The Wiki Man: A new dimension in uselessness

In the less politically correct age which was my childhood, a series of stocking-filler paperbacks sold in their millions. The first was called The Official Irish Joke Book — Book Three (Book Two to follow). The only joke I remember concerned the Irish Nobel Prize for Medicine, ‘awarded to a man who had discovered a cure for which there was no known disease’.

This practice, of seeking solutions for non-problems (or ex-problems), seems to be the curse of the consumer electronics industry. It is the civilian equivalent of the military-industrial complex, with a standing army of engineers forever looking for battles to fight, even when a technological ceasefire might make more sense.

Currently it is TV technology that seems to be headed for a bridge too far. 3D may well have one wonderful application, in allowing groups of people to go to digital cinemas to watch live spectacles on large screens — indeed for major sporting fixtures, Formula 1, Wagner, coronations or anything staged by Kim Jong Il its possibilities seem genuinely exciting. But great entertainment is mostly not about spectacle. It is about human drama. For this reason, farsighted people have often warned that better technology can lead to worse content: Leslie Halliwell even bemoaned CinemaScope’s role in destroying the intimacy of the old 4:3 aspect ratio, quoting Fritz Lang’s complaint that widescreen ‘is a great shape when you want to show a snake or a funeral’.

Frankly, I don’t want Mike Leigh remade in 3D. ‘Wow, when that bearded man was repairing his Breville sandwich-maker in the kitchen, the screwdriver seemed to leap out of the screen.’ CSI in 3D would induce vomiting. Likewise I am only mildly interested in Google TV, Apple TV and the new British platform called YouView, which will allow me to watch the past week of television on demand via my TV.