Life Sentences

I was just reading a User Review on IMDB of a 1970s television series... children's sci-fi ...the sort of scares you could air when it was OK to give kids a fright as well as a treat. You could give them a supernatural thrill at 4:20 PM as long as you also promoted breakfast that provided central heating (for kids ) and a toothpaste that would give them a ring of confidence.

The viewer was commenting about a long forgotten TV series called Sky which I seem to remember trying to watch but when it didn't grab me in the first episode I didn't bother again. Maybe I will have grown into it by now

But the reviewer comments 

"Unfortunately, my parents chose to have a row during the last episode and switched the TV off ! The series was repeated and I watched again only for there to be a power cut when the last episode was due to broadcast" 

And there we have it. 

Conditions from a bygone age. 

Cruel lessons for children to negotiate.

Miss your opportunity and you are left with a lifetime of questions.

(But witness a show without the sort of spoilers that are so in-your-face today and something could shock the living daylights out of you. I'm thinking of the final scene of Blakes 7. You can think of your own).

Parents can be a tricky thing for children to manage. I distinctly remember my Dad on several occasions banning my brother and I (probably mainly me) from watching television just because he had lost an argument. But I remember particularly vividly when he went out on Saturday night and took the crucial aerial cable with him, making a bending of that imposition utterly impossible. Nowadays of course I can think of 100 ways of watching a program but in those days that was that.

You just missed it. And when you had no aerial your could not even use the VCR.

If it was something that you needed to see, missing it would live with you forever, possibly until a DVD release 35 years later. 

A 35 year punishment... what do people generally get for killing somebody nowadays... 7?

And they get all the TV they can watch.

I know from many retro TV and radio shows, and countless stand-up comedians, that I wasn't the only one who would record themes on tape cassette. There was a shared consciousness amongst the generation of presumably males wearing down and repairing their C90s for repeated battle. Of course I was using my Dad's Dolby double decker, so he probably felt entitled to march into the living room, make a big loud noise, exclaim loudly, and shake, rattle and roll the paper at the very moment that I was recording the 45 seconds it took to get the Dukes of Hazard theme down. And every time from then on that I listened to my tape,  I heard him do it again, over and over and over.

Inconsiderate! 

It's not like a wife, of course, you can tell one of those to shut up for 45 seconds because you are a master of the household.

But my own father was filling that role himself at the time. 

Which brings me to the user's second observation.... the power cut. The reviewer bought the DVD release in 2014 of his TV series because the power cut prevented him watching it in . I think therefore a number of other people must have suffered a similar plight. I certainly had. It was during those few years when there were a lot of three episode miniseries coming out of America, usually 3x 90 minutes. I was staying up late watching quite a racy miniseries called Studs Lonigan at Grandma's house. It was episode 3 and I'd watched the other two. Power cut! They promised they would retransmit it but if they ever did, they never told me. Thanks to the National Grid, I only caught the third and final episode last year. 

If this 10-year-old boy could have seen Stud's transition from goodhearted boy to embittered, physically shattered alcoholic, what sort of a different life might I have led?