Category: Media

TV, Internet news, Web 2.0 and anything that doesn’t fit into the other categories.

A spectacular own goal

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

I’ve just received an email from Virgin Media:

Hello,

From 1st July, our broadband helpline number is changing and from then on it’ll cost 25p per minute to call from a Virgin home phone, plus 10p to connect. Mobiles and other networks may vary. The new number is 0906 212 1111.

That’s “0906” as in “scam”.

Access to technical support, at least on the ex-Telewest side, has always been

  • 0845 local rate for those with a BT line
  • free (through 150) for those with a Telewest line

After July 1, this is no longer the case – customer services on 150 will give you the 0906 number if you have any trouble with your line (or, as has been the case with all my dealings with ex-Telewest tech support, they have a problem they refuse to recognise and/or their equipment has become faulty.) With the standard “reboot your modem, reboot your computer, repeat that the connect light on the modem is not on numerous times to the minimum-wage checklist operative on the other end until they finally get that the modem isn’t getting a signal from the UBR and it’s not your computer” routine that VM’s call centre staff follow, at 25p/min they’ll probably earn about £5 a call. Hopefully the broadband support USENET groups will continue to exist, and they’re certainly better than any of VM’s call centre staff, but with the cost-cutting they’ve been doing I’m not so sure.

Last I remember, not even the ex-NTL people got screwed with a premium rate support number. At least putting people on hold is banned under the premium rate regulations, but having your only recourse for support being an 0906 number is unacceptable under any circumstances – it is anti-consumer, it is an added cost on top of the already overpriced £25/month I am paying for 4Mbit/384K, it is an imbecilic idea thought up by someone who wants to make even more money out of people with real problems instead of caring about fixing them. Telewest already had a line (at a staggering £1/min) for people with spyware problems and other issues not covered by the broadband support service, so the explanation in the FAQ about cost saving does not hold water.

All this is going to do is annoy long-serving customers like me. I’ve already been annoyed quite a bit by VM in recent months; the swapping out of the only good music channel at TV L for MTV and VH1, the major speed issue I and everyone else in my region of Edinburgh suffered between January and April, the small-print switch from per-second to per-minute call billing, the special deals given to those who whine about the loss of Sky One on the cancellations line, the fact that VM only accept email support through a webform that cuts off after a tiny number of characters, and the fact that they still haven’t admitted anything about the speed limiter (which I actually agree with to an extent) to customers in email. At least they sent out a message warning of this.

VM have to be very careful – the local-loop unbundled providers are setting up in cable areas for a reason, because unless VM stop thinking like the penny-pinching NTL of old and start acting the way Richard Branson obviously wants them to instead of just throwing red paint over the infrastructure they stand a real danger of a customer exodus to BT, Freeview or Sky and ADSL2+ LLU. I’m already sizing up the cost of getting an aerial fitted.

I have been a Telewest customer since August 2003. I’ve had the same package all the time, and been very satisfied with it. I never had any serious problems with the service until after the NTL takeover. Now, with this change in the customer support system, they are simply being outclassed by their competition: Sky have 0870 support. Be Unlimited are freephone (0808) and, right now, very technically proficient. They are the competition here. I have a moral objection to Murdoch and Sky, but none to O2 (owners of Be). I even have a BT master box in my flat just ready to re-enable.

The change in the support structure says, quite simply, both that they think we’re all stupid and that the company is desperate for money: this is not a company that I wish to be paying £45/month to. A sad end for what for a long time was the best broadband provider anywhere in the country, is forthcoming I feel unless Richard Branson can force the banks that really own the company to get their act together. I’m not sure that even he can manage that, unfortunately, so it might soon be goodbye.

Madeline McCann: Maybe the police weren’t 100% there after all…

~ Inquisitor

Now discussions about the Madeline McCann case (not Maddy – it’s a media infantilisation along the lines of “Jamie” Bulger, she wasn’t Maddy and he was always James) have a tendency to drift towards the heartless and so I’ve avoided putting my two cents in to avoid it rubbing off; however the latest news article from the Guardian on the latest rather downbeat turn in the investigation has a little bit near the end which really rather surprised me.

It is not the first time Portuguese police have searched an area following a tip off. It is understood their last search was carried out following contact with a psychic medium in America.

