Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Lost videocassettes reappear

My wife was cleaning out some cupboards the other day in the hope of finding some new storage space. To the surprise of us both, she discovered a hoard of video cassettes which we must have forgotten about. Almost all of the cassettes held recordings of television programmes, which have long left our television screen but not from our memory: Cold Feet, Coupling, Star Trek DS9, Star Trek Voyager. 

As I have the complete Cold Feet series on dvd, I had no problem in throwing those cassettes away. I'm not too interested now in watching old Star Trek episodes (especially as a few seasons of DS9 weren't shown here) so discarding them also wasn't a problem. I have 'Coupling' stored on my computer, but only after throwing them away did I remember that the computerised episodes have no subtitles whereas those televised episodes did. A little regret there.

Out of maybe thirty cassettes, there were four which interested me greatly: one labelled Cropredy 2001 (I wasn't there that year; maybe this is a television programme), the Lindsay Anderson film "If ...", and two labelled "Forty something". These hold all six episodes of a British comedy/drama programme from 2003 starring Hugh Laurie and Anna Chancellor; I wrote about this series in one of my earliest blog entries, from nearly eight years ago.

I have just finished copying the video to dvd; this is done of course in real time, and it was a real pleasure to revisit the programme. I'm looking forward to watching "If..." again.

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