match the more obvious influences in the colours and patterns used.

This is not a case of my digital photographs versus (the digital sample of) an analogue tape, the relative age of the tape, or the decline in quality of the recording over time, but more the technical limitations of the VHS format that have largely been overcome by the switch to digital formats, through no longer being constrained by a physical form.

On a 12.5mm-wide VHS tape, the top 0.65mm is taken up with one or two audio tracks, and the bottom 0.75mm is a control track used for synchronising recording and playback. The remaining 9mm is used for the picture, with a signal bandwidth of 3 MHz for luminance – the black-and-white signal that forms the picture - and a 400 kHz sub-signal for chrominance, reproducing the colour. 

These numbers obviously doesn’t mean a lot by themselves, except that less space on video formats are reserved for colour signals because your eyes react more to changes in brightness, so a colour signal can be compressed more without much change in colour. However, the bandwidth of the original TV signal being recorded is much wider, with the PAL video standard using 5.5 MHz for luminance, and 4.43 MHz for chrominance, SECAM using 6 MHz and 4.43 MHz respectively, and NTSC, broadcasting a 525-line picture instead of 625 lines, using 4.2 MHz and 3.58 MHz respectively. 

In order to fit your recording onto the tape, VHS has to throw much of the signal away in a manner that befits having tape only half an inch wide, playing at 1-1.5 inches per second – older professional, broadcast quality tape standards like 2-inch quadruplex, 1-inch Type C and U-Matic recorded a better quality by simply having more surface area to play with, running a wider tape more quickly to pick up as much information as possible. The later S-VHS standard increased the luminance signal recorded to 5.4 MHz, but kept the chrominance signal, and the speed of the tape, exactly the same.

While the picture quality of the contemporary Betamax format was better than VHS, the throwaway nature of TV advertisements often mean that the format that won out in the video format war often winds up as the archive format for those ads. One point of my video as to show how colourful 1980s design was but, without me doing anything with some of the images, another point would have been how our recordings of the decade washed out that colour.

HAVE NO FEARS, WE’VE GOT STORIES FOR YEARS [309]

This is how I unintentionally used “The Simpsons” to increase my brain power.

It is January 1998, and the Video Home System (VHS) is still at large, the first DVD player having only gone on sale in the UK six months earlier. I am a great fan of “The Simpsons,” then in only its ninth season, which is airing twice a week on BBC Two. We didn’t yet pay to have Sky One, but blank VHS cassettes were still widely available and absurdly cheap. I could just record the show when it aired, and watch it whenever I like. People streaming “The Simpsons” on Disney+ take note: this is how things used to be.

Much has already been made about how “The Simpsons” was one of the first TV shows for which recording the episodes was the only way you could take in all of the jokes, with background signs and sights gags often worked on as much as the main plot by the show’s writing staff. Its thick animated lines would not lose detail when recording onto a VHS cassette, which only achieved pictures of 230 lines of resolution in Long Play mode, as I worked to stretch six hours of recording, and sixteen “Simpsons” episodes, onto an E-180 tape.

However, being a British “Simpsons” fan also means there are jokes I am not likely to get. The 1990 episode “Homer vs. Lisa and the 8^th Commandment” – the one where Homer steals cable television, and Lisa refuses to watch – the sound of a TV show is heard: “We would get there quicker if I borrowed Dad’s car.” “I don’t know, Davey…” If the Christian animated series “Davey and Goliath” had ever aired on British television by that point, I would never know, and it must have been on some satellite station we could not see.

This was where online resources, such as they were at the time, proved valuable. Before the World Wide Web made the internet more accessible, message boards allowed people to communicate in text form. One such Usenet newsgroup, alt.tv.simpsons, formed just after regular “Simpsons” episodes began in 1990, began compiling crowd-sourced reference and episode guides into HTML format at The Simpsons Archive (www.simpsonsarchive.com, running since 1994).  With far fewer competing web pages than now, and with Google not being founded later in 1998 – the search engine of choice, Yahoo!, was a curated guide with a search engine attached - you really needed a website that could prove it was authoritative and comprehensive

“The Simpsons” eventually became abasis for making web searches. Anything I didn’t “get” could be looked up, meaning I might laugh if I saw the reference again, like the reference to the 1986 charity event Hands Across America in “Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes,” or the real-life existence of all the baseball players in “Homer at the Bat”. Naturally, if something in the next article proved interesting, you may want to find out more or, when films like “Psycho,” “Citizen Kane” or “A Clockwork Orange” are quoted often, you find the original films to watch on their own.