Read that again, because it’s truly incredible that police would at all put any trust in any evidence gained from that sort of source…

…a psychic medium in America.

No wonder they haven’t found anything yet then. Was it Allison DuBois?

Oh, come on

~ Inquisitor ~ 4 Comments

Now I’ve bashed the PS3 as much as anyone, but finally here we have something that Sony doesn’t deserve to be blamed for:

Cathedral row over computer game (BBC News, 9th June 2007)

The Church of England is considering legal action against entertainment firm Sony for featuring Manchester Cathedral in a violent Playstation computer game.

The Church says Sony did not obtain permission to use the interior in the war game Resistance: Fall of Man.

No, and nor should they have.

The game is an apparently flawed, war-based FPS set in an alternate (that is, not real) 1950s where what are either aliens or a biological experiment gone wrong are invading the West, spreading virally. Let’s emphasise that this is not real. Since your objective is to win the war, using ground-based resistance tactics, this of course means that you battle in real-world locations like churches, just like in every other war. That’s what war is.

And forgetting this context, they then make a very horrible comparison:

The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Revd Nigel McCulloch, described the decision to feature the city’s cathedral as “highly irresponsible” – especially in the light of Manchester’s history of gun crime.

“It is well known that Manchester has a gun crime problem,” he said.

“For a global manufacturer to re-create one of our great cathedrals with photo-realistic quality and then encourage people to have guns battles in the building is beyond belief and highly irresponsible.

For a start, Sony didn’t write Resistance – it was developed by Insomniac Games, the people who came up with Spyro the Dragon, and merely distributed by Sony on their console. Secondly, it’s from what I hear not actually a recreation of the cathedral – it’s a model whose outside look is based on it but internally is fairly different (unsurprisingly, as it’s being destroyed by the enemy when you turn up). And, most importantly, exactly what the hell has Manchester’s gun crime problem got to do with a fantasy game set in an alternate 1950s where you play a resistance member fighting a last-ditch battle against an alien invader?

If Resistance was the British-set equivalent of the 50 Cent game they might have a point, but it’s not and the press should be ashamed at this comparison. It is not encouraging street crime, it is fantasy. Churches are fine to be used offensively in all other media – only a few weeks ago, Doctor Who’s “Lazarus Experiment” episode featured a denouement set in a cathedral, and I didn’t hear any of this lot complaining then – so why not much the same thing in a game?

And besides, they don’t have a leg to stand on over the image issue anyway, legally; buildings are there. It would be like the New York tourism department raising hell because I put a destroyed Statue of Liberty in a counter-terrorism game which, as per Deus Ex, they didn’t do. Hell, it would be much the same as a church complaining about the type of church-based deathmatch level that’s turned up in pretty much every World War II FPS ever made (I played it a lot in one of the variants of Medal of Honour), but they don’t.

Note also that this game has been out since November – it was a PS3 launch title, and as a result sold well because amongst the launch titles only it and Motorstorm were in any way decent (they’ve now been joined by Oblivion, but that’s still pretty much it if you don’t count PS2 games) – and the controversy has only started now. Have the gutter press got tired of Big Brother already?

Brilliant scheduling from BBC Four

~ Inquisitor ~ 1 Comment

On tonight, Saturday 9th June 2007:

  • Alice Cooper: Welcome To My Nightmare – “the classic 70s concert” (10:10pm-11:30pm)
  • Iron Maiden: Rock In Rio (11:30pm-12:30am)
  • Journeys Into the Ring Of Fire – “Iain Stewart tours the perilous and spectacular landscape of the Pacific Rim to discover how the rocks beneath our feet have shaped human history.” (12:30am-closedown).

So that’s hard rock followed by hard rocks. Brilliant.

Hidden in the Celebrity Big Brother transcripts…

~ Inquisitor ~ 3 Comments

…is a gem. (26-page PDF, courtesy the Guardian.)

To summarise: Jade and her just-as-thick brother [Ed: AAARGH, mental classification screwup] boyfriend, Jack Tweed, Jo S Club and Danielle Lloyd played a very childish party game of “make up limericks about Shilpa” which involved trying to avoid a word that apparently rhymed with “tacky” and began with the letter P. Mostly it’s just as dull as Big Brother’s always been, but the interesting bit is how (a) none of this got to air and (b) the details of how Channel Four tried to cover it up.

