Yes, the miracle box has its flaws

Jun 19 2009 by Alan Shaw, Irvine Herald

I’VE had one of those things for a while now that lets me pause live television.

At first, I didn’t know how I managed to live without it. Should the telephone ring whilst I was in the middle of watching something, I could press a button to freeze time, then simply pick up from where I left off.

If I took my eyes away from the screen for a second and missed anything, I could simply rewind. And even better, the miracle box would let me see what programmes were going to be on a week on Friday and then record them for me. No tapes, no discs, no hassle.

But like all great inventions, it has its flaws.

Take the pause function, for example. That initial feeling of being able to make the world stop to suit myself wore off very quickly when I realised it had a time limit of 30 minutes.

After that time it simply carries on regardless, whether I’m ready or not.

The ability to record more or less does what it says on the tin. Once I had studied the manual for a fortnight and learned the correct combination of buttons to press on the remote control, I started recording just about everything that looked vaguely interesting in the TV guide.

Which presented another problem – the internal hard disk filled up very quickly.

At least with VHS tapes you could just pop to the shops and pick up another pack. Although even with what I had recorded, I would have needed to take a fortnight off work and done nothing but watch TV to catch up.

So I had a little clearout and only kept the programmes that I knew I definitely wanted to see. And then, hard disks being hard disks, the inevitable happened. It crashed and I lost the lot. I swear I could hear my old video recorder laughing from the cupboard.

But have I bothered to re-stock it with more programmes? No, because I’ve realised that whenever I miss something I never seem to have to wait very long before the repeats start.

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