This established the pattern I use for recalling facts – one piece of information will remind me of a reference made to a similar fact, or word, or number, picked up elsewhere, building into a web. Mnemonics and learning by rote don’t really work with me, although remembering having tried to learn something may make it easier to remember what I was trying to recall. If all else fails, I can look it up again, because I know where to look.

Now, practically everything is available at once, including every episode of “The Simpsons,” a show I made more of an effort to watch when it was more scarce than twenty years ago, both in appearances on TV and in number of episodes, and which has now referenced so much that people think it is predicting the future when history repeats itself. Perhaps it will end when there is nothing left that isn’t worth knowing.

IT’S AUTOMATIC, IT’S SYSTEMATIC, IT’S HYDROMATIC [140]

So many ways have been used to get music, TV and films into the home over the years, but there is a reason I am going to talk about Sony’s U-Matic here, apart from it being the world’s first video cassette: it is the nexus point of all that has been, and all that remains, in the last fifty years of audio-visual formats, and that isn’t hyperbole either.

U-Matic, named after how the tape was threaded around a large chrome cylinder that contained the record and playback heads, was first shown off as a prototype in October 1969, and went on sale to the public in 1971, beating Philips’ VCR (Video Cassette Recording, also known as N1500) and Avco’s Cartrivision by a year. Home video recorders were already on sale for nearly ten years by then, but these were open-reel devices, not unlike reel-to-reel audio recorders – U-Matic simply encased the tape in an anti-static cassette, making it easier to handle. Like the EIAJ standard agreed among open-reel machine manufacturers, Sony also persuaded other companies, like Panasonic and JVC, to agree to make their own U-Matic machines.

However, for all the ease the format gave the general user, they were still ruinously expensive to buy, approaching the price of a small family car. However, businesses, schools and colleges could afford them, which caused Sony to move their efforts towards them – the “VO” prefix on the machines’ model numbers already stood for “Video Office.” The failure to get U-Matic into homes led Sony to develop the smaller Betamax format, and much has already been written about the format war between it and VHS, ironically developed by JVC, with help from their owner at the time, Panasonic.

Holding a U-Matic tape in your hands defines “industrial.” While a smaller E-180 (3-hour) VHS tape weighs 195g, a 60-minute U-Matic tape weighs 505g, and that is mostly the tape: while VHS runs at a maximum of 1.3 inches per second (PAL region, Short Play), using tape half an inch wide, U-Matic’s three-quarter-inch tape runs at 3.75 inches per second – 60 minutes is all you can get into the case, unless you make the tape itself thinner. However, more tape per second means higher quality, and rather than people at home using them to record TV programmes, the programme makers themselves were using them instead.

Until U-Matic, if you wanted to go out and record a news report, you needed to take a 16 mm film camera with you, which would have to be developed before you could edit it and show it to anyone. This had begun to change slowly – Sony had developed a “Portapak” system that used open-reel tape, but once the U-Matic S Type (for “small”) cassette was developed, Electronic News Gathering (ENG) took off in the United States from the mid-1970s. It did not matter if the picture was less detailed than film, it did not matter if U-Matic had a problem with making the colour red too saturated, and it did not matter if the S Type cassette only held 20 minutes at most – making the news became easier and faster, and did not need as many people to make it work. It took another ten years for ENG to become commonplace in the UK, as unions argued it put too many jobs at risk – the BBC took a film developing unit to the Falklands War – but technology was moving on.

As UK TV news began using ENG, other formats were becoming available, and even Sony had a replacement for U-Matic: while the cheaper and more convenient VHS beat out the technically superior Betamax, Sony simply reworked their second cassette for the professional sector as well, creating Betacam (later Betacam SP, later DigiBeta). While these became the industry standard, Sony still supported U-Matic, because companies still used it: there is evidence that films like “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” (2005), and the Studio Ghibli film “Ponyo” (2008) had clips issues to TV stations in the US using U-Matic tapes. I couldn’t find the date for when Sony stopped supporting U-Matic but, considering they only stopped making Betamax cassettes in March 2016, it can’t have been that long ago.

While U-Matic was central to the development of video, it was to audio as well: before the Compact Disc, video tape was the only way of recording music digitally, and U-Matic was often used for mastering music this way in the 1970s and 80s, once connected to early PCM adaptors. Because the digital signal would be encoded using the number of lines in a TV signal, a combination of the number of lines that make up the picture, and the number of audio samples made up one line, meant that a total of 44,100 samples could be recorded per second, otherwise known as 44.1 kHz – CDs use the same rate for this reason, and practically everything else has since.