Oddly, the game itself is not included in the transcript [Ed: wrote this before I realised it was on p5 and forgot to remove it, grr], but two of the warning interviews are: the one I’m interested in is the one with Jade’s brother bf:

Saturday 20th January 2007 approx. 20:20 – DIARY ROOM WITH JACK TWEED (p.18-26)

Jack: Hello.
Big Brother: Hello, Jack.
Jack: Hello.
Big Brother: Jack, please could you switch off your microphone and take the battery out, please? You should know that you are still being recorded.
Jack: Done
Big Brother: Thanks.

[…]

Big Brother: You were using rhyming slang to replace what you called ‘the “P” word’.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: You said the word rhymed with ‘tacky’.
Jack: Okay
Big Brother: It is clear to Big Brother, Jack, that this was a reference to the racial insult ‘Paki’.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Do you understand that this is considered racially offensive language?
Jack: Yeah, okay.
Big Brother: What do you have to say about this, Jack?
Jack: I was explaining the word that someone that was meant to have rhymed with the word. I
wasn’t actually saying the word.
Big Brother: Do you mean you were trying to include the word in the limerick but were using another
word to replace it?
Jack: I can’t really remember what exactly happened but I think… that someone said ‘I know a word that rhymes with that’ and then I clocked on to what it was and then explained what the word was, but didn’t actually say the word.

Genius.

There then entails a long series of questions determining where they were playing the game, and then on p22…

Big Brother: Jack, do you understand that the ‘P’ word – Paki –
Jack: Yeah.
Big Brother: Is considered to be racist?
Jack: Yeah, I fully understand.
Big Brother: And that simply by replacing the word with a word that rhymes with it doesn’t take away from the racial insult?
Jack: I wasn’t saying it to anyone. I was explaining what the word… what the word is. That’s why, in a conversation, you’re allowed to say, ‘The word “Paki” is a racist remark’. That’s why you’re allowed to say it. So I wasn’t saying, ‘That girl is a Paki’; I was saying ‘the word is that’.

Oh, I’m sure. These people are just as appalling on paper as they are in real life, aren’t they?

What’s really interesting about this is the style of the questioning. This interview is asking very short, simple, almost primary-school level questions, whereas the questioning of Jo S Club is much more detailed and inquiring (and she gives better game, too.) Is this an assumption that Big Brother is making directly of the Goody/Tweed family, almost talking down to them in much the same way they seem to think Shilpa was talking down to them?

Big Brother: Jack, was the limerick about Shilpa?
Jack: I think… I really can’t remember. I think so. I don’t know.
Big Brother: Jack, Big Brother is going to remind you of the limerick.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Jo began: ‘There once was a house that was happy’. You then said: ‘Until…’ Jo said: ‘And then there entered…’ Cleo then interrupted and said, ‘You are all going to [Big Brother] prison’.

That’s actually a brilliant one-liner – the conversation in question is on p5-6 if you’re interested. Excellent timing from Cleo Rocos there. Watch out for Jack’s grammatical howler:

Jack: Yeah. So that wasn’t referring to the word ‘Paki’. That was just people who was tacky.
Big Brother: Jack, in a previous conversation, you had substituted the word ‘tacky’ for the word ‘Paki’.
Jack: In that limerick just then, I wasn’t at all suggesting that the word was meant to be ‘Paki’. I was saying tacky, as in tacky people. I wasn’t – not at all.

He’s got a bit of a cheek calling Shilpa Shetty tacky considering exactly how tacky the Goody/Tweed family are – Jade herself spent a lot of the time before stupidly deciding to go on BB again making low-rent, truly dreadful reality programming for LivingTV (“Britain’s Most Popular CSI Repeats And Psychic Bullshit Channel”) with titles like “Jade’s Salon” and “Jade’s PA”. Making exploitative reality TV that no-one watches has to qualify as tacky even by their perspective, surely?

Big Brother: Jack, do you understand that some people may consider what you said to be racially offensive?
Jack: Yeah, some people who got the wrong end of the stick, I would, yeah. Can I just ask: is this… What, is this out in the paper, because if it is, I’d rather just leave now.

And Jack gets pretty much straight to the heart of the matter here, which is really quite surprising. Big Brother is tiptoeing around the issue but this is the only reason he’s being questioned about it – because news of the “Shilpa Poppadom” incident had already got out and C4 was worrying that this would get out too.

