Deaf, Dumb and Blind

I seem to have had a very mixed sort of week. It started well enough with us receiving our new broadband package which now includes TV (some extra entertainment channels and BT Sport) that, paradoxically, is a very cheap way of replacing a duff PVR. At least I thought it was. Our 12 year old Humax PVR which sits in the bedroom appeared to be on its last legs with the signal breaking up and I “thought” I had eliminated any issue with the aerial. The plan was to get the new broadband package which included a free PVR and move the newer-old-Humax box from the living room to the bedroom. This ingenious plan appeared to have gone all to well until I plugged the newer-old-Humax PVR into the bedroom socket in place of the older-old-Humax PVR to discover that it was the aerial at fault after all. 30 minutes later I was up on the roof, absolutely craping myself with thoughts of Rod Hull and Man-U, until I had a bright idea, severed the aerial cable and stuck a small new antenna on the wall. All was now working and at least I have the satisfaction of being able to watch the Tranmere match on the telly.

Anyway, the brand new PVR from Plusnet works well enough except that the remote control is infuriating and I now had no way of turning up or down the sound on the surround sound amplifier without getting up off my fat arse and doing it manually. It’s annoying because I’ve had that amp for the best part of 10 years and the sound is way better than the TV. In fact, this has lead the rest of the household to question whether I am  going deaf or, more precisely, they keep asking, “ARE YOU GOING DEAF OR SOMETHING?” I’m not entirely sure. I do seem to have had a multitude of otic related issues recently but the last time I had my hearing tested it was OK – aside from the tinnitus. As far as the TV amplifier goes I decided it was time to buy a digitally integrated replacement which I duly bought from the Glasgow branch of Richer Sounds. I have to admit that I did find it difficult to hear the staff in there but that was mainly because there was a recreation of the Battle of the Somme going on in their not entirely sound-proofed demo room.

The new amp solves the issue of the TV ergonomics quite  nicely and the sound is a big improvement because every source is now in full Dolby digital rather than mostly being the Dolby Pro simulation. This means the centre speaker is almost entirely concerned with the speech and the other speakers handling the surround features. For most of last night this was of little use as we spent the bulk of the time watching the wonderfully daft and dumb camp-fest which is Eurovision. I thought it was one of the better ones this year – not so much the winner which I found incredibly dull but the rest of the performances which combined the weird with the wonderful mixed amongst the down-right silly. I did have a favourite, the Romanian entry, which appealed to me mainly because I would never have dreamed of mixing rap with yodelling (from the man who will happily listen to Slavic folk mixed with Death Metal).

Where the new sound system was really exceptional was on this week’s Doctor Who, Oxygen, which was creepy enough without having all the surrounding creaks, cracks and wheezes circling about the room. I was looking forward to this one mainly because it was written by Jamie Mathieson who has been one of the best Whovian writers of the last couple of years. He really didn’t disappoint with this episode which, initially, reminded me of the likes of Alien in that it showed the brutal reality of a future life in space but actually reminded me of many 1970’s Who stories in that on the one level there was a threat and monster (in fact the “base under attack” was a trope of late 60’s Who) but above that there was a strong moral story of the sort of beast that an unfettered corporation can turn into. The “zombies in suits” idea works on both a literal and metaphorical level to describe the psychopathic nature of unfettered capitalism. It is pure coincidence that this episode is airing during a General Election campaign but it could not be more timely.

I hope that when Chris Chibnall takes over the reins of Doctor Who that he has  Jamie Mathieson’s number on speed dial. To my mind, Oxygen is his strongest work to date but for the first time he has really thrown a huge hand grenade into the works. *SPOILER ALERT* if you haven’t seen Oxygen yet, stop reading now! I’m used to Doctor Who having the series arcs with bits of story slipped in amongst the current week’s episode (the vault, for example) but mostly the instalments are pretty much self-contained with all parameters being reset for the next week. That appears to be quite different now and supposedly we are about to see an interlinked three-parter, but the fact that the Doctor is now blind really changes all we know. Does this actually account for why the Doctor has been occasionally wearing shades for the last series or so – to hide that particular plot twist from the publicity photos? Next week’s episode is set in the Vatican which is a Whovian setting I’ve wanted to see for a long time: both have secrets that they want to hide from view but what are they hiding from each other?