From Downton Abbey to Kirstie's crafts … the New Boring is everywhere

A mind-numbing cultural diet of Downton Abbey, Adele, home-baking, crafts à la Kirstie Allsopp and novelty knitwear is crushing the spirit of the nation. Rise up against the New Boredom


Stuart Jeffries
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 November 2011 20.00 GMT

It's now clear why Julian Fellowes was made a Tory life peer last year: for services he was about to render to the Conservative-led coalition in stupefying a nation with some of the most unprofitable questions ever posed by a prime-time British drama. Will Downton Abbey's eligible girls (Snooty, Pouty and Dowdy) ever find true love? Will Bates ever be free of his barmy ex, even though she is, in fact, dead? Are Fish Face and Evil Smoking Guy for real?

And now along comes news of the Downton Christmas special, which will fill our mental in-trays with more insufferable imponderables. Apparently, the special will introduce a new character called Lord Hepworth, played by veteran roué Nigel Havers. The Countess of Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith) will have to decide whether he's most suitable for Lady Mary, Lady Edith or Lady Sibyl. But hold on. Aren't two of them already spoken for? And anyway, isn't Havers old enough to have fathered their father? Is this a Woody Allen wish-fulfilment drama now? See, already I've been suckered into caring about a backward-looking potboiler that should be beneath my contempt.

Downton Abbey not only depicts a reactionary social order; it helps create one. It isn't so much an export product from a nation that has nothing more innovative with which to capture foreigners' imaginations (though it's certainly that), but the TV equivalent of bromide in soldiers' tea to make living in recession Britain palatable for a people who really ought to know better.

But we don't. That's why department stores recently reported a 100% year-on-year increase in sales of silk dressing gowns and cotton pyjamas as favoured by the Earl of Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville. French revolutionary Alphonse de Lamartine explained why his countrymen and women ousted King Louis Philippe in 1848: "La France est une nation qui s'ennuie" (France is bored). In France, boredom catalyses revolution; here, a rise in pyjama sales.

It would be churlish not to recognise the politicised minority who are rising up and occupying things, but the overwhelming narrative of recession Britain is one of political quiescence and cultural conservatism. Welcome to the New Boring, of which Downton Abbey and its ancillary industries (dull interviews, dressing gowns, National Trust season tickets, butler-length eyebrow extensions) is the most perfect expression in its conservatism, vapidity and conformism. The New Boring upholds a law announced by French situationist Guy Debord, who very sensibly killed himself in 1994 so there was no chance of him witnessing the Z-listers who have joined Ant and Dec in the jungle. Namely: "Boredom is always counter-revolutionary. Always."

The term New Boring isn't mine. It was coined earlier this year by Popjustice.com's Peter Robinson in a Guardian article that suggested pop's Beige Wave – Adele, Mumford and Sons, cathedral-blighting folk simperer Laura Marling – had created a vortex of boredom, "a boretex, if you will". He had a point: if I ever hear the piano arpeggios of Adele's Someone Like You prop up some Very Poignant Moment in another documentary, I shall become so angry that I shall set fire, not to the rain, but to the car that's been double-parked in the street playing Rolling in the Deep on a loop for 48 hours straight.

Robinson particularly had it in for Ed Sheeran, whose lamest lines ("I'm up an' coming like I'm fucking in an elevator", "I've never owned a Blu-ray, true say" and "Suffolk sadly seems to sort of suffocate me") are impossible for intelligent persons to read without rolling their eyes. Robinson's disturbing thesis was that the Old Boring (Coldplay, Leona Lewis) hadn't gone away but had been augmented by the New Boring in a pincer movement that threatened to squeeze the joie de vivre out of this already spiritually depleted nation.

But what Robinson didn't explore is the fact that the New Boring extends its remit way beyond music and throughout culture. Think, just as an example, of knitwear. Season two of The Killing arrives this weekend, which means that the global shortage of Faroe Isles sweaters will intensify as every woman of a certain IQ seeks to look like Sofie Gråbøl. At the same time, Netaporter.com has commissioned designers to produce novelty Christmas jumpers, even though they and everybody else surely know that novelty Christmas jumpers can only be worn by sad-eyed poshos in thrall to their mothers, as Colin Firth demonstrated so brilliantly in Bridget Jones's Diary.