(In fact – although this is from memory, not my email archive so could be unreliable – news had got out through the usual Popbitch-type channels that Channel Four had material showing Jade et al making racist comments and had covered it up. Because it was from Popbitch et al, it wasn’t taken seriously. Now, of course, we know that this was true.)

Big Brother: Jack, as a result of this incident, Big Brother is now issuing you with your first and only formal warning about this.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Any further incidents could result in your immediate eviction.
Jack: Okay. Could I just… Can you just please tell me if this is out in the paper or anything like that, if anything’s out there suggesting, because if it is, I’d rather just leave now.

At least he realises he’s made a major boner and wants to stop making them – which is more than can be said for a lot of people.

Big Brother: Jack, just listen for a second.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Big Brother would ask that you exercise some care in the future with your language.
Jack: Yeah.
Big Brother: And Big Brother would like to remind you that, as always, all diary room conversations between Big Brother and housemates are confidential.
Jack: Okay.
Big Brother: Do you understand?
Jack: Yeah. Thank you.

The implication here of course is “don’t speak about this ever again and you’ll be fine.”

What this transcript shows is that all along C4 had the power to control the events on BB, editing out this limerick incident (which happened at around half eleven on the 16th of January, the same day as the cooking incident that triggered the press furore) from even the E4 live transmission and similarly keeping the official reprimand out of public view. Very interesting in its own way to watch how they were all manipulated for the camera – so much for BB reflecting real life then.

The sponsors for this season by the way? Virgin Media. My cable company. Who, through their ownership of Living TV, make all that psychic bullshit and Jade-featuring reality shows (although of course they don’t feature Jade anymore, they’ve got Pete Burns in instead.) Aaargh, not impressed – with that and the service I’m getting, I think I might soon be giving BT a call.

Eurovision 2007 – “we deserved nul points” edition

~ Inquisitor

But sadly Ireland (7pts) and Malta (the full twelve) rescued Scooch from total ignominy. Of course, we didn’t give Ireland any points in return so I bet they’re regretting that now.

We had the worst song. Even that Ukrainian drag act, the French’s inexplicable Parisian routine and the Latvian’s Il Divo clone were better than ours. Only the Irish stereotype number dragged itself to our level. Sure, Cyndi wouldn’t have won either, but we’d probably have ended up closer to mid table. (Much as it pains me to say it, the Big Brovaz number would probably have done best out of our lot – generoballads didn’t do well this year.)

This was my Twitter reaction when watching:

  • 21:21:26: Much as it it pains me to say this, this is our entry: Scooch, with “Flying The Flag (For You)”.
  • 21:22:34: At least they’re in tune. They’ve never managed it before.
  • 21:23:15: They’ve kept the godawful salted-nuts type puns in, which are *dreadful*.
  • 21:24:12: Oh God. “Pleasurable journey” with crotch movements. Why couldn’t this not have been our entry?
  • 21:24:45: And here it comes, the worst pun of all – “suck on for landing”. NUL… POINTS! NUL… POINTS!

It was a poor joke to begin with, and the godawful tuneless “would you like something to suck on?” bits sealed it; people just ended up confused about what they were watching. What was worse was that it didn’t have a tune – to pick up those Europeans who don’t understand English innuendo (like Lithuania’s “We Are The Winners Of Eurovision” song did last year – it ended up coming sixth). They grated in Making Your Mind Up, and I thought they were awful then; this was magnified when I saw clips of their out-of-tune rehearsals on news programmes and boosted to all new levels when I saw the final performance.

Peter Sissons on News 24 had to try and keep his obvious dislike of the song and disbelief that it was our entry out of his speech pattern when introducing the pre-contest reports; he failed miserably. He wasn’t the only one – Wogan at one point pointed out that “we deserve to come bottom four”, whilst complaining about “bloc voting”.

In fact, what’s interesting is that we’ve had eleven different winners for eleven contests since 1996 and telephone voting: including us (1997), Ireland (1996), Sweden (1999), Denmark (2000), Greece (2005) and Finland (2006) – all of which at least “think” Western Europe. That pretty much in itself disproves the Eastern Bloc voting theory – they may well all vote for each other, but that’s because they like the same sort of music and, what’s more, it’s not enough to win.

