When the news came through that Blockbuster Video was the latest High Street casualty, I was amazed. Amazed that they were still going at all. 

The idea of video or DVD rental is a quaint concept that maybe even children my daughter's age will not get their heads around. Imagine having to go to a shop to pick up a film, watching it and then taking it back the next day, I remember it and it sounds daft when you think about it now.

There was something rather sweet about a video shop, or even the local off-licence/newsagent who had a wall of films to rent. You could have a little conversation about your choices, and they would recommend films based on what you already watched, (an idea used by Amazon now). Every now and again, they would put a collection of old posters out for you to take home and decorate your bedroom wall with, (when you were of putting posters on your bedroom wall age).

As with digital photography, I was slow to join in with the DVD changeover. The main reason (aside from the fact that DVDs used to cost several million pounds when they first landed in the shops), was because I wanted to make sure that the same thing didn't happen that happened with videotapes. Betamax was a far superior brand both in terms of picture and sound quality, but VHS won the fight. You couldn't record onto a Betamax tape, so VHS waded in with the innovative novelty of being able to go out and not miss your favourite programme. Another lesser known reason was that the porn industry decided to nail their colours to the VHS mast.

I still have a lot of my home recorded video tapes in storage, sadly we don't have a video player in the house anymore. We dug our old one out at Christmas for a few years until it packed up and now we had to replace some of our Christmas films with DVDs. Home taping used to give me a huge amount of pleasure when I was a kid, (I was easily pleased), although I don't know if I've actually got anything of interest as far as archive material is concerned. There might be some old adverts on there and there's definitely some musical stuff (bands on talk shows, that sort of thing), and comedians, (I used to tape the equivalent of Live At The Apollo, which was a rarer thing then, with the pause button on so I just had the good bits), but I hardly think the episodes of Friends and Only Fools And Horses need keeping.

When I was a postman in York, there was a video rental shop called Ace Video. At some point I remember them having a clear out sale to get rid of their video cassette collection, this was the beginning of their switch to becoming a DVD rental business. A quick Google search brought up a few listings on local information sites, but they don't seem to have a website. They were a nice couple who ran it, so I hope they are still going. Blockbuster changed to DVD and computer games fairly early on, which is probably what kept them alive on borrowed time for so long. It's a shame to see the whole concept vanish, but I personally haven't used a video shop for years. DVDs have come down in price, you can select from a film library as part of your Virgin Media package (or whatever service you use), and you can buy DVDs online of course. As for the rental market, there is LoveFilm, who post you a DVD (not the one you asked for usually), and you can send it back and get another one. I don't know if there are other companies in the LoveFilm business model, I would hope so because LoveFilm are shit. There is also Netflix, but I wouldn't recommend that because it fucks up your computer.

The video shop might just be the only business to totally vanish during my lifetime, which coincides with the VCR being the only thing invented and becoming obsolete during my short life. Maybe they are still being made somewhere to satisfy a niche market. After all, they only stopped making typewriters last year, and the last Sony Walkman limped off the production line two years ago. I still occasionally buy videotapes from charity shops, which gave me the inspiration for Charity Shop Film Guide, but the good pickings are few and far between. Especially as you can buy most films on DVD for less than a fiver, in fact a few charity shops have stopped accepting videotapes as donations. The last time I bought videotapes was as part of a 'five for a pound' deal, no individual price, you had to buy five. The vinyl record has managed to fight back, but sadly I don't think the humble VHS will be as lucky.

It's The Future!

While I lay at home with an aching back, this afternoon Mandi went to her unit in Storage King to retrieve her video player, and several VHS tapes. It is nice to have a video again, rather than slumming it with a DVD player. As I have no patience with anything in the world, Mandi saw through all the various frustrating stages of tuning, black and white with sound, and colour with no sound etc.

We settled down later on to watch You’ve Got Mail. A story about two people falling in love as a result of talking to each other over the internet. What a ridiculous scenario!

Aside from the film itself, which was lovely of course, several things struck me while watching a video from 1998.

In 1998, the internet was not as mainstream as it is today; it certainly was not in every house and on your phone like it is now. Remember asking people if they had the internet? Now you just ask for their email address because they will have one! The filmmakers played on our not being entirely sure what it was. Internet use in the movies was that special Hollywood internet where the computer pings to announce an email, or in the case of this film says ‘you have mail’.

It was also quite nostalgic to hear that ‘dial up’ noise after all this time. But nostalgic in a bad way, as if you’d get nostalgic for Thatcherism, the three day week and corpse robbers during the war. As soon as I heard that old crackle of connecting sounds, I wondered how the characters could afford such a method of communication! Does anyone remember having a dial up connection in 1998? It was an expensive pay as you go operation, you wouldn’t waste time flirting in a chat room (one of those movie chat rooms with perfect text reading across the screen, I’m amazed they didn’t go for black screen with green letters).

I also concluded that the film industry has a special team of writers and directors. Their job is to make trailers for films that do not exist, apart from as pre-film trailers on shop bought videos.

There was also an advertising trailer trumpeting the arrival of DVD. The voice over gave us all the good points, picture quality, sound quality. But forgot to mention disc errors, or that sometimes your DVD player will deny having a disc in it, even though you just put one in. Or that you will get to the last five minutes of a film and the whole thing will freeze. Or that watching it on video is better, because sound and picture aside, it’s nice to be able to watch a film the whole way through. Or if you do need to stop it, you can press play and carry on where you left off, rather than having to watch the whole thing from the beginning.

The best bit though, was being able to fast-forward the piracy warnings. Because I put a DVD in the other day and had to sit through a stern lecture about it being illegal to watch pirate DVDs. Ruined my enjoyment of Treasure Island!