Back After the Break

Yeah, I'm back after a brief seasonal break and here we are in that strange limbo between Christmas and New Year, when normal time seems to stand still and you find yourself losing track of what day of the week it is.  (Today is definitely Friday, if you are still in any doubt.  It certainly isn't Saturday, which I thought it might be when I woke up today).  You know, I'm old enough to remember when Christmas TV was an event, a collective experience, as there were certain shows - Morecambe and Wise, most famously - that you knew everyone was watching.  But, in recent years, it seems to have declined in importance - this year, in particular, the BBC and ITV seemed to have spared every expense in terms of their schedules.  If many of the programmes hadn't had the prefix 'Christmas' in their titles and some tinsel stuck on their regular sets, you could have been forgiven for thinking that both broadcasters were running a normal schedule.  Doubtless, they will, once again, decide to cut any vestiges of Christmas off with the New Year.  Yes, this is your annual reminder that Christmas is a twelve day festival that lasts until Twelfth Night and that people should be allowed to enjoy the season in its entirety, rather than this truncated version that sees people abruptly forced back to their normal schedules directly after New Year.  

Anyway, back to issue in hand: thanks to the wonders of highly dodgy Roku channels and the dubious legality of their content, my DVD collection and a load of stuff I keep recording on my DVR but never actually watching, I managed to put together my own Christmas TV schedule, which has kept me amused, so far.  I'm guessing that, these days, most people do something similar, except by using over priced streaming services, (I'm too much of a cheap skate to pay for any of these over-hyped services with their paywall protected 'must see' programming - not only have I never felt that I've 'missed out' by not watching the latest cancelled-after-one-season sensation, but I find it far more fun to hunt stuff I'm interested in down via those dubious Roku channels and other barely legal, or even illegal, streaming services).  Which, in many ways, is a pity, as it represents yet another erosion of what used to be a broad swathe of 'collective experiences' that we used to be able to participate in - these things may seem trivial, but they are a big part of what binds us together as a society and societal fragmentation is one of the things that allows the rise of things like extreme right-wing ideologies, with their promises of a new collectivism for certain groups.  See? I can work the politics and anti-fascism into anything!