What wins is a song that people like. People liked Lordi. People liked the Serbian song this year: and, let’s face it, her song winning completely disproves the theory that people vote for Eurovision entries based on style. And the Ukrainian entry outdid us on comedy value – it actually felt hand-wrought and endearingly batty, while the Scooch song just felt like it was built on a camp assembly line. One of the men in the ‘band’ is a presenter on one of those Quiz Scam channels to pay the bills, and it’s that personality that came off the screen – made to a template of smarm.

People hated Scooch, hated Daz Sampson and hated everything we’ve put in since Katrina and the Waves. And I think it’s because they know that by putting that kind of entry in Eurovision, we’re patronising them – we think of Eurovision entries as if it was 1997, not 2007. They might not be very good at English lyrics but they have the same slick pop production values as us – if the Pet Shop Boys or Xenomania or Richard X were to produce a number for a Eurovision contender this year, they might at least have a chance. Hell, we should just get Robbie Williams to enter, he’s our most well known pop star on the Continent.

But this year’s Making Your Mind Up consisted entirely of washed-up failures and people who shouldn’t have been there – we’re looking third rate, but Eurovision demands first rate now (or at least a decent ripoff of first rate). It needs to change. Let’s have an entry we can be proud of for 2008 – we deserve one.

Eurovision 2007 – They’re not flying the flag for me!

~ Inquisitor ~ 2 Comments

So there’s the worst British entry to Eurovision for a very long time and a whole crowd of Eastern Europeans. Oh well, should be fun to watch. 25 minutes and counting – you may find my liveblogging results over at my Twitter for the time being (since Twitter’s a lot faster to update than wordpress.com is and is much more suited to a liveblog style.) I’ll be checking these comments and the DVD Forums too. Will Scooch sing as out of tune as they sound at the rehearsals? Will we get points? Do we deserve to? And will there be a surprise? Stay tuned!

Also liveblogging: All About Latvia (they linked to me so I’ll link to them.)

Penny for your martyrs

~ Inquisitor ~ 1 Comment

There’s an infuriatingly misreported story going around now about metrification which is implying in many cases – especially on BBC TV news, the Mail and the Guardian (via PA) – that imperial-only measurements will be allowed from now on and this is some sort of victory. They’ll spin it that way but in fact this isn’t true – it’s not a victory for imperial at all (and quite rightly so), it’s simply continuing the mandate that all tradeable goods must be either metric or dual-measure, with metric primary, beyond 2009.

That’s it. The BBC news story showing some fool of a greengrocer who sells only in imperial and then tries to say that “99% of my customers ask for measurements in imperial, so why should I go metric?” (gee, maybe because you don’t have any metric signage and probably have a metric-“martyr” sign in the window) in fact is simply pointing Trading Standards his way just as much as it would have done before this ruling.

What I found even more annoying, however, was this rather credulous quote from the Guardian’s PA reprint:

Mr Chichester said: “After saving the crown on the British pint, I am happy the Conservatives have persuaded the Commission that it is good not only for international business but for the British people that traditional measurements are kept.

“I just hope there won’t be any more need for Metric Martyrs and that the Government will avoid forcing metrication down the public’s throat.”

Mr. Chichester is, of course, a Tory MEP, so we need to translate this into English. “International business” means “the USA” (who actually use a different imperial system to ours, which they hilariously call the “English system”); “the Conservatives” means “fear of the Daily Mail”; “traditional measurements” means, well, anything; “saving the crown on the British pint” means “allowing to fill up to 568ml with foam” (Euromeasures don’t include the head, so a half-litre in most of Europe has liquid filled up to a half-litre level and then head above that; so often you’ll get more beer than a “pint” over here); and “metric martyrs” means “people stuck in the past”.

(Is it just me, by the way, or doesn’t the term “metric martyr” really grate? After all, it’s what they call themselves, which by rights should disqualify them from using it. In any case, they weren’t threatened with death, just asked to buy scales which had kg printed on them – if you were really interested in providing customer choice rather than just arrogantly imposing your ignorance, you’d have dual-measure scales anyway.)

