First broadcast on FAB RADIO INTERNATIONAL at 19:00 on August 7th 2022

These days I’m often told that, when it comes to my thoughts on things, and the emphatic stances I tend to take on events that seem not to bother other people in quite the same way, or, indeed, vice-versa, I need to loosen up a little, and learn to be a little more flexible. This seems to be especially pertinent when it comes to the small matter of the acquisition and storage of the television series which I have accumulated over the years and still want to watch, or share my insights upon.

Why, I am often asked, in this era of streaming and downloading, do you still feel the need to get hard copies of all these things? Why are you so attached to the shiny disk in all its formats, and, when it comes to those boxes of old videotapes that still sit mouldering in the darkest corners of your increasingly cramped and cluttered little house, hiding behind the piles of books and CDs and magazines that also seem increasingly anachronistic to some, can you still not bring yourself to get rid of them?

And, to be honest, there are a lot of people, probably a lot younger than me, and who grew up in a different era of digital accessibility, who would roll their eyes impatiently at this strange, perhaps slightly desperate, need to cling on to physical objects in order to enjoy watching certain television series of the kind I watch.

And yes, whilst certain shows (because there’s one born every minute), have tempted me to single, double, and even triple dip their releases through VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray and more, quite a lot of the television and films that I choose to watch in the pursuit of bringing you VISION ON SOUND each week are not widely available in any other format, and some of us are still very grateful to the companies that choose to make their products available to us in these various formats.

Whilst I’ve not yet been persuaded of the wisdom of the resurgence of the Vinyl LP as a music-playing choice, and I have been looking at ways of retrieving data from some of my old VHS collection through digital conversion, I still get a small thrill at the announcement of a brand new blu-ray set crammed full of delightful looking VALUE ADDED MATERIAL, or even a DVD release of a series that I’ve never actually heard of, or which I genuinely never believed was likely to ever be seen again.

So this week, I’m joined once again by PAUL CHANDLER, THE SHY YETI himself, curator of THE SHY LIFE PODCAST and we take a delightful journey through the upsides and downsides of the curious world of collecting PHYSICAL MEDIA in a digital age, a topic prompted, mostly, by PAUL extolling its virtues in response to an article in the national press which seemed to imply that this is something of an eccentric attitude for us to have.

PLEASE NOTE - For Copyright reasons, musical content sometimes has to be removed for the podcast edition. All the spoken word content remains (mostly) as it was in the broadcast version. Hopefully this won't spoil your enjoyment of the show.