If you want to know what it's like to have a brush with the mafia, just try being living in England for a bit at a residential address. At some point, a letter from an insitution known only as "TV Licensing" will shove a friendly note in your letter-box, informing you of the legalities of watching television in the UK. This will be followed by one that says roughly the same thing but in a less friendly tone, and is printed in red ink. Then comes the one that hints at patrols involving "sophisticated detection equipment", followed by the same wrapped around a dead fish, and so on, until, finally, an envelope arrives on which is written NOTICE HAS BEEN SERVED, and inside which is a picture of a relative holding a copy of yesterday's paper and a note informing you that a hit, I mean, a raid, will be carried out in the next 48 hours. At this point I capitulated and paid up, even though I don't own a television set and don't watch television. But the idea of being woken up by the blunt muzzle of an automatic being pressed against my temple with the rest of the squad rummaging through my lingerie drawer in search of a concealed television set was too much to bear.
The upshot of all this is that now that I've spent so much on my television license, I've decided I should watch television so that my £126 doesn't go to waste. Besides, I've been championing the form for the past few years but bypassing the medium; i.e., I think that some of the best writing, acting, and directing being done today is being done for television, but I've always watched it on DVD. This is partly because I've never had the patience to tune in at a particular time, can't stand commercials, and because I want Dolby 2.0 at the very least. Now that HD is coming to England, I might change my mind, but an HD box is probably the last thing I need now with examinations coming up.
So if ever I watch teleivion now it's on my computer, as a little window on the screen (the resolution of my monitor is higher than broadcast resolution, so resizing it looks horrible). What does one get for £126? Without a decoder box, fairly terrible stuff, the worst of it being reality television involving extremely unattractive people, mixed in with the occasional BBC gem. This is what got me started on BBC programming, which in recent times has moved away from the type of fare it used to produce, which could charitably be described as "soothing" (try watching their adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast). The most noticeable example of this change in BBC style is the new Doctor Who, which now for a change the Americans are trying to download on Bittorrent. I'd previously dismissed it as hardcore sci-fi, which, like opera as a musical genre, the best of which I like but most of which bores me. But the writer of the new series, Russell T. Davies, was quoted as being a Buffy fan and wanting to reclaim the genre. So I watched.
Its lineage from Buffy isn't the female heroine; for that, only Alias does it for me so far (on this point I concur with Anne Billson's book on BtVS, though I disagree with most of it); it's about good writing: shifting in a moment from funny to frightening; operating on a scale both intimate and human, and Saving the World (which both Buffy and the Doctor do on a weekly basis). Unfortunately, Doctor Who is pretty new, so I couldn't go on a seven-season marathon the way I did with Buffy. (Incidentally, American seasons are around twenty-two episodes of forty minutes each; British seasons are ten episodes usually about an hour long, since there are no commercials, which also means that they don't follow the four-act structure of American teleivision.) The second season is now airing, with a new actor playing the Doctor with a new swagger; the new season definitely has an air of confidence about it, as well as a very obvious budget bump.
And since I found myself home on a Saturday night, and with a television license withering away, I decided to fire up my little digital receiver and tune in. When I turned the sound down at the end of the episode, I could hear the same music through the walls and realized that my next-door neighbor was watching it in his flat, as were people in homes and pubs all over Britain. So this is what it's like to watch television. So how much is that HD box again?
bbc.co.uk/doctorwho
How much do you enjoy television?
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