‘I saw this amazing film,’ people used to say at dinner parties, ‘you must see it.’ And it was nice to have their recommendations; pleasant to trot off to see The Matrix or Four Weddings and a Funeral and be the one to rave about it at the next party.
These days, just the words ‘You must see…’ fill my heart with dread because they are invariably followed by not a film, but a whole TV series, available in a box-set: The West Wing, The Killing, The Wire. Nothing makes the heart sink more at the start of a villa holiday than the sight of a fellow guest arriving with 30 episodes of Mad Men under his arm. Experience tells you that it is for these, not picturesque hilltop churches or the local trattoria’s funghi porcini, that the holiday will be remembered.
You need only step through the door of HMV (if you can still find one) and look at knee-high piles of box-sets to calibrate the format’s rise. Every television programme ever shown is on offer, from Friends (39 discs, 236 episodes) to The A-Team (75 hours of viewing) and Brideshead Revisited (a paltry 13 hours).
Then there are the spurious economy packs of films: ‘The Lesser-Known Westerns of John Wayne’ or ‘Diana Dors: Queen of the B-Movie’. Hours and hours and hours of what should be fading memories, dug up, glued together, remastered, marketed.
In theory, box-sets are a wonderful thing. Freed from the vagaries of television scheduling, you can watch as much or as little as you want, whenever it suits. You don’t have smuggle it off the internet through some dodgy download site or wrestle with some incomprehensible satellite technology. You can just switch on the DVD player and settle back for a week of Upstairs, Downstairs. The problem is that it’s not a normal or happy watching experience: it’s the televisual equivalent of the all-you-can-eat buffet. We consume episode after episode one after another, long into the night and long after we’ve stopped having any fun.
Box-sets can ruin whole holidays. A friend recently returned fuming from a stay in France, where a mediocre cop series had been inflicted on the party by an overbearing stockbroker. ‘The really galling thing was that he didn’t even watch half of it,’ she complained. ‘He kept disappearing to make long calls on this mobile. It wasn’t to do with entertaining us, it was a power game.’ Box-set bullies collude to punish the weaker watchers. At midnight, when you’re longing for bed after six episodes of West Wing, someone will say with a sinister, challenging tone of voice: ‘Shall we have another?’ And if the majority want to plough on, you must too — because secretly, however much we complain, we all want to be part of the gang.
Too often, as the holiday draws to a close, a note of desperation creeps in. It becomes clear that there are not enough evenings left to get to the end of the box. An expedition to the beach is cancelled to allow for a matinée. Worst of all, half of the party return from a walk to find that the others have watched two episodes in their absence. The recriminations are bitter; the holiday will not be repeated.
The fact is that box-sets demand a certain temperament. Their appeal is comparable to that of lovers of interminable board games such as Monopoly or Risk — people for whom even the most innocent activity can take on an obsessive, competitive edge. To suggest that everyone should call a halt after episode 17 and watch the rest at leisure back home would be like abandoning an ascent of Everest. Real men take The Wire to the wire — or they did, until the American series became passé.
The trend now is to collect foreign TV series, such the French police show Spiral (or Engrenages) or the Danish thriller The Killing. These box-sets usually have words such as ‘intense’ and ‘chilling’ emblazoned on the front. They enable the viewer to feel metropolitan and recherché as he slouches on the sofa for hours at a time. He can convince himself that the exercise is improving, since it involves reading (subtitles) and listening to another language. Yet for those of who look to the TV for mental relaxation, foreign DVDs are an intense and chilling nightmare.
Fortunately, however, DVDs represent intermediate technology. In the not-too-distant future they will be deemed obsolete, and it will be just too much of a chore to wait for a whole series to download from the internet. The movie experience will be back. For now, the moral is plain: only holiday with people who can think outside the box.