NO MATTER WHO’S THE LEADER WHEN THE SUN SETS DOWN [105]

The idea of owning a personal copy of a film or TV programme is only around forty years old. Unless you had spent thousands on your own cinema set-up, or on a new-fangled home video tape recorder, 1978 was the year home video began in earnest, and anyone buying into it had to decide which direction they would take.

Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder in 1975, with VHS, JVC’s competitor format, launching the following year. They were marketed with a specific use in mind – the ability to time-shift your television viewing. A two-hour video tape costed as much as £20, but were expected to be reused often - pre-recorded tapes cost at least three times as much, taking as long to make as they took to play back. With the recorders themselves costing up to a thousand pounds, selling films to the general public would have to be done another way.

The answer was, as will be with DVD and blu-ray, to copy the main method of getting music into homes: pressing video onto a disc. The first disc format, usually known as LaserDisc, went on sale in 1978. It was originally known under the hilarious name “MCA DiscoVision” – the name had been chosen back in 1969, before disco music appeared, but if you are forming a company to hold video-on-disc patents held by MCA, then owners of Universal Pictures, and the electronics group Philips, it was the right name to choose. LaserDiscs look like 12-inch CDs, recording their data in a similar track of spaced pits - the discs are big enough to see the track with the naked eye - but the pits are used to interpret the waves of a composite analogue signal, rather than binary code. A LaserDisc player was two-thirds of the cost of a VCR, requiring fewer moving parts, and pre-recorded films, the first of which was Universal’s “Jaws,” cost as much as a blank tape did.

The second format was CED, or “Capacitance Electronic Disc,” launched by RCA in 1981 under the "SelectaVision" brand they also used for their VCRs. However, the release date was originally meant to be 1977, with the project having started back in 1964. However, the long gestation period was because RCA was perfecting their own patents: instead of using a laser on a reflective plastic disc, the CED would be made of the same vinyl that made audio records (with carbon added for conductivity), could be made on the same presses, and would even be read with a diamond stylus that physically touched the record. The video signal is then generated from the resonance measured from the changes in electrical capacitance between the disc and the stylus. Because the merest piece of dust on the disc would disrupt this process, attracting moisture from the air, the records would be shielded from view within a cartridge, from which the player would retrieve the record without the owner touching it. The first CED on release was not “Jaws,” but the more laid back film “Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.”

This is where the problems started – stacked against LaserDisc, which could be mistreated like a CD and still play, CEDs would be too temperamental, only produced a VHS-level picture against the higher quality of LaserDisc and, of course, was released too late. RCA announced they would stop making CED players in 1984, which paradoxically caused demand for the discs to increase, until they finally ended in 1986, when RCA was broken up for sale, after losing $600 million on the whole endeavour – the UK would only see the whole system on sale for six whole months. LaserDisc would carry on much longer, having proved very popular in Japan, with discs on sale until 2001, and players still being made as late as 2009 – its analogue picture quality was still on a par with early DVDs, and its ability to provide chapter searches and audio commentaries made it the premium alternative to VHS, through film series like the prestige Criterion Collection. Pioneer Electronics, which had bought out MCA and Philips’s stake, changed the name, and pushed the format to the very end - when they bought into it, in 1980, it was Pioneer that started pushing the more futuristic "LaserVision" as the name for the format, and "LaserDisc" for, well, the discs. In 1987, Philips tried naming the format "CD Video" in Europe, using gold-coloured discs, but LaserDisc had already failed to catch on there, so it lasted only a few more years. 

VHS became the dominant home video format for twenty years, but this was only achieved through economies of scale. While the cost of a pre-recorded tape was initially too much for most, it created the market for rentals instead, increasing what demand there was, and reducing the cost of making each tape. More companies began making both recorders and tapes to meet demand, and the overall cost continued to fall. The only downside of the ubiquity of VHS was that, when it came to replace them with DVDs, the plastic used to make the tapes was not recyclable – presumably, my collection remains in a landfill to this day.

Right now, “home video” no longer involves ownership for many people – online video streaming has replaced both the rental market and the need to record TV shows to watch at a later date. I have bought films on Blu-Ray because they were no longer available on Netflix, and recording TV shows to keep now involves a dongle attached to a desktop computer. When a problem is solved, it shouldn’t slowly reappear like this.