Home Video (VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, 4k)

at some point in the late 1990s, this all changed. Cuts to the BBC budget resulted in arts programmes, rarely ratings-grabbers, being denuded, while the onslaught of Sky meant that you had to pay a hefty subscription in order to see a lot of classic films. Late Review limped on in a much less rigorous fashion, a sign (I feel) of a growing anti-intellectualism in Britain.

And that’s where the DVD came to the rescue, filling in the gaps, allowing you to buy – often very cheaply – things that you’d heard about, but that had been unavailable. It may be unfashionable to praise Kenneth Clark’s unashamedly patrician 1969 series Civilisation, but the DVD box-set became a favourite of mine.

DVD companies were quick to tap into the nostalgia market. The market leader was Network DVD, a no-frills UK company that brought many widely loved TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s back into our living rooms. Among many other things, they released Arthur Hopcraft’s masterly 1977 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, which hadn’t been repeated in decades, and which I had long wanted to see.

Only this May, the company went into liquidation, and part of my sadness about their demise is that their catalogue almost certainly won’t end up somewhere such as Britbox. Like several streaming companies, Britbox seems to only purchase, or air, the shows that are algorithm-friendly: that people have actually heard of, or are searching for. The result is that streamers often promote an untruthful archive, one unrepresentative of the treasures of our past.

There are other reasons why DVDs are important: they’re superior as a product, often real things of beauty, with carefully-thought-out sleeve-notes and superb extra features. Some say that such add-ons are for nerds only, but I believe that an erudite director’s commentary or a tangential supplementary documentary can really enhance your enjoyment of a film or TV show. Firing up the latest series of The Crown on Netflix on the other hand, waiting for the data to stop buffering on your laptop, feels bleak in comparison.

...

One DVD among a carefully curated shelf is a tangible thing that you can revisit, leaving a little part of it etched into your brain; an endlessly-scrollable morass of streamable films just won’t have the same effect – and that is bad for all of us who constantly try to promote the importance of film and TV.

Archive of source