downton abbey & other telly stuff

While I was away I saw this Downton Abbey people seem to have gone nuts for.

I can't honestly say I understand why it's so popular.  It seemed very poorly written and had an odd, staccato feel to it - like all the scenes were filmed with the intention of being the last in the show, or just before an ad break.

You know the drums you get at the end of Eastenders and there's that dramatic pause while they play?  All of the scenes seemed like that in Downton.

Also, the camerawork was very sedate, with mostly static shots, so it had a feel of only having 1 camera, which usually goes along with a low budget, but it clearly had some money spent on it.  It looked very lush - lots of lovely costumes and old cars and stuff.

But as I say, the story was very languid and it seemed daft.  It also seemed a bit theatrical - you know that way in which things are a little bit hammy in theatre sometimes, because they're having to emote to a big room?  It felt a bit like that.

I wasn't keen at all, to be honest.

There's still no sign on Total Wipeout's return to the telly.  The latest series of QI is well past half way and Have I got News for You is back again, so it's well into the autumn season, but there's no sign of it.

I ended up suspecting I'd actually missed the series, but I did some investigating and my theory about them showing the celeb specials (which were clearly intended as the last thing in the series run) and nothing else appears to be correct.

I'd have thought if they were planning to run it up to Christmas they'd have started by now and Chrimbo is only 5 or 6 weeks away.

There's been a brilliant new wildlife series on BBC one all about the frozen bits of the world (the far north and south).  I actually got to watch the first episode at home and at my Dads.  This is significant because my Dad has recently purchased a gigantic High Definition TV and has Freesat HD (basically the satellite version of digital telly - he used to have Sky so already had the dish).

It really looked good in HD and again made me think about getting a freeview HD box.  I've decided against it for a while at least, because the analogue signal isn't being turned off for me until April 2012.

It seems to have taken ages for the switchover to happen where I am.  I'm pretty sure it was originally planned for 2010, but then got pushed back.

It's a real pain because I'm just on the cusp of a receivable signal.  Indeed, if it weren't for my brilliant Humax box I probably couldn't watch digital.  My telly has freeview built in, but it can't really get a very good signal.  But as I say, it's just on the cusp - sometimes it will be okay, sometimes it will break up a little bit and sometimes it will be so bad you can't tell there's any picture at all.

I did identify that the plug on the arial was in pretty poor condition, so redid it and the signal quality improved massively, but strength was basically unaffected.  When they switch off analogue they will turn up the strength of the digital - they can't set it to "max" at the moment as it would interfere with the analogue.

After that I will probably look again at getting HD.  Another issue will be that, while my telly is a nice size for my room and the space I have available, it won't really make full use of HD.  I mean, I can see the benefit a bit when I watch Blu-Ray movies, but I'd need a bit bigger telly to really get the full effect, and so it's quite an expensive proposition.

Lastly, the Big Bang Theory is back on... but I unfortunately didn't realise and have missed the first couple of episodes :(.

The problem was that it's come back to E4, but doesn't appear to have been shown on channel 4 yet.  Usually (or at least, my memory is) they show new episodes first on E4 and then repeat them a week later on channel 4, but this time they seem to have just started showing them on E4 without the repeats.

As such, I've only realised because the new series of the Mentalist started and I was like "hang on, shouldn't the Big Bang Theory be on too?" so I did a search on the old PVR and eventually worked out the new series was already 4 episodes in.

I say eventually because there isn't a day when E4 aren't showing multiple (old) episodes of Big Bang - they repeat it like they used to Friends - so finding new ones is a tricky task.