I still have a DVD collection. Not a particularly impressive one and certainly not one that would make me a fortune on Antiques Roadshow in thirty years’ time but there’s something I like about having a shelf full of films I can actually hold in my hand. These days, of course, you can watch pretty much anything without owning a physical copy. When there are so many new TV channels around and everything can either be downloaded, streamed or watched on catch-up TV, what is even the point of a DVD? They just take up room, fill up cupboards and shelves and generally get in the way.
To a certain extent I sort of agree with that, for instance, if you miss a film on the BBC, you can always go to BBC iPlayer and watch it there. On the other hand, I read somewhere on the internet that DVDs are making a comeback.
Sometimes, when there is absolutely nothing on TV worth watching, I’ll have a scan through my DVD shelf and choose something to watch. These days I get bored pretty easily, so I might watch an hour of something, go to make a cup of tea and find that something interesting has popped up — a documentary or an old TV show — and I’ll save the DVD for later (my DVD player actually remembers where you stopped the disc). Then I’ll settle down with my cuppa, watch the old TV show and finish the DVD later.
Interestingly, last night that exact situation occurred. I was watching an old favourite, the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, paused the disc to make a cuppa and up popped that old TV show, Man in a Suitcase. (I had set a reminder for it earlier after a quick browse through the on-screen TV guide).
Man in a Suitcase was a series made by Lew Grade’s ITC production company. It’s about a former CIA agent called McGill who was either sacked or forced to resign from the CIA and now makes his living as a private investigator in the UK. Presumably there is an episode that explains all this but I’m not sure I ever remember seeing it. Richard Bradford played McGill in a brooding, laid-back James Dean sort of style.
I had really been looking forward to watching Man in a Suitcase but after about twenty minutes — or probably less — I realised it wasn’t my cup of tea and went back to my film.
Some time ago I was looking up at my Woody Allen DVD collection of about twelve discs and thought I really needed to pick up some of his other films. Sleeper is a great comedy about Miles Monroe, played by Woody of course, a health-food store owner who gets cryogenically frozen in 1973 and wakes up two hundred years in the future. I searched eBay for a copy and found one, although the cheapest was just under £6. A number of Woody Allen DVD bundles came up for a similar price but sadly none of them had Sleeper. Anyway, for £5.20 I bought a collection of five of Woody’s films. Two I already had: the wonderful Manhattan and Bananas, although my copy of the latter was one of those free newspaper DVD versions, so it was good to get a “proper” copy with all the correct packaging. (Yes, I know, I’m a bit weird like that).
I put the first DVD in and got it set up ready to go. Then I sorted out a cup of tea with the mandatory ham sandwich and chocolate digestive and I was ready to press play. After about twenty minutes of Love and Death I was a little underwhelmed and thought, OK, I’ll save that for another day. In went Zelig, which is a sort of spoof documentary. Again, it wasn’t great but I managed to watch it right through to the end. The best thing about it was the way they made a lot of new footage actually look like real documentary film from the 1930s or 40s, whichever decade it was supposed to be set in. Great visual quality Woody, but Zelig was a little lacking in content.
Time for another cuppa and in goes Shadows and Fog. I gave that one fifteen minutes but it wasn’t doing it for me, so it was out with that one and in went Bananas. Just then though, a documentary series popped up on the Yesterday channel: Canal Boat Diaries. It’s a diary of a young man, Robbie Cummings, who journeys along the UK’s canals in his narrowboat. It’s largely self-filmed, although I suspect that at various points he is joined by another cameraman and a drone pilot, because various shots are incorporated from overhead and of him tootling off into the distance on his boat. I may be wrong and perhaps after that last shot he then had to reverse back, pick up his camera and tripod and start off again. When I used to make little YouTube films about our motorhome trips to France, I found myself doing similar things. It can be a little frustrating but sometimes you just need that shot.
Nothing much happens in Canal Boat Diaries but it’s a glimpse of a gentle, relaxing existence, chugging along at 4 mph through various towns. Robbie parks up here and there, makes dinner on his little stove and stops to stock up on supplies and to fuel up, as well as to explore. A few years ago, Liz and I looked at hiring a narrowboat for a weekend but the costs were really shocking. Perhaps we’ll have to try again later in the year when the holiday season has finished and things get (hopefully) cheaper.
Back to Bananas, which is one of my favourite Woody Allen films and it’s a long while since I’ve seen it. The film opens with the shooting of the President of San Marcos, shown as if it were a sporting event, with actual American TV sports commentator Howard Cosell presenting the action. Woody plays Fielding Mellish, who is a product tester and in one of the first sequences he is testing an office set-up with built-in exercise items. It’s actually a lot of fun but later he opens the door to a market researcher played by Louise Lasser, in real life Woody’s former wife. Woody later travels to San Marcos to impress her. Sylvester Stallone makes his film debut as a thug who Woody encounters on an underground train.
I love Bananas, especially the end where Howard Cosell commentates on Woody and Louise’s wedding night. One thing I found disappointing though, is that there are never any extras on a Woody Allen DVD. No interesting ‘making-of’ documentaries or commentary tracks by Woody, which I think are always an interesting addition to a DVD.
If I were to rewind a few years, I used to spend a lot of time in Manchester city centre, browsing music shops for CDs and DVDs. My favourite store was the huge HMV in Manchester city centre. They used to have an in-store DJ who was a really friendly girl, very approachable and very into her music. I always used to go and chat to her and she recommended all sorts of albums to me.
After looking through the CDs I’d pop up to the DVD section and spend more time there. I remember going in one day to find the in-store DJ had been replaced by a radio version: someone, presumably at head office in London, who was broadcasting music to all the HMV stores. Later, in 2013, the store closed down completely after more than twenty years on the same site. Browsing records and videos in HMV and then popping into my favourite bookshops before settling down in some back-street pub for a drink — ah, those were the days. I probably bought the larger part of my Woody Allen DVD collection there. Or was it eBay? Certainly the buying power of the internet may well have played a part in HMV’s demise.
Anyway, where will I find a copy of Sleeper? Ah well, back to eBay again.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 