This is what Britain will look like on Christmas morning: every marital bedroom will have a man in a beige Downton dressing gown trying to get their hands up the ghastly jumper of a woman who thinks she's fashion forward, but is really fashion boreward (dammit – even the New Boring's neologisms are tedious). No matter: as the fashionistas say in their 10 Point Winter Wardrobe Fashion Plan: "[This year festive jumpers are the last word." And I always thought the last word was Zzzzzzz.

Fashion also tells us that polo necks, sensible jumpers, pencil skirts, loafers and brogues are in and thus by definition expressions of New Boring this season. If you're wearing any of these items while reading this on the bus and are wondering why everybody around you is shaking their heads sadly, now you know why.

Nor did Robinson realise that the Beige Wave has a political function. It's not only Baron Fellowes of West Stafford who deserved to be ennobled for crushing the spirit of a nation and making it more supine in the face of government cuts, nor should there be just Lady Adele of Tottenham or Baron Sheehan of Suffolk. Many others have worked tirelessly to subdue a whole population during recession by boring us silly and have thereby made us incapable of strangling George Osborne with the entrails of Sir Fred Goodwin. The people responsible for the X Factor, obviously. The people responsible for the Champions' League group stages (a perennial bore but – or is it just me? – more insufferable than usual). The PR placement artists responsible for the Middeltons and all their works, especially Pippa's insufferably posh bum. Those who let Julian Barnes win the Booker, prompting all the articles/tweets/blog posts about how boring it was that Julian Barnes had won the Booker. And let's not forget all the people who'll post boring replies on the end of this meta-boring article moaning about how boring writing about the New Boring is.

Lest you think the New Boring will be over in six months, two words: the Olympics. Is there anything more boring than waiting the best part of a year for Team GB's relay crew to drop the baton on the back straight of the 4x100m final, or for interviews about where it all went wrong in the semi with Britain's hopeless and inarticulate heptathlete/clay pigeon marksperson/Greco-Roman wrestler? Yes, there is. There's watching Jessica Ennis run dead-eyed across a beach on a pop-up ad on every boring web page you click on. Or those unsmilingly buff athletes with milk moustaches on every bus just out of reach of defacers' spray cans.

Is there anything more boring than the prospect of spending from now until Christmas watching footballer Robbie Savage bare his torso and dry hump Craig Revell-Horwood's desk? Yes, there is. There is thinking about how wrong it is that the Queen gave Brucie a knighthood rather than insisting he do the decent thing and retire for the public good. Not that I'm saying, you understand, that Strictly Come Dancing, is boring.

The New Boredom is everywhere. Think of Kirstie Allsopp (is it insignificant that so many of the New Bores are insufferable toffs with reactionary agendas, such as her and Julian Fellowes? The question was rhetorical), her fascist craft programme and its allied book.

It was one thing to be nine and have Val Singleton on Blue Peter tell me how to make a functionally useless mobile for my mother's birthday with knicker elastic, used washing-up liquid bottles and spit. It is quite another to be an adult and face Allsopp's aristo homilies directed at making povvo proles shape up and cut their expenditure in line with the decline in real wages by reviving dead "crafts" as part of a TV-government conspiracy dreamed up by her and George Osborne on a billionaire's yacht moored off Corfu (that meeting probably never happened, but, in making it up, I feel justified because the actual truth of Kirstie's commissioning process is surely even more boring).

The blurb for her book reads: "Kirstie Allsopp's love affair with British crafts took off when she renovated her house in Devon." My hate affair with craft started when I was bought a stencil kit and it was suggested I could use it to decorate my Walthamstow slum. Allsopp has spent ages on the road "finding the things that make our Great British crafting nation truly great". So whether you want to make your own jewellery, crochet your own cushions, distress your own furniture or simply self-lobotomise and puree the resultant brain tissue to make authentic medieval stippling paint to decorate your garden chimenea (I made the last one up), then buy what is billed as "the ultimate crafting bible". Or realise that lost crafts got lost for a reason and save yourself a few bob.

