Be kind, rewind

November 24, 2015 by Ray Morgan

Be kind, rewind

I had a conversation at work the other day about VHS. It started with a simple "Remember VHS?" and turned into me waxing lyrical for possibly the whole lunch hour about videos of times gone by (people may have walked off, I'm not sure, but I kept going anyway). I miss VHS. They were pretty terrible, but they kept it real didn't they?

Growing up in my Mum and Dad's house taping things off the telly was a Big Deal. My parents created a system where we had about 30 blank tapes, all numbered with stickers, and a corresponding exercise book ('almanac' if you will) where you wrote down what was taped on each video. You'd think it was foolproof. But what about the panic when Dawson's Creek was about to start but Grandma was on the phone and I need to thank her for my birthday money? WHERE IS NUMBER SEVENTEEN I would cry, looking under sofa cushions and unable to find an elusive tape that had nothing of worth on it.

You would think you'd got away with it, and then days later someone would say something like "Er, who taped over Inspector Morse with American teenagers talking a load of old rubbish?" *sheepish face*

I remember perfecting the art of pressing pause while the adverts were on for a smooth transition between, say, scenes of ER so the tape would be slick, professional almost. Apart from the fact that the tape wobbled during an important bit of the programme, and cut off three minutes before the end. SUCH PAIN.

My Grandad loved VideoPlus. If you wanted to tape something the Radio Times would print a little code underneath the programme, and you stabbed it in to the telly using your video remote. It would magically start taping at the right time, and end when it was scheduled to be over. But, as this was a new kind of technology, it never quite seemed to work. My Grandad would often be found taping films off BBC2 but BBC2 for some reason ALWAYS ran late. So he would always miss the end of the film! This had promised to be progress, but was in fact bloody frustrating.

There was a great trick where you could pop in a bit of plastic on the videotape and it meant it could never be taped over. Don't ask me how it worked. But: SERIES 1 OF WILL AND GRACE COULD BE SAFE. Except when some bright spark discovered an equally brilliant plan: that a bit of Sellotape could actually undo your magic, and you'd settle down to find yourself watching something awful involving Ian McShane.

Today, you can pause live TV while you go for a wee. Save Strictly to a hard drive so you can go out on a Saturday night (though I would never do this). Watch programmes on catch-up as soon as they've finished. Like, on your phone.

My 2 year old nephew can watch whatever CBeebies programme he's into over, and over, and OVER again - because it's all just sitting there on iPlayer, ready to be repeated. He will never understand the difficulty of just having to watch what was on TV because there wasn't anything else. I never actually wanted to watch Newsround, or Bodger & Badger, or Record Breakers. They weren't what I would have chosen, they were just...on. If I was a child now, I would be driving my parents insane by watching exclusively Maid Marian and Bitsa (yes, the recycled art programme, shut up, it was COOL) - over and over again until somebody snapped.

It makes me realise how much patience we had in the days of VHS. Fast forwarding and rewinding was a lottery let's face it, and you always knew in the back of your mind that overdoing it might cause the video to squeak unecessarily. They were cumbersome; shelves of chunky plastic boxes framed most houses in the 80s and 90s. Now there isn't anything tangible to hold; everything is on a cloud somewhere, untouchable, perfect and new.

Obviously, this is all better, blah blah blah... but I can't help but feel a bit of nostalgia now and then for those clunky, chunky tapes of the past.

My top 5 videos that I owned (RIP)

1. BBC's Pride & Prej box set. Before 'box set' was a thing.
2. Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet, gifted to me by my Gran in Woolworths for doing well in my SATs.
3. My taped-off-the-telly ER selection. The Mark Greene/Corday/John Carter years. Sigh.
4. Home Alone. Classic. Now a slim DVD in my collection.
5. The Box of Delights: festive 80s children's teatime, slightly creepy, snowy fun.