New Year's Telly

Come on, right! Some of us don't have social lives - whether by choice or accident - and we're kind of reliant on a certain instrument that's become the focal point of many a lounge room.

I am, of course, referring to the laptop computer.

When I was a child I was restricted to one channel on our television, later expanding to two. It took many a long year before some company decided to invest, and lose money, on a third channel. Then a fourth. Then some more. Then you could get Sky TV and watch many, many channels (though oddly no more television programs.)

Now there are so many different channels available for viewing on your computer, or your computer hooked up to your television, or your television's own on-board computer, that it seems like we'll never run out of entertainment.

I was a tad worried at Christmas, remembering long hours of boredom as a child where there would be absolutely nothing worth viewing on TV and we would have to play bored board games instead. But it appears that the British remember this as well and produce a wonderment of television viewing to get you through a long day with your relatives.

I'd started to relax somewhat. There was a new series I was interested in released all at once (which is the best idea in entertainment for a long time) and we had a couple of old reality TV shows stored on the hard-drive (so we can reproduce the same sensation by ourselves.)

And then the New Year hit. We've gotten so desperate that today we watched an entire free movie from Vimeo and actually watched it through to the bitter end even though it was sick and disturbing and that was just the people attempting to act.

Sometimes a shoestring budget is a hindrance, sometimes it's an impetus to brilliance, and sometimes it's more than they deserve.

There's still another long week of weirdness before all the networks around the world decide that everyone's over the holidays and ready to sit down and pay some proper attention again.

Let's hope I can hold out that long.