Again, there is political purpose to Allsopp's eulogy to the crafts of this United Boredom: as the nights draw in, as recession bites, let's do all those boring crafts that we would have disdained in happier times. Let's get busy with our darning needles rather than revolting against those, including Allsopp, who are cashing in on people's anxiety about money to bore us more.

Hence, too, the unstoppable rise of baking shows in the proving bowl of recession Britain. True, the fact that Mary-Anne didn't win The Great British Bake Off still makes me shake my fist skywards at an unfeeling God, but let me ask you two questions: do we, the fattest nation in Europe, really need to bake more cupcakes than those Manhattanite singleton bores (you know who I mean) inflicted on us a few years back? Is there anything more tiresome than Facebook friends describing their zen moments kneading Finnish rye from Nigella's recipe and MMS-ing you minute-by-minute pictures of the bloody thing rising in the airing cupboard? Again, these questions were rhetorical.

What's especially striking about the New Boring is how much of it is tied to our anxiety about recession, how it saws the lid off the cranium of our fears and implants nasty little electrodes that switch us into boring panic mode every five seconds. Think, if you can bear to, of supermarket price wars. Sainsbury's currently offers a till voucher if your total bill is more than it would have been at Tesco. Asda has something similar. Rather than all of these supermarkets actually lowering their prices and stopping ripping us all off, they're going to bore us into submission by inducing us to doing fiddly little calculations. But, here's the twist, they know we won't do those calculations because they're too boring. As is sitting on hold trying to change your electricity supplier, whatever the energy secretary Chris Huhne says.

Kierkegaard argued that boredom predates the beginning of the world: "The gods were bored; therefore they created human beings." Later, bored human beings created Downton Abbey, Adele and Allsopp: nobody said we weren't virtuoso masochists made in the gods' images.

How do we escape the New Boredom? In his recent book The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, McKenzie Wark recalled one of the best slogans of May 1968 Paris: "Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault with reality." That slogan is not quite right, since there is not just a fault with reality but our attitude to it. The aforementioned penseur Guy Debord argued the real business of late capitalism is to ensure wholesale alienation, rendering invisible to us the reality of the world: hence the spectacle of Strictly, must-have novelty Christmas jumpers, and crocheting your cushions à la Kirstie.

Part of us, amid the vicissitudes of the times, in all our despair about the future and insecurity, seeks refuge from the reality of the world in such soothing examples of the New Boring, making the real business of late capitalism easier. Retailers and media companies, not to mention their footsoldiers (Fellowes, Allsopp and the rest) sensing the customers' yearning to be comfortably numb, to be unchallengingly bored, gleefully supply us with the wherewithal. "On the horizon of the modern world dawns the black sun of boredom," wrote Debord's co-consiprator Henri Lefebvre. Today it all but fills our field of vision.

In a sense we couldn't be in a worse position to overturn this United Boredom since we partly crave what holds us back, what dresses us in beige dressing gowns, sensible shoes and novelty jumpers. But boredom isn't our destiny; it's something to escape. The point isn't to see the world as it is but to make it less boring, argued Debord. We have nothing to lose but our Downton Abbey pyjamas.

From Downton Abbey to Kirstie's crafts ? the New Boring is everywhere | Culture | The Guardian

Yes darling, you're so much cleverer than all the other children. Now go and play quietly, grown-ups are talking.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

Yawn Again? Is this year's Boring conference too interesting? - Home News - UK - The Independent

Quote:

