The Sarah Jane Adventures

Hot on today’s/yesterday’s news that Grange Hill is going to be revamped (free registration required) to focus on younger kids and return to the original comic strip titles and theme tune, I thought I’d focus a little on the misery of old age.

As you may – or may not – know, I’ve got one of those door stops aka Apple TVs that sits connected to my now somewhat senile television and serves up, among other things, all manner of goodies from Bastard, my Mac-based PVR.

I say “among other things” because it also has an Internet connection that allows it to stream YouTube videos directly to the TV as well.

Initially, I thought this was about as useful as a Marxist analysis of Katie and Peter Unleashed. But it’s actually turning out to be quite fun, now that YouTube is slowly digitising all its old vids into an Apple TV-compatible format – assuming you can get over having to use one of those old arcade game-style on-screen keyboards to type out “prestidigitation” or whatever you happen to be looking for. Much better than crouching over a computer typing stuff into a web browser anyway. And some of the vids are almost crystal clear.

Being of a certain age, once I’d got over the excitement of the “Will it Blend?” guy, immediately started looking for clips from old kids’ TV shows.

Tell you what – not only have times change, everything was a lot more sinister then.

Continue reading “The changing face of kids’ TV”