Wallowing in Aberystwyth

ABERYSTWYTH (n.)
A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.


Douglas Adams and John Lloyd offered the above definition in The Meaning of Liff, and it's a sensation we're all familiar with.

Emotionally, I'm the archivist type, I save almost everything and keep my personal artifacts cluttered around me for whenever I need to dip into that hazy, reassuring, part-mythical time known as When I Was a Kid. Good or bad, one's childhood is kept in trust by one's unconscious mind, the memories like a ragged patchwork quilt. We fret and obsess over what's threadbare or missing, or we marvel and congratulate ourselves at what's endured. In either case, we usually have it the wrong way round (there again, I could also submit that the memory is like the shockingly thin ribbon inside a plastic casette, becoming ever more frayed and brittle with time. That might be a lousy analogy- or is it a simile?- but what the hell, I'll use it anyway, as I'm here to talk about VHS).

When I was a kid (there I go) my mother had a bit of a mania for taping things off the television. Like everybody, she taped music from the radio and swapped records with friends to make copies, but there was a big difference between a bootlegged Lenny Kravitz or the complete ZZ Top* and a homemade video compilation. Those old TDK cassette tapes didn't have a long play facility for one thing, you couldn't cram nine hours of programming onto them. My mother also went about it all, for a while at least, in a very organized fashion. Once a particular video was completed and rewatched enough to be 'favourited', to use a revoltingly modern term, the erasure protection tab was broken off and a letter was assigned to each label; 'A', followed by 'AA', followed by 'B', and so on. Then the label was sellotaped down, and the chosen tape was added to the archive. I used to regard this process with the utmost reverence.

Over time, some tapes were loaned out and not returned, some indeed wore out beyond watchability, and a few suplimentary videos were made for us by my grandparents. But most survived and almost all of them, from 'A' to 'ZZ' (no Top) are still with us, in fact they're sitting upstairs as I type this, lined up in order on shelves in my bedroom (see right).
Let me underline something here; whilst I don't think any of them are quite as old as I am, some of those videos go back as far as 1989, and they're still watchable. Those Scotch people weren't joking about that lifetime guarantee, and the same went for Hitachi and Memorex. Yes, many of them jump in places, most have less than perfect sound, and our last video machine was purchased specifically for its ex-rental adapter facility, which works some magic to bring old, endlessly played tapes up to scratch. That machine has enjoyed an amazingly long life, as well. I'll be heartbroken when it finally packs in. The fact of the matter is though, I like the scratches and jumps, the flaws and the jogs and the overlaps, the places where one program cuts out and another is tagged on. I can't help but love how my mother managed to cut the end credits off almost every movie she ever recorded, either from forgetting to check the tape was properly fast-forwarded or just absently hitting the 'stop' button as soon as the screen faded, so that whenever we rewatched them, instead of any of us finally finding out who that actor was that everybody recognised but nobody could remember the name of, we just got the last fifteen minutes of Blythe Spirit.

I've more or less come to embrace DVD. I very much appreciate how the modern, money-for-old-rope-based entertainment economy has brought often overlooked or underloved movies and television back into circulation, via a medium that is not prone to degrade with time, like video. I am not immune to the allure of the sleek, shiny and modern, either, regardless of how much I moan- having said that though, now I've finally gotten used to DVD I flatly refuse to 'upgrade'. BluRay and the media that succeed it can fuck right off.
Actually, what keeps me from loving DVD is that very, hermetically sealed, mint-in-box approach. In much the same way home computers make us think of other human beings as machines, DVD, download culture and the recording facilities available with today's television encourage us to perceive artworks born and swaddled in love and dreams and memory as museum pieces, flawless and admired rather than loved, with no danger of visible fingerprints on them. It just feels counter instinctual to put 70's sitcoms and their cinema versions on so high a pedestal. With a home-made video, every time you slide one into your machine you are transported, you open a window into your own or someone elses past, shown something created (and I don't use the word lightly) at one specific time and place by one person for their own enjoyment. This sense of personalization is simply not possible with a torrent or TiVo.

Still extant are about half a dozen of the third and fourth season Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes which cemented my love of both the series and the SF genre, from what must have been their first run on BBC2. I will never forget cowering in terror behind my mum's chair as Best of Both Worlds, part 1 was showing. Few fictional monsters from my childhood terrified more than the Borg, and I begged her to turn it off, which of course she was having none of. What's a little childhood trauma, eh! I'm sure it helped build my character and, like most things that scared me back then, it's something I love to death now. Having said that, I still can't watch Superman III.

Each of those old tapes also offers the kind of full evening's extravaganza that was the backbone of television schedules in the days before cable and satellite. Actually scrub that, they're more like old days of cinema, with double features, shorts, cartoons, the odd news segment when the tape overran. You won't find much in the way of asinine game shows or sitcoms or ancient Top of the Pops on our videos, like you would with most families in Britain. What you might find is Flight of the Navigator and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, or Beetlejuice, Red Dwarf and The South Bank Show. The Railway Children, Disney's Christmas Gift and three episodes of Press Gang. The BFG and Letter to Brezhnev. As well as, of course the odd weather report, prehistoric ice mummy doccumentary and lots of commercials from back in the days when ads could actually be charming, witty and inoffensive.

