Digital killed the video star

Pause with me, my friends, for a moment’s silence to mark the passing of our old VCR, which last night passed over to that great electronics warehouse in the sky, to frolic for eternity with all the Walkmans, Betamaxes, Amstrads, reel-to-reel tape recorders and gramophones that have gone before it.

We briefly considered claiming on the insurance from the sea freight chappies who promised we could do so if they broke anything in transit, and who had clearly dropped the box in which it had travelled. But then we looked at the poor thing, which was already second-hand when I bought it in 1996 and had a label on it with a pre-01-phone number (which, sad person that I am, I know means it was made before 1991), and decided its time was probably up anyway. It’s had a huge amount of use and has endured, by my estimation, at least ten house moves, including from Edinburgh to Southampton (via Kent) and back again, plus at least a year in storage, has had paint spilled on it, had the tracking repaired at least once, and I’ve never cleaned the heads. So expecting it to survive a move to China was probably asking a bit much. If this machine were a cat, it would have reached its ninth life long ago.

The truly annoying thing was that we’d got it working. It took us two hours, trying two different TVs and several different aerial settings, but much shouting and swearing later we’d managed to figure out how to change the TV setup language to English – a major breakthrough, though not as helpful as it sounds when your instruction book and remote control are still only in Chinese – and eventually to get the video to play. It happily played all through Toy Story (which happened to be the first tape that came to hand out of the boxes) but alas when it finished and I tried to rewind to the beginning I could immediately tell something was amiss, so well did I know that VCR and its little ways.

It was groaning in obvious pain, wouldn’t rewind, wouldn’t eject. We somehow succeeded in extracting Toy Story intact and tried another tape, but this was too much and the machine breathed its last. Emergency surgery was attempted in an effort to remove the second tape but unfortunately we were unable to save mother or baby.

Which leaves us with a bit of a problem. As far as I’m aware, you can no longer buy VCRs in the UK (except second-hand) and even if we could, we wouldn’t be able to bring one back to China due to customs regulations. (Very irritatingly, it’s probably cost us about as much to get our now-broken machine into China as I paid for it in the first place.) China being slightly old-fashioned – as previously discussed – it is still possible to buy new ones here. BUT China is in a different region, video-wise-ly speaking, so we wouldn’t be able to watch any of our VHS tapes on it.

And boy do we have a lot of them. We’ve got quite a few DVDs too, obviously, but being slightly long-in-the-tooth types we still have lots of tapes which we each bought or recorded off the telly back in our respective heady youths, and somehow ‘upgrading’ these has never been top of the spending priority list. To be frank, we never look at the damn things, but in a moment of insanity we nonetheless shipped EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM out to China on the basis that there might be no TV that we could understand, so that after a year or so we might actually get bored enough to watch them.

Which brings me to the delights of CCTV9, ‘China’s only English-language channel’. Satellite TV is supposedly illegal in private homes here, though apparently you can get it if you have the right contacts (which we probably do) and many people do have it. When you stay in hotels you get movie channels, CNN, BBC World News and National Geographic like everywhere else, but at home we haven’t quite got around to sussing out the satellite thing yet. Which means we have 90 cable channels and only one we can watch – though we have passed the odd amusing quarter of an hour making up ridiculous dialogue to Chinese soaps.

So over the last few months – with most of our belongings still in transit, don’t forget; at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it – we’ve spent more time than anyone ever, EVER should, watching CCTV9.

This channel takes Boring to a level you never knew existed. The worst of it is the adverts, of which they have about six – all from the Chinese Tourist Board of various regions – repeated on a loop. We know them all, including the bloody awful plinky music, off by heart. They repeat news, current affairs and business programmes on a three hourly cycle. All of these have a Chinese nationalist bias so heavy it could send the TV crashing through the floor. The presenters speak in an array of accents you will hear nowhere else, ranging from American to tortured Chinese vowels to English public school circa 1952. There’s a sports roundup fronted by an American man who reports on football (i.e. soccer) with clearly no idea what he’s talking about, carefully enunciating words like ‘penalty’ and ‘striker’ with a fixed grin as if he’s speaking a foreign language.

They intersperse these with programmes about China which try desperately to be ‘interesting’ without ever saying anything remotely controversial. Some of these are just bizarre (‘Sports Chinese’ anyone? Yes that’s right, learning Chinese through the medium of tennis).

Our favourite, however, is a programme called ‘New Frontiers’ which is on every night at 10.30pm. The title is a mystery, as it’s about old things within China. It begins with a charming male Chinese presenter in slightly high-waisted trousers walking onto set in the dark, looking ostentatiously for his mark on the floor and then swinging to camera, before saying something like, ‘Hello. I’m Xiao Ge Jin [or whatever his name is] in Beijing.’ (Every single presenter introduces themselves this way. They are all ‘in Beijing’, so I’m unsure why they feel the need to tell us this. But anyway.)

He continues, ‘Tonight on New Frontiers, we will continue our look at the history of the three-legged copper-bottomed pot from the Shaoxing region of China. Last time, in episode 18, we saw how in the Ming Dynasty in the 16th century, the conservation of these ancient pots was encouraged by the emperors. Tonight, we will see how they began to decline in popularity’.

I’m not kidding; it’s that bad. And all this as if you’d been on tenterhooks since last night waiting to find out what would happen next. Then cut to the documentary itself, which is narrated by a New Zealand man with THE MOST BORING VOICE OF ALL TIME who recounts in minute detail every reference to these bloody pots which has ever been unearthed and repeating important events from their history just in case you missed anything. At the mid-point, we cut back to Our Graham for a quick recap, after which New Zealander starts droning on again.

And so it goes on. Every night. We’ve seen episodes about stamp collecting, Chinese chess, and the current series is about the very very long history of some dreadful Chinese opera genre. It makes the talk we had to sit through this summer in the Czech Republic about ‘the history of floating wood downstream’ (don’t ask) seem like an all-action blockbuster.

So you can see how we might get so desperate that watching the same episode of Bergerac for the 14th time, or a tape featuring a fuzzy Carry On Up the Kyber followed by Review of the Year 1997 (no really, I have this) would seem like a fun evening’s entertainment. Alas, our long-serving VCR sits inert on the lounge floor, its matte-black cover removed, its orange LCD display dimmed forever, its wires spewing forth like intestines attached to the green circuit-board which we had to snap, marking the demise of our youth. Ah, the 80s. Forget what I said last week; they’re dead & gone.

It’s time to move with the times. DVDs for Christmas please. Lots. Thanks.