The organiser of this year's Boring conference – a London gathering dedicated to the delights of the mundane, obvious and overlooked – has a problem. He is worried it is in danger of being too interesting. Such was the success of the inaugural event last year that the series of talks has attracted a line up of speakers including author Jon Ronson and documentary maker Adam Curtis who, it is feared, could have the undesired effect of entertaining the sell-out audience. This might seem unlikely considering some of the subjects on offer today. These include a morning discussion on the evolution of the electric hand dryer by a man who has installed a Dyson Airblade in his home, and an exposition on the history of Budgens supermarkets. But the prospects for this year's get-together are already being talked down – or up, depending on your perspective – to prevent disappointment. In a sign of the level of expectation, a Canadian documentary team has already been despatched to record proceedings. Canada is said to be a hotbed of activism in the emerging global boring movement. However, James Ward, who founded 2010's Boring conference initially as a joke on Twitter following the cancellation of a rival "Interesting" conference, believes there is still scope for failure. "I'm hoping that because I am putting it together things won't work, I will forget things or someone will pull out," said the 30-year-old who works for a DVD distributor. Nearly two dozen speakers will be given 10 minutes to discuss a subject they find personally fascinating. Four hundred tickets have already been sold – twice as many as last year and Mr Ward said he had plans to take the event international, possibly launching in Berlin next year. The irony is that boring stuff is not actually boring at all, said Mr Ward who is delivering an introductory lecture on the first 10 years of Which? magazines. As with his other interests in stationery, he believes there is a nostalgic thirst for the workaday among the predominantly 20-30-year-old crowd the event appears to attract. "That is the paradox. At the heart of the boring thing is what people consider to be interesting in the newspapers and in the media is actually quite boring. "What we are talking about is the stuff people take for granted, which is considered trivial mundane. Because it is so familiar when you look at it in detail it is incredibly interesting," he said. A glance down the list of topics is certainly enough to get the pulse racing and delight sponsors Hi-Cone, the packaging firm that makes the plastic strips that hold cans together. Before lunch, conference goers will be able to hear about toilets and hand dryers. Later, the action hots up with a seminar on the square root of two and a talk on civil aircraft. The tricky final session reaches a dizzying finale with discussions on health and safety, vending machines and concrete overpasses. The Independent's Rhodri Marsden, who will be discussing his inability to make social small talk, said anyone expecting to be bored would be let down. "It's a bit of a misnomer. I went along last year and no one knew what to expect," he said. "People are intrigued by the idea of stepping back and considering stuff that we wouldn't normally ponder." Dull Debate: Has the schedule become too sexy? 2010 Cataloguing ties It might seem arcane, but building an index of cravats and ties remains a sartorial skill. Conference-goers learnt that logging should be based on colour, material and fabric. 4/5 Milk matters Everyone knows semi-skimmed is better for you than full fat but how do various types rate? Pitting "skinny" milk against UHT, audiences lapped up this taste test. 4/5 Plug-in laptop Thanks to the BlackBerry, laptop and mobile phone, everyone is "always on". But how much does it cost to re-juice those electronic devices in municipal buildings? The answer: not much. 3/5 Beauty of car park roofs Inside they are depressingly, gear-crunchingly narrow and harrowingly expensive. But once you reach the top of an NCP building you're rewarded with a bird's-eye view. 5/5 2010 Verdict (out of 5) - 4 2011 The first 10 years of Which? Magazine (1957-67) With accounts including the best way to use a fridge, this decade of early consumer writing takes us back to a lost age. 3/5 The life and times of Budgens supermarkets Little did John Budgen know, back in 1872, that he was founding a supermarket dynasty not to rival Tesco or Sainsbury's. 5/5 The advance of the hand-drier Electric driers had advanced little from George Clemens's first patented invention in 1948. But 45 years later Mitsubishi devised the Jet Towel and revolutionised the world of hand sanitation. 3/5 Locations from About a Boy Hugh Grant starred in the high-grossing 2002 adaptation of Nick Hornby's paean to irresponsibility. Locations include Oseney Crescent, Kentish Town, Hanway Place, Fitzrovia and the London IMAX. 3/5 2011 Verdict - 4 Result: Snore Bore

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

If you read the Guardian last Thursday, you may have caught Stuart Jeffries' robust polemic against The New Boring – an entertainment trend in which terrifyingly inoffensive offerings such as Downton, Strictly and Kirstie Allsopp's Home Knit Bakery Challenge (or whatever it's called) have seemingly lobotomised the nation into docile viewing acquiescence. Jeffries borrowed the term New Boring from Peter Robinson of superlative music blog Pop Justice, who has angrily decried the comparable 'Beige Wave' of audio dullards – the turgid likes of Adele, Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling.

Jeffries and Robinson are right of course. In these troubling times, it seems mainstream entertainment has turned into the equivalent of a nervous-looking policeman shuffling in front of a burning fireworks factory shouting, 'nothing to see here, more away, please' as a billion Catherine wheels ignite in unison. Downton and Master Chef have dropped below the level of entertainment to become gentle cultural sedatives. Meanwhile, our simmering fury at the world is being skilfully channelled, not into marching en masse toward Downing Street, but into shouting at our TVs when the wrong karaoke singer is evicted from X-Factor.

