Just Another Manic Monday

The Story So Far: Media-loving boy deprived of the old sources and finding satellite, cable and streaming services a poor substitute becomes his own Programming Director and enjoys it immensely . . . though it is a lot of work. The more tricks he learns and the more content he amasses in-house, the less he misses the ever-growing shallowness of Contemporary “Culture,” of which the quality can best be described by another word beginning with the letter “C.”

And now we re-join our regularly scheduled program, already in progress:

 

When I first started going off the grid with my evening’s entertainment, I quickly realized that Monday Night was going to be critical to my mental well-being.

Monday. The worst day of the week needed to be met head-on with Things That Made Me Happy. Tip No. 1: Pile All of Your Favorite Shows onto Monday Nights!

For me, this meant Comedy, specifically situation comedy, specifically (but not limited to) the British variety. And in the USA, only the most popular of British comedies — your Monty Pythons, your Fawlty Towers and the like — ever got a home video release in any format. Some that did get issued (Are You Being Served, Dad’s Army and The Goodies among them) saw incomplete, inferior or staggered releases.  I was fortunate to have taped a lot of shows off the air during the days when PBS would run such things, but it became evident pretty quickly that if I ever wanted to see anything new-to-me, I would have to find a way to buy and play Region Two disks. The “buy” part was easy enough (because Suited Corporate Bastards will sell you anything), but playing Region 2 disks in the USA is impossible without specialized equipment.

Still, I resisted. It took a show called Last of the Summer Wine to get me to break down and buy a region-free DVD player. And I’m so glad I did.

At 295 episodes, it is the longest-running sitcom in the world. As things go, it’s about as UN-high a concept as you can get: three retired gents spend their days wandering around a cozy Yorkshire town, talking.

That’s it. As the cast filled out, opportunities for the ladies of the town to speak their piece were added; and, most of the time, the more enterprising one of the gents would come up with some hair-brained scheme to get the scruffiest one of the group to publicly embarrass himself. It ran for 37 years. 

I just finished watching series 18, which puts me a little more than halfway through the run. My first significant buy of Region 2 material has already lasted me for years, and without repeat viewings it will remain a centerpiece of my Monday Happy Place for years yet to come. Although I do not look forward to key cast members dying off and being replaced, it’s a strong reminder that life has its trials even in the best of times.

My region 2 player was not satisfied with just that significant dish, and still required regular feeding. One of the first additions was the Complete Collection of The Goodies, a comedy trio with cartoonish sensibilities that make Monty Python look staid and conservative by comparison. From Jimmy Perry and David Croft (creators of Dad’s Army) have come Hi-Di-Hi (hijinks in one of those uniquely English Institutions, the Holiday Camp), It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum (antics of a British “Concert Party” in WWII India; now considered by the BBC to be one the most offensive shows ever made — a thing that I regarded as a particular selling point) and others. 

From Bob Esmonde and John Larbey, creators of the classics Mulberry and The Good Life, comes Brush Strokes, the good-natured saga of a young man who likes the opposite sex rather too much. From Yorkshire Television, the company that gave us a state-of-the-art spy show in The Sandbaggers, comes In Loving Memory starring Dame Thora Hird and Christopher Beeny as a duo of undertakers muddling through in a 1929 mill town.

The versatility of comic star Ronnie Barker (known to Americans primarily as one half of The Two Ronnies) was spelled out to me via two series: Open All Hours (created by Summer Wine’s Roy Clarke) and Porridge (a prison comedy of all things, which turns up often on lists of Britain’s Best Sitcoms). 

And, in the fall season, from Richard Carpenter, creator and main writer for Robin of Sherwood comes The Ghosts of Motley Hall and Catweazle — not so much situation comedies as supernaturally-themed “kid’s shows” with a gentle sense of humor. These entries demonstrate why it’s important to support physical media while you can: they were released by a company called Network, which went belly-up late in 2023, taking an awful lot of British television with them when they died.

It hasn’t all been unmitigated joy: sometimes you come up with a clinker. Mann’s Best Friends was a one-shot-series from Summer Wine’s Roy Clarke with a good concept and a good cast that simply tried too hard. It wasn’t so much about the eccentric and wacky residents of a tiny rooming house as it was about residents who were trying to be eccentric and wacky and failing miserably. Misfires happen when you’re a programming executive, even on the smallest scale. Curry and Chips, another show that attracted my attention for being considered one of the most offensive shows that ever aired, wasn’t so much offensive as ineffective and half-baked.

But the winners have far outnumbered the losers, and one of the nice things about British TV is that the series are so short (typically not running more than 6 to 8 episodes in any given season) that none of them outstay their welcome.

