The Stresses Of Relaxation.

 Way back in 1995, I came back in from chasing a hoop down a road with a stick, or whatever the fuck it was we did before iPhone games, to discover that Sky, in a fairly cynical ploy, had given everyone with their basic package free access to The Movie Channel for a week, not-at-all-coincidentally the same week "The Fugitive" premiered.

 By letting us plebs see it, the hope was that we'd get flustered and probably purchase the full movie package, having had a taste of such excitment. This was a simpler time, when a movie based on an old TV series was seen as novel and a major release. It was also a time when film patrons could be easily convinced that throwing an old mannequin off a dam constituted decent stunt work.

 [Harrison Ford, looking slightly less wooden and uncomfortable than usual.]

 What really strikes me about it all, nearly 20 years later, is that there was a thing called The Movie Channel.

 THE Movie Channel.

 The channel that showed movies.

 These days, there are about six hundred film channels, all of which are also available in HD and Plus 1 duplicates. A few months back, Sky devoted an entire channel to James Bond. The Bond Channel. Showing only Bond films. When things like this happen, it strikes me that we seem to have crossed the TV Rubicon in the night without noticing, and now have far too many channels. 

 Somehow, there's still nothing on. I probably watched The Avengers a dozen times last year. I like The Avengers - I really do - but I was only watching it because I couldn't find anything else I liked.

 The truth is that 24-Hour Rolling Everything has ruined TV. The ceaseless deluge of content has battered us into submission. We're so swamped with countless channels of gibbering nothing that we can't think anymore, only passively consume in the vain hopes that somehow a moment of great art will emerge from the ether and actually make our stultifying downtime worthwhile.

I used to read through the TV guide to see what was going to be on over the next week, but the modern culture of instant gratification has left that process feeling clunky and ridiculous, so now I just flip through the same handful of channels I always watch in the stupid-when-you-think-about-it hope that something new and interesting will be on. 

 There never is. There's so much to choose from that the only choice we make is to settle for something we recognise. That's why we all end up watching Top Gear on Dave. Or The Avengers again.

 Maybe the answer would be to take a conscious step backwards and do things the way we used to; to boldly go out and buy a TV guide and look ahead to plan things you will actually enjoy watching. 

 But we're all too fecklessly modern to do that, so my suspicion is that we'll leave TV to babble on endlessly to itself, and all sod off to Netflix instead.

 And I can't decide what to watch on that, either.