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.
The late seventies and early eighties were the heyday of the TV ‘mini series’. What is a mini series I hear you asking? Well, they were short TV series with only a few episodes. You rarely hear the name ‘mini series’ these days but they are still about. I mentioned some time ago about the series ‘
For Christmas the previous year my mother had given my brother and me a shared present. It was a portable stereo record player. At the time neither myself nor my brother were that interested in the pop charts. The first album I bought was a collection of TV theme tunes by composer John Barry. Barry wrote a number of famous tunes for both TV and the cinema. He is probably best remembered for a tune he didn’t write, the James Bond theme tune. There was actually quite a controversy over the authorship of the tune. Monty Norman is credited as the writer of the music although it was John Barry’s jazz arrangement of the theme that most people are familiar with.
The title track from the album is the theme from The Persuaders, a TV show starring future James Bond, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The pair played Lord Brett Sinclair and US businessman Danny Wilde who are recruited by a retired judge to fight crime. Tony Curtis drove my favourite car of all time in the series, a Ferrari Dino 246 GT. Price tag today, anything between £500,000 to a million.
MASH was a series based on a book and film about US army surgeons in Korea who worked in a mobile army hospital unit. Alan Alda played the wisecracking Hawkeye Pierce and the series ran for many years combining humour and drama in a most impressive way. It perhaps ran a few years longer than it should have done and the later episodes were not as good as the earlier ones, at least in my opinion.
Tv programmes of course cost money, quite a lot of money in fact. Back in the 1990s when I was fresh from a video production course and hoping to actually get a job in the TV industry (I never did) I was told an hour of television costs £100,000. What it costs nowadays is anyone’s guess but then again, it’s so easy to make a TV show in 2026. One of my favourite programmes is Canal Boat Diaries, an entirely self-shot show which has graduated from YouTube onto the BBC and can be seen quite regularly on the U-Yesterday channel. Does that mean an hour of TV is worth more or less than that 90’s figure of £100,000?
We watched The Crown last year while staying in the Loire valley even though we don’t normally watch much TV on holiday. This year in Lanzarote, we spent many an evening watching Emily in Paris, another Netflix show. I’d found it by searching on the internet for good TV shows to watch on Netflix and Emily came up so we thought we’d give it a go.
In March I was getting a little stuck for ideas and I had to recycle an old post, 
I’ve written many posts about books and a regular series is one in which I compare books to their filmed counterparts. In August I added a post about one of my favourite book/film series, 
One day in December 1980 I was working as a bus driver and I was driving one of our old half cab buses into Manchester. My conductor, Bob, was kept pretty busy as we took a bus load of passengers into Manchester city centre for their jobs in shops, offices and other places. At one point Bob poked his head through the little window into the cab and told me that he had heard from a passenger that John Lennon had been shot in New York. It was shocking news and when we arrived in Piccadilly, we both ran to the news stand to read the news in the morning papers. There was nothing about Lennon in any newspaper and we wondered if it had been just a mad rumour. Later when we went back to the canteen for our break, we heard the news either on the TV or the radio. Lennon had indeed been shot and was dead.
Just to backtrack a little, we rented this same house back in May and usually, the only time I put the TV on is to watch F1 racing. May is the usual month in the calendar for the Monaco grand prix, one of my favourite races of the year. There is actually plenty of talk recently about cancelling the race as nowadays, the F1 cars are faster and much bigger and so there is very little room left to overtake.
A long time ago I decided that I would set myself the task of reading the entire Hamish Macbeth series of books. There are 34 books in the series, all written by author M.C. Beaton which is in fact a pen name for Marion Chesney. Marion actually wrote many books under various pseudonyms including Ann Fairfax, Jennie Tremaine, Helen Crampton, Charlotte Ward and Sarah Chester. After Marion’s death in 2019 further Hamish Macbeth novels have appeared penned by writer R.W. Green.
I mentioned a while ago about my 
Letters from an Unknown Author! 