Contemporary mass entertainment, then, is largely horrible, asinine and designed to be forgettable and throwaway – like the cheap, impulse garments filling our highstreet tat shops. But what annoys me is that there's a vital exception to the New Boring flourishing under the noses of our cultural critics, they're just not seeing it. They are not seeing video games.

Okay, so admittedly, games aren't any more in touch with the 'real world' than scripted reality TV shows or the movies of Michael Bay. But at least they are extremely good. This autumn has seen a relentless barrage of acclaimed mainstream masterpieces, from the gothic thrills of Batman: Arkham City to the ridiculously ambitious expanses of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, via the warm, generous beauty of Skyward Sword. Metacritic, the leading score aggregation site for the music, movie and games industries, has seen an explosion of titles rated at 85% and above. If all this were happening in the TV or movie sectors, critics would be tumbling over themselves to proclaim this a golden age of passive visual entertainment. As it is, critics are simply tumbling over themselves to switch off I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

And even the biggest, most conservative game releases are many times more adventurous and subversive than their televisual counterparts. The military shooter Modern Warfare 3, which has been derided by gamers for not being imaginative enough, still manages to feature a land invasion of the United States, a shoot-out on a fragmenting jumbo jet, a gas attack on London and American pilots bombing the Eiffel Tower until it falls over. It makes Spooks look about as dangerous and apocalyptic as Come Dine With Me.

And then there's Saint's Row 3, an open-world crime shooter, that seems to have been concocted entirely by hyperactive 14-year-olds force fed on a diet of sherbet, Red Bull and Korean gangster movies. This is a game in which the player can, entirely at random, bludgeon passers-by with a giant dildo. To the best of my knowledge, Downton Abbey features nothing even remotely comparable – although, to be fair, I skipped most of season two, and may have missed a key scene in which Hugh Bonneville attacks his butler with some nightmarish Edwardian device intended for the cure of female hysteria.

At the other end of the scale, there is Skyrim, a game so vast, so open, so wondrously detailed, you can effectively plan and enact your own unique Game of Thrones adventure. Nothing that Zack Snyder hacks together using a digital camera and his comic collection will ever, ever come close to the grandiose vision at the heart of this immense experience.

And then Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword... Please, if you are a parent and you want something to do with your kids on a wet Sunday afternoon, don't rent the latest heavily marketed CGI bore-fest from a Hollywood studio more interested in selling you merchandise and the moral agenda of its self-serving financers, buy Zelda. Buy Zelda and share a genuinely thrilling, heart-warming escapist fantasy with your children. Certainly, it's not as 'good' as taking them to a museum or getting them to play footie in the park, but if the only alternative is Horrid Henry, it is spectacular – and they will never forget it.

That is why games will never be part of the New Boring. Even the annual updates, the tired sequels, the safe Triple A blockbusters, are constructed by insanely dedicated teams whose modus operandi is the construction of memories: the first time Batman lifts his cape and soars over the rain-slick streets of Gotham; the darkness of a looming citadel in the pulverising RPG thriller Dark Souls; Uncharted's Nathan Drake fist-fighting on the open cargo door of soaring aircraft. Interactivity is a blunt but effective tool to ensure attention and alertness. And as such, video games have never sought to stultify or repress. Video games are not interested in teaching us to make the most out of our tired soft furnishings.

Of course, the spirit of Jeffries' piece was one of agitation. He wanted us to rebel against mainstream entertainment and its agenda. But that doesn't have to mean chucking your TV out of the window and occupying your town square. If you want mass entertainment that's going to test you, enrage you, get you talking to your family, games are where it is now. Forget mainstream TV, forget it. It's over – at least in terms of water cooler discussion. Apprentice and X-Factor may reliably trend on Twitter, but it's all ironic chatter mixed with barely-disguised collective embarrassment and culpability. There's nothing enriching there.

