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Desert Island Stuff

August 11th, 2019 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

I have spent an inappropriate amount of time thinking about this. The more trivial something is, the more thought I give it for some reason. I have bought houses and cars almost on a whim, but spent months comparing specs before buying my first DVD player and MP3 player. In the old days I could walk into a record shop with a fiver and spend an hour deciding what to spend it on.

Anyway, this is a more extreme version of Desert Island Discs: If I had to live with a TV that could only receive one channel, which one would I choose? Let’s ignore the fact that most viewing I do is on streaming services, and what I do watch on TV tends to be recorded. After due consideration I think it would have to be BBC Four.

I know it is not on all day, and some days there is nothing on it that I would choose to watch, but when I sometimes go through the EPG choosing things for the Tivo to record I find a lot more on there than on other channels. Just in the last few weeks I have watched the continuing old TOTP episodes, Julien Temple’s Ibiza: The Silent Movie, the BBC Proms concerts of Angelique Kidjo and Public Service Broadcasting, the story of the mighty David Rodigan and a documentary called Everybody In the Place. That last one is about the history of dance music in 1980s Britain, done in the ineresting format of a presentation to a group of school children. Of course for them the 1980s is history in the same way that WWII was for me – it is as far back in time as the war was for me when I was at school, which is a scary thought.

A close runner-up would have to be Sky Arts which has a similar output. Recently I have enjoyed a series about punk rock, a documentary about the Damned, and a series on architecture. There isn’t a lot in it. The two channels both feature decent documentaries about music, art, architecture and film/TV, but Sky Arts does have all those adverts in it.

If I had a radio that could only receive one channel then there is no competition. It requires hardly any thought on my part to decide that it would be BBC Radio 6 Music. If I could have a second channel then it gets more difficult. In the past I have listened to Planet Rock and Absolute Radio 70s a lot but my radio can’t get either of those now and I have to go to apps to listen to them in the Internet.

I don’t want to think about how I would answer the questions of having to ave only one album, one book, or one website. Questions that trivial would tie up my brain for weeks. After which I would probably end up with Entertainment! by Gang of Four, the complete Sherlock Holmes and Wikipedia skuds.org 🙂

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