When I say I don’t have a telly, I don’t mean I don’t have a machine. I do. I mean it’s not plugged into an aerial socket. It is actually on a different floor from the aerial socket. This means I am liberated from the sickening jingle-filled dumbed-down celebrity-obsessed consumerist pageant that is served up nowadays as entertainment in our homes. Instead I watch films on DVD and video, which I either buy at charity shops or rent from lovefilm.com. This organisation has a stock of 60,000-odd movies: you choose at least 10 of the ones you want to see, and mark them down as high, mid and low priority. You can have two on the go at a time. They send you the films: when you have watched them, you send them back, and they send the next available ones on your list. No late fees.
This gives you some control of your entertainment. You can invent your own ‘seasons’. At the moment I’m having a Vittorio de Sica and a Federico Fellini season. On Wednesday I was notified by e-mail that two new films were on their way: Umberto D by the former, and 8½ by the latter. On Thursday they arrived. I took them unopened to my local pub, where I droned on to whoever was listening about lovefilm.com, and the glory of Italian neo-realist and surrealist cinema of the 50s and 60s. To make my point, I opened one of the envelopes and pulled out a disc. Would it be Fellini or De Sica? There was a familiar cartoon figure on the disc. Toy Story 2. They’d sent the wrong disc. A random error: nothing to do with my list. It stopped my droning, and put a smile on everyone’s face. Later in the weekend, I watched it, wondering who ended up with Umberto D. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the happenstance unexpectedness of my getting to watch it. Do Curry's in the Cliffe sell TV aerial cables? AL