This week I'll be mostly pressing pause

I'm ... pressing ... play.

"Come in, sit down and shut up" was what my Grandad used to say. We'd go round on a Saturday evening and Kojak would be on the telly, or Hawaii Five-O, or whatever. This was before the days of video recorders; VHS and Betamax were just a twinkle in the eye of some electronics engineers. So when it was on, it was on. If you were watching the telly, you would come in, sit down and shut up.

A decade later we had video. Of course you still had all that mucking about with setting the timer and making sure you wound the tape back to the right place, and remembering to switch the thing off - because it would only record if it was off - doh! And then when it was recording you couldn't watch anything else. So videos were really for taping things that you were going to miss while you were out; You could go down to Hammersmith Palais on a Saturday night, nip over to Leicester Square for the midnight showing of RoboCop, come back on the N279 from Trafalgar Square, get home at 3am, watch a bit of Night Network, and still be able to rewind the tape and catch up with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield on Saturday Live before going to bed.



It was two and a half years ago that we got round to getting Sky+. Mainly on account of not having Freeview in Jersey, so you have 4 analogue channels, or you get Sky. And if you're getting Sky, you might as well get Sky+. That has totally revolutionised our tv watching habits. For starters we never watch anything when it's on. And secondly, we never watch adverts. You just press tv guide, hit the green button, decide what to watch, ffwd to the start and off you go.

The problem though, is that it is just too easy to press pause nowadays. Back in the 70s, if you needed the loo half way through Starsky and Hutch then you just missed a couple of minutes. Tough. Today, in the Foster household, if someone sneezes and we miss five words of dialogue then we pause it, rewind it 10 seconds and try again. Or Hiro and Ando start talking in Japanese in Heroes and Abbie can't read the subtitles quick enough, we pause it while she goes and gets her glasses. Or the dogs start going "erm, ahem, we haven't been fed yet", we pause it and go get the dog food sorted out. Or we decide to get some sweets and popcorn about 15 minutes into Star Trek IV, we pause it, rummage around in the kitchen for half an hour, while we're at it we draw the curtains, turn the lights out, pull up a footstool, get some drinks, chop up a melon, load up the dishwasher, take the bins out, then settle down to the rest of the film.

The other night we were watching The Bourne Supremacy. All that had happened is Jason Bourne had a bit of a nightmare, got up and turned the bathroom light on. We were 2 minutes into the film, and it had taken half an hour to get to that point, for one reason or another.

Maybe one day we will get through an entire episode of Firefly without pressing the pause button. Maybe one day we will actually watch something on live tv. Maybe, one day, we might even just come in sit down and shut up. Until then, the pause button is our friend.