What's on TV?

In our house? Not a lot.

We have a TV, a nice flat screen that sits in the corner of the living room. On the roof is a Sky dish, on the opposite side of the room to the TV is a coiled up Sky cable (which is the wrong sort for Sky+ and is too short to reach our TV). We live in an area that doesn't get a decent Freeview signal so Sky is really your only option.

When we moved in funds were tight, so we contacted the TV license people and said we wouldn't be watching TV at home. We figured we'd get settled in, I'd start my new job, then we'd look into getting TV. Where we were living before we had access to the complete Sky package and before that we'd paid £20-ish per month for Sky+ Entertainment and Documentaries package, so we had a lot of programmes we liked to watch.

But we decided that in the interests of saving money, we'd hold off for a little while because it wouldn't just be a TV license, it'd be the cost of getting a new Sky card (a relative offered us a spare box which would've saved us a bit of money), plus getting the cable changed and extended, plus the Sky subscription. Not to mention the fact that if we were getting Sky we'd want a phone line, at which point we'd want broadband. Each little thing would lead to another.

So we put it off until Christmas. We moved in the Summer, so we figured that six months down the line we'd get it. Instead we started watching some of the TV series we had on DVD; starting with Waking the Dead and then Spooks. We have something of a large DVD collection, so we've not been without viewing material.

One of our DVD bookcases

It seemed like the longer that we put it off, the less we felt like we needed to get the TV stuff. The major downside was that I never got to see the last episode of the first series of Game of Thrones (as it coincided with our move), as you can see above, I've taken steps to rectify this by getting the first series on blu-ray (it's next on our viewing schedule).

We are lucky in that we've got my in-laws who let us record Bones on their Sky+ and we catch some stuff on iPlayer there as well. It's funny to think that we've gone from getting in every evening and switching the TV on, watching any old random thing (so many repeated episodes of Crystal Maze and Top Gear as I remember rightly) and adding another programme to the viewing list each time a new series was shipped over from America, to just watching one series straight through at a time.

We've taken to watching two things on an evening; something on DVD/blu-ray in the living room while we eat our tea (at the moment it's All Creatures Great and Small, next up is Game of Thrones), then something else on my laptop in the bedroom before bed (currently the boxset of Scrubs that Mr Click got me for Christmas). It's a good set up.

The one downside is that sometimes there are things on that you really want to watch, but miss out on. We dutifully downloaded all the episodes of BBC's Dancing on the Edge onto iPlayer desktop (an old college friend of Mr Click's stars in it) so we could watch them in quick succession once they were all on; but when the time came to watch them it kept giving us an error message before any we tried to watch vanished. We were able to download them from iPlayer for Windows Media Player, which let us watch the first episode but then stopped the second twenty minutes from the end.

In the end we gave up. Mr Click's pre-ordered it on DVD, so we'll watch it then. And we'll have it for posterity. We'll squeeze it in between the first and second series of Scrubs if it's here on time.

As you can see above, we've got enough viewing material to keep us going for quite a while yet. I'm sure it's working out much cheaper to just keep buying TV series boxset than we would spend each month on whatever deal Sky could offer. I never thought I'd be able to go completely without a TV, but now I can see how many programmes I watched just for the sake of watching. I like our new set up and I'm very glad we're finally getting to watch so many of those DVDs we've acquired over the years.

I'm also curious to hear about other people's viewing habits. Are you TV-free too?