In fact, metrication is happening anyway over time. Electronic appliances print degrees C rather than Fahrenheit or gas marks and supermarkets have switched completely for the most part (with the exception of Tesco’s 454g mince, but even that only prints the amount of grams) because most people born after the 60s actually don’t understand very much imperial – certainly I don’t, I work in metres, degrees C and Kelvin, litres and ml and kg, I print on A4. I use decimal points and scientific notation, which gives enough accuracy for anyone. I only use inches for measuring computer screen diagonals, and that’s just because it’s still printed on the box; I drink in pints because that’s what my pub sells.

Working with scientific data as I do, I don’t see how the imperial system would make any sense for anything, but it’s what people were taught for a long time and I accept that; but people haven’t been taught it for a while. This EU decision is the right one; by not forcing the time of imperial’s death, it will in fact allow it to happen quietly, as opposed to noisily when the deadline comes. It’s just a shame it’s being reported as yet another yah-boo-Europe-sucks story instead of what it really is, but then the EU is always so prone to misinterpretation.

Also on this subject: Europhobia’s fine piece.

A prediction based on the evidence

~ Inquisitor

So the election results are in and the only possible coalition seems to be the SNP, the Lib Dems and the Greens, and that gives a majority of two if you toss in Margo McDonald. (We’ll discount the Tories because, well, they’re the Tories and in reality they probably won’t want to help either Labour or the SNP.) The LDs have already rejected a SNP coalition, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they turned turtle after a bunch of concessions; but even then, the Greens might be a very hard act to keep happy. So what are the rules here?

Scotland Act 1998 – Section (3): Extraordinary general elections

(1) The Presiding Officer shall propose a day for the holding of a poll if-

    (a) the Parliament resolves that it should be dissolved and, if the resolution is passed on a division, the number of members voting in favour of it is not less than two-thirds of the total number of seats for members of the Parliament, or
    (b) any period during which the Parliament is required under section 46 to nominate one of its members for appointment as First Minister ends without such a nomination being made.

Hmm. Looking at Section 46, we find

Scotland Act 1998 – Section (46): Choice of the First Minister

(3) The period allowed is the period of 28 days which begins with the day on which the event in question occurs; but-

    (a) if another of those events occurs within the period allowed, that period shall be extended (subject to paragraph (b)) so that it ends with the period of 28 days beginning with the day on which that other event occurred, and
    (b) the period shall end if the Parliament passes a resolution under section 3(1)(a) or when Her Majesty appoints a person as First Minister.

So this means that if no-one can get their act together by May 31st, we’re having the election all over again. And since this is Scottish politics we’re talking about, I think that’s actually quite likely unless, somehow, all goes well in the negotiations.

And combining this with the voting screwups, I think it’s probably the least worst option too, but what do I know?

Swift deliveries

~ Inquisitor

Just got my pre-ordered Venture Bros. season two DVD from Amazon US – which considering that it only came out last Monday and that I used ultra-cheapo delivery is pretty good going. Brilliant packaging, and once I’ve watched them all I may have more of an opinion, but season one was one of the best bits of TV comedy I’ve seen for a long time and it’s such a shame that it’s stuck on Bravo (otherwise The Breasts, Poker and Chuck Norris Channel) at 1AM.

Happily, however, I’ve got broadband and a multi-region DVD player and so don’t need to care at what time Britain airs it at – I can just download it and/or wait for the DVD (I got into the show too late for season two, but I’ll still be buying a Robot Chicken S2 DVD when it comes out mainly because of the fact I downloaded the lot.) There’s lots of great stuff out there that didn’t air in Britain that you’d otherwise be unable to obtain; being able to play Region 1 helps a lot, and I highly recommend it for any comedy fan disillusioned at the fact that Roman’s Empire and Catherine Tate may well actually be the best that BBC2 can come up with.

And some advice to all and sundry: avoid the Python TV releases (I particularly loathe the smug “no extras” captions that are on all the advertising – Sony obviously think that’s Pythonesque, but it bloody well isn’t) – there are apparently better ones coming down the pipeline, and if we’ve waited this long for Flying Circus we might as well wait for a version that’s worth £20 a series, because one without any extras or cut material at all is most definitely not. Especially since we know full well that the Pythons have lots of outtakes and other spare material – Terry Jones hoarded VHS copies of Flying Circus for years in the fear that it would be wiped like so much else, and this almost certainly applies to much other Python material as well. Just say no to cash-ins.