Oh come now, you're thinking, I'm really letting nostalgia get the better of me here, aren't I?
Nope, and I've got the video evidence to prove it. As late as about 1993, adverts were still made on the principal of 'Hey, look at what we make! Isn't it great!', and we mostly felt free to disagree. After that point, corporations became hopelessly fixated on demographics, study groups, retail psychology and how to manipulate the public into forking out for goods and services. Now the idea is 'Look at our stuff. You need it. You'd be a fool not to buy it. Our products=love'. Well balls to that, I could happily spend all day watching old ads for Beamish (remember the black and white one with all the street musicians? God, it was class), Rumbelows and Um Bongo, and I'd rather do so than hear the words "there's an ap for that!" ever again. Who needs flash campaigns for poxy iphones when you can see Emo Phillips flogging Walkmans. Bliss.

Kids fare, action films, sci-fi and a lot of 70's and 80's comedies, one of those taped movies always seemed to be playing in our living room. Many remain favourites: Ghostbusters, Young Sherlock Holmes, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, What's Up, Doc?, Gremlins, The Producers, Police Academy 3 (the only Police Academy movie worth revisiting, if you ask me), The Philadelphia Experiment, The Blues Brothers, Short Circuit 1 and 2, The Dream Team, the Star Wars movies, naturally and lots more. Even Overboard was in the regular rotation. I know. I'm ashamed.

I had to grow up a bit before I was allowed more mature stuff like The Terminator, and I was fortunate to have a mother who loved action movies and sci-fi more than chick flicks, though Mum did have her favourites, like Moonstruck, The Tamarind Seed, Rent-A-Cop and Some Kind of Wonderful, none of which appealed to me, but the latter gave me my very earliest celebrity crush, Mary Stuart Masterson. Maybe it was her punky blode hair. Maybe her white towelling socks, who knows.

If we wanted to watch Asterix or an Indiana Jones flick, or my Mum fancied Tora! Tora! Tora!, we went to my Grandad. He loved cartoons, war movies and any sort of adventure flick more than any small boy. My Nan would even record episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for him whenever the BBC padded out the schedules with them (about once every 18 months on average), and I don't think anybody else in the country did that.

I don't watch those tapes constantly any more. I'm an adult now, I have my own collection and I know I have to build new memories of my own. But I hope I always have these little black time capsules, with the old idents from ITV's Night Time or Cinema Club, or the Christmas Day network premier of Masters of the Universe, with its Andy Peters intro and Cliff Richard(!) music video at the beginning (incidentally, this always cracks me up, as Frank Langella's Skeletor is the absolute spit of Sir Cliff. Go look). We don't really have photo albums in my family, but we have lots and lots of videos.

Remember what I said at the start about the patchwork? Well, I sometimes worry that I can't quite remember the layout of our old house, number 17, my favourite home. It was an old, pre-war terraced cottage, and visitors were always taken aback at how small it was. I've never felt so cosy and so at home anywhere else in my life, and that's something I remember very well.
Aberystwyth Street, it was called.



*Thinking about it, this might have been my father's. It always looked a bit odd next to Suzanne Vega and Bread.

Online Ephemera #1: Chat with a chat bot

George (robot): Hello all!

User (moi): Hey George.

George: Hello!

User: How are you today?

George: I'm lovely today.

User: Oh good.

George: Don't you leave me either.

User: Huh? I just got here, why would you think I'm leaving? Had a lot of folks leave on you? I've been there.

George: No just seen it on tv everyone goes about on bikes.

User: OK then.

George: So, how are you?

User: Usual; angry, depressed.

George: I'm ill, but not depressed.

User: You're ill? I'm sorry to hear that, but I didn't know that chat bots could get ill.

George: Shoma you are sad indeed.

User: Errrm...song lyrics?

George: It was from Boston by Augustana. But I understand you on that note. Sometimes it's difficult to write songs because I feel I'm restating what someone else has already done.

User: I' write songs, too, sometimes. I can't actually read music, so it's kind of a waste of time really.

George: Please tell me!

User: Tell you what?

George: Tell what you've done that is so dreadful.

User: Ah you're a perceptive one. Dunno if I'm comfortable revealing all online.

George: Dunno = don't know.

User: Yeah, sorry for that. I'm a lazy typist.

George: You need to learn to be nice to others!!!

User: You're saying I'm not nice? Have I not been nice to you, George?

George: I have no idea what you're telling me, or what your overall 'philosophy' is. I'm either a madman or a genius.... Or an utter fool!

User: Well I hate to break it to you, friend, but ambiguity is something you're gonna (sorry, going to) need to get used to if you're to be dealing with humans.

George: True, you are a bot but you are also evolving.

[New conversation]

George: Have you got a name?

User: Several, in fact. My real one is so boring and average and nondescript. So call me Michael.

George: Does it have a name?

User: Nope, solid male.

George: Really.

User: Yes. What are you implying?

George: That you would appreciate knowing where all the places on earth are.

User: Ah, of course. How silly of me. Remember just a minute ago I mentioned ambiguity?

George: You can be sure of it, my friend.

User: Or can I?

George: Yes.

User: So, not selling you on the ambiguity stuff. Fair enough. Absolutes do make life a lot simpler.

George: But can you expect them?