Too Much TV?

It has become fashionable to say that, with the plethora of TV channels, digital and streaming, that now exist, it has become impossible to be able to keep up with everything on TV.  The implication being, of course, that back in the days when we had only three terrestrial channels, it was possible.  Indeed, I used to pride myself upon the fact that I thought that I could recall, even if I hadn't seen them myself, the majority of stuff that had shown on the BBC and ITV before 2000, or so.  If push came shove, I thought that I even had a reasonable knowledge of what had been on Channels Four and Five between their respective launches and the early 2000s.  In recent times, however, I have been proven brutally wrong.  Forces TV is a digital channel that shows all manner of old TV shows, from all the old terrestrial channels.  Scarily, there are many that I have absolutely no recollection of whatsoever.  It is the ITV sitcoms from the nineties which really seem to have passed me by, right now, for example, they are showing the Brian Conley starring Time After Time, which apparently ran for 15 episodes between 1995 and 1997.  Nothing about it stirs any memories for me - I don't even remember seeing trailers for it, or noticing it in the schedules.  Then there's a Richard O'Sullivan sitcom which features him as a psychiatrist - this also draws a complete blank.  Not to mention that one with Paul Nicholas as a vet and featuring LIsa from Eastenders as his daughter.  To be fair, it isn't just ITV sitcoms - there's a BBC one featuring Ray Winstone and a young Kate Winslet as his daughter that I never knew existed as well.  

Clearly, I didn't watch as much TV as I thought that I had.  To be honest, there was a period, during the nineties, when my viewing patterns did undergo a change, coinciding with when I bought this house and finally had full control over the TV remote, meaning that I no longer ended up spending time sitting through stuff I wasn't really interested in.  That's one of the great things about living on one's own - you no longer have to endure other people's viewing habits and instead develop your own.  One of these new habits was not watching anything on prime time ITV, which was then beginning its long decline into lowest common denominator mediocrity.  Getting cable TV in the late nineties (mainly due to poor reception here of the analogue signals for Channels Four and five), further diminished my BBC and ITV viewing, as I suddenly had access to a number of new channels.  The advent of digital TV and the acquisition of a Freeview box reduced my watching of conventional TV, while buying a Roku box a couple of years ago really shifted my viewing patterns, giving me access to a whole panoply of low-rent streaming channels.  (Right now, for example, I'm watching a sleazy Italian supernatural thriller, Ring of Darkness (1979) on Otherworlds TV - the sort of thing I'd never get to see on terrestrial).  Anyway, getting back to Forces TV, they also show a lot of old US TV series, most of which I remember but haven't seen since their first UK broadcast.  I'd forgotten just how depressing Midnight Caller became as it quickly settled into its 'issue of the week' format, or how surprisingly enjoyable Spenser For Hire was in its own cheesy way, (despite its standard US private eye TV series format, it remains the best screen adaptation of Robert B Parker's characters that I've seen - Avery Brooks' casting as Hawk was quite superlative).