telly annoyance

So this week I've not really gotten up to much - well, other than spending all that money I don't really have that is. I've been trying to watch more of the telly shows I normally record and then watch over the weekend.

I don't normally talk about all the telly I watch on here for some reason. I think that's partly because I'm such a PVR-whore. A PVR if you don't know is basically the digital/modern world equivalent of a VCR. It stands for Personal Video Recorder and does pretty much what it says - records programmes for you.

Only unlike a VCR, which uses magnetic tape, it does so to a hard drive. PVRs are actually the miracle that has spawned the modern anime fansub industry. In Japan, the fans PVR the anime shows (one thing we don't often realise in the west is that even though anime is on TV, it's often shown very late at night) and then make them available via peer-2-peer networks and Usenet type services.

Generally speaking they don't do this for western fans, though I understand there are some who do it on behalf of us westerners, but those are mainly western ex-pats. The Japanese fans do it to share with each other and the fansubbers just make use of the availability of it and add the subtitles.

Anyway, the point is that a while back I got digital telly. I bought quite an expensive model of decoder and it has a PVR built into it. Now during the week there are a variety of shows on that I want to watch, but because of a combination of work, eating, the time I go to bed and the types of stuff I actually fancy doing in the evenings, I tend to PVR everything.

That then means that I'm out of step with programmes, but it also means that at the weekends I watch a huge amount of telly. So much in fact that on the average Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning that's essentially all I do.

It's at its worst over the winter months as you get a lot more stuff on during winter. Over summer you get more sports stuff for one thing, but because people are expected to be out more in the evening, dramas and stuff tend to dry up too.

But this week I've been trying to get ahead of myself, watch more stuff as it's aired, rather than have a big stack at the weekend. Hopefully that'll free up some time at the weekend as I've a couple things I need to get done.

Anyway, the point of this blog wasn't really all of the above - what I wanted to do was moan about something.

Basically, two of my favourite shows are The Shield, which is a sorta-cop show and 30Rock a comedy show. They're both American and both air on channel 5. Or at least they used to - now they're being aired on 5Us (or something like that).

See as I mentioned there are more channels on digital, but quite a few of them are from the same broadcasters, so you have E4 and More4 and BBC3 and BBC4 and one of five's is 5US.

Now that's all well and good, except that my reception of 5's channels is really touch-and-go.

At the moment the digital broadcasts are "turned down" - they're not as powerful as they will be when they turn the analogue broadcasts off, because otherwise they'd interfere.

So that means that 5's signal strength is really borderline. I dunno if you've ever tried to watch poor-signal digital telly but it's impossible. With normal analogue what happens is it gets static and maybe the sound hisses, but it's still just about watchable. With digital it's more like a threshold - it'll be fine and then suddenly *boom* it's totally unwatchable because the picture and sound break up.

And that's what I've discovered with The Shield and 30Rock.

Now I would be buying DVDs of them anyway, admittedly, but they won't be out for months I imagine. What a pain in the arse.