Of course I liberally mix in American series, both new-to-me (for instance, My Favorite Martian, with Ray Walston and Bill Bixby) and Old Favorites. The latter includes a lot of shows that I haven’t seen since their original airdates (Cheers is coming soonish), but occasionally the time comes to revisit perennial classics like M*A*S*H or Gilligan’s Island. Whether new-to-me or not, I dole them out sparingly in six-to-eight week runs, just to pace them. Good as most MTM shows are, they’re better when taken in British measures. I’ve been viewing The Mary Tyler Moore Show in such limited bits that it’s taken me significantly more than a decade to view the first five seasons. No binge-watching for me: These shows were meant to be taken at a rate of no more than once a week. How can anyone appreciate anything when they guzzle it down in gulps as if it were a quart of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream? One thing I’ve learned: when something makes you happy, you want it to last.

Among the re-discoveries? As a very young boy I remember watching re-runs of Car 54, Where Are You?  with Fred Gwynne, Joe E. Ross and Al Lewis. The main impression on me at that age was of course that Gwynne and Lewis were “the same guys in The Munsters.” In my sixties, I was glad to discover that it’s actually a very funny show in its own right about inner city cops, pre-dating Barney Miller by many years. I’ve made its two seasons last about as long as possible: it will be an unhappy day when I run out of episodes sometime this summer.

Next Time: WDUK Tuesday Night at the Movies.

— Thorn.

The Power of Playlists

 

For a long, LONG time, I was content with planning my evening’s entertainment around the DVDs that I had on hand; which, yes, meant removing and inserting disks and waiting for them to load at about half-hour intervals (I don’t “binge-watch” anything, and neither should you). As a child of the broadcast TV era, and an adult of the VHS era, I was accustomed to this. It teaches patience.

It took me an unconscionably long time to figure out how Wifi and digital media could make an evening’s entertainment seamless, and it took even longer for me to realize that iTunes’s Playlist feature could be used just as well for video content as it is for music. This was more than a “lightbulb over the head” moment: it was a door opening.

Away back in the days when I was the night guy/de facto children’s librarian at the library of a small local college, I started hosting a regular “Free Movie Night” for the students, and from the start it was never just a movie. I’ve always been interested in re-creating the kind of full program that movie theaters used to offer their patrons, and so I presented an array of short subjects before the feature: usually a cartoon, a two-reel comedy (Laurel & Hardy or Buster Keaton), and a chapter from an old cliffhanger serial, because that’s what I had on hand.

In those days, it was next to impossible to run a seamless program, without interruptions. In addition to the projector, it required two VHS players, or a VHS and a DVD player, the latter of which was a New Thing then. I would have to cue up the tapes the night before so that they would start at the desired point when I switched them out. With DVDs it was actually harder, even though the quality was better. Because of menus and un-skippable commercials.

In later years, when I had friends over for a movie night, it was still the same challenge, with the same unsatisfactory result: impossible to create a really smooth program. In fact it was a little bit worse, because I’d have to occupy one of the best seats in the house just so that I could reach the players easily.

It wasn’t until about three years or so ago that I discovered the freedom of using playlists in iTunes to arrange the evening’s show. I know, I’m slow on the uptake. But with a small amount of prep, I could pre-load an array of trailers, movie-theater bumpers, short subjects and the feature; at showtime, all I had to do was press “PLAY,” sit back and watch it unfold seamlessly. 

This was a Joy.

From there, the next logical step was to arrange my normal personal evening TV series viewing the same way. Before I moved to town from the country fifteen years ago, I’d never known anything but free broadcast TV. After that, DirecTV was the best option, but I quickly grew tired of paying every month for a bunch of channels that didn’t interest me. The rise of streaming services passed me by; I’d already pulled the plug by then. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out that nobody knows what I want to watch better than me.

I have an older iMac that I’ve converted into my server: and an AppleTV connected to my television, which easily allows me to connect my TV to the computer, and run iTunes directly through my TV. It isn’t the fanciest or slickest set-up, and there are plenty of other ways to do it (and plenty of sources to tell you how), but it’s simple, it works, and I was able to figure it out for myself.

Nowadays, whatever I’m watching, I usually plan the full week’s viewing in advance. I have an array of “station ID” bumpers that I’ve created, and am amassing a growing collection of vintage TV commercials, so that when dinner is over and I sit down for the evening’s entertainment, all I have to do is launch the playlist; what unfolds isn’t particularly authentic, but it is a fair approximation of the style of what prime-time television used to be like when I was growing up. And I’m finding a lot of pleasure in the planning, in being the “Programming Director” of my own virtual station. 

I still buy physical media. In fact, I ONLY buy physical media: digital content can go “poof” too easily, and in too many ways. But every disk that comes into the house is immediately ripped (via MakeMKV and Handbrake) to digital MP4, because it’s that much more convenient. As Monty Python once said, “It’s fun, and only slightly illegal.” 

Over the next few posts, I’ll be walking through my current schedule, the thinking behind it, and the hows of finding and arranging it all. It’s a way of writing about media that goes beyond just what the present day is shoveling down your throat. Hopefully this will be of interest to somebody; perhaps it’ll give you some ideas, and open some doors for others. I’ll be starting with most critial night of the week: the dreaded Monday.

See you there.

—Thorn.