By contrast, games demand immersion and investment. Traditionally, this has formed a stereotype of dead-eyed zombies slumped in front of monitors, but of course, through XBox Live and PSN, gamers now constantly communicate with each other, as well as share creative tasks in titles like Little Big Planet and Minecraft. New research from Michigan State University suggests that gamers are more imaginative story-tellers – the findings are far from conclusive, but they don't surprise me. The game worlds in Zelda, Uncharted and Dark Souls are rich and deep. They are cluttered with possibilities.

Big business knows that this is true. Corporations are busily converting their websites and marketing campaigns into mini-tasks and collection challenges. Gamification is the communications buzzword of the 2010s. Industry leader Bunchball has supplied gamification tools to everyone from Warner Bros to Playboy; and when Nike introduced its Nike+ range of trainers and gamified jogging apps, sales grew by 10%, with 35% of purchasers claiming to be completely new to Nike products. Games get to us on some primal level, they speak to the machine code of the human id – and that can be a good thing. Last year, game designer Jane McGonigal gave a talk at the TED conference entitled, 'Gaming can make a better world' in which she argued that the sense of passion and commitment within game communities could be harnessed to solve real-world problems.

You have your doubts and so do I. But the very least mainstream games do is give us a platform to discuss amazing things. When you talk about Zelda or Uncharted 3, you can talk about beauty, art, mythology and adventure; when you talk about the forthcoming Bioshock: Infinite, you can cover architecture, paranoia and politics and it all makes perfect sense. These elements aren't hidden away, to be teased out by cultural studies students desperate to apply their knowledge of Derrida and Saussure. They're there in the very form, the very function of the games. Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 are idiotic and politically suspect, but give them five minutes and they'll show you more about the computerised lunacy of contemporary conflict than most of those MOD-arranged shaky cam war reports beamed into your living rooms by over-stretched 24-hour news channels.

So much contemporary television is transitory and listless - it doesn't try to be memorable, it just re-caps everything before and after the commercial breaks and hopes for the best. The apathy of the audience is actually built in to the format. What a fall from grace. I'll sound like an old codger here, but you couldn't forget Cathy Come Home or Our Friends in the North or Boys From the Black Stuff, the anger and craft seared themselves into your brain. Games don't tell us much in comparison, but at least they know we're listening. And they know we're not bored.

Video games are the answer to the New Boring | Technology | guardian.co.uk

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

Well yeah, some of my happiest childhood memories involve playing Spyro the Dragon with next-door's little sister (no innuendo there - we were genuinely playing Spyro the Dragon), but it's so fucking expensive.

You spend a whole year's worth of heating money on a Playstation $$$, then each game costs you 50 quid, and after six months the next generation of consoles comes out and you get to do it all over again in slightly higher definition.

__________________
Standard disclaimer: the disgusting statements contained in this post are the views of the poster, and unless specified do not represent the views of the moderators or the site's owners.

That's why I always play games 2 years out. So, okay, I miss all the buzz and stuff. But I point blank refuse to pay more than £15 per game. And, overall, I have been pretty good at getting some good games (about 10 of them) for an average of £5-7.5.

And I use my computer to run them. So it's not like I need to buy a dedicated platform such Xbox or PS.

The biggest cost is the time they actually consume. Games are frightfully time consuming. Which, by the by, makes them good value for money entertainment-wise... If you spend 25 hours with even a £50 game, you have paid £2 per hour of entertainment. It looks a lot less expensive that way as a £8-10 movie is still twice/three times that.

Of course, TV is nearly free but, frankly, I haven't had a TV in years and I am not exactly feeling deprived at missing the latest Strictly or X factor. I positively hate that kind of entertainment...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.

Yeah in terms of value for money they are quite respectable. And of course with a PC, games and hardware are both cheaper, and can be upgraded one component at a time.

There is still some interesting TV out there. Game of Thrones for example, I like dFlaling skies, the new V was decent.... these are all of course my taste, and others may have different preferences (I hapen to like Mumford and sons too), but it does take a bit of listing-browsing.

Usually, TV programs I like (such as Game of Thrones) become available on DVD fairly rapidly. Okay - that bit is a tad expensive. But I found that having a couple of good boxed programs (Rome, Deadwood, Firefly and a couple of others) are a decent investment. I watch them once or twice per year...

__________________
Unless otherwise specified, I am posting as a regular poster. When I will act as a mod, I'll make sure you're in no doubt.