Box-set bullies

 ‘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.