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VHS

Ahh, who’s gloating now, eh, VHS? You thought you had won the war when you saw off the technically superior, but undoubtedly less popular, Betamax, didn’t you? There you were as the King of Home Entertainment, happily lording it up over laserdiscs and anything else that came along, only for you to be made almost completely irrelevant by the onset of digital technology.

To add insult to injury when I tried to donate some videotapes to my local charity shop recently, they refused to take them. ‘No one wants these any more, love,’ said the delightful old lady in the polyester dress.

Oh, VHS, how did it come to this?

The Video Home System (or VHS, for short) burst into our living rooms in the late 1970s. It had been created by JVC in Japan, who realised that the road to world domination lay in sharing the technology, so they licensed it to other manufacturers to ensure a wide range of machines were on the market.

The very first video cassette recorders (VCRs) went on sale in 1977, but were, to begin with, very much a luxury item. Once prices started to come down they became far more popular, and by the time the ’80s were in full flow they were a common feature in many homes below, or above, the TV set.

Video had two major attractions. One was the fact that you could now watch films on your television when you wanted to, not just when the three (count them!) TV stations chose to broadcast them. The other was the ability to record programmes to watch later.

The film thing was really a very big deal at the time, something we can often forget in this age of Sky Movies, LoveFilm, and internet streaming. For one thing, the UK didn’t get to see US films in the cinema until quite a while, often months, after America, something I talk about in more detail in a later entry. Outside of the cinema, the only place to watch a film was on the telly, but TV stations did not get to show the big Hollywood blockbusters until years after release. Because of this, the first showing of a big film on BBC1 or ITV was a major deal, and there would be trailers for weeks beforehand, often resulting in huge viewing figures. For example, Jaws premiered on UK television on ITV on 8 October 1981. It had first been shown in cinemas in 1975, six years earlier! That night, 23.25 million people tuned in to watch it, just under half of the entire population, and more than the peak audience for the Royal Wedding between William and Kate in 2011.

So you can see why the home video rental market exploded as the ’80s went on. Every town, and almost every village, had its own rental store, and people had access to thousands of films whenever they wanted to see them, changing the sorts of films we watched. This was before the day of the multiplex cinema, and most local film theatres only had two screens. Two cinema screens and three TV channels did not really offer a huge selection, but all of a sudden we had video stores with aisles of cassettes. This meant that you could rent a new film, or perhaps an old classic, but you could also borrow all sorts of shite you had never heard of – the straight-to-video market was born.

The appetite for watching films at home was so great that it was difficult to meet the demand. Studios realised that consumers would potentially watch almost anything, especially if all the block-busters were out of stock at 8pm on a Saturday night, and films that had previously sat on distributors’ shelves unwatched and unloved were quickly converted to VHS and sent out. All manner of low-budget thrillers, action films, or true-life stories (most of which seemed to feature Brian Dennehy) found audiences that simply hadn’t been there before.

And then there was the porn. At one end of the scale, the legal end, a plethora of erotic films hit the market. They were incredibly tame compared to the explicit material that is only a Google search away for people today, but they were pretty much all that the average person (OK, let’s face it, bloke) could get access to at the time. Every video store had a top shelf full of the stuff. At the other end was the hardcore pornography that was illegal in the UK, but was exploding across the US. Much of it found its way here. It is said that the porn industry is often the first to exploit new technology, and that can certainly be argued when it came to VHS.

Such material was not without its understandable controversy, but it wasn’t so much the pornography that was dismaying the Daily Mail readers of the ’80s. They really had it in for horror films, the so-called ‘video nasties’. Titles such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead were banned in the UK for many years, despite them now being seen as classics of the genre and the inspiration for many of the major directors of today.

Home recording was the other big feature of the VCR. Never before had you been able to watch a TV programme if you weren’t sitting down in front of your set as it was broadcast. Early machines were famously hard to programme and this led to numerous devices languishing in living rooms flashing 00:00 for weeks on end, but, once mastered, users were able to record what they wanted, when they wanted. Never again did you have to miss an episode of Neighbours (especially that one where Bronwyn did a bellydance, or the one where Henry wound up naked in Mrs Mangle’s garden), or the show jumping on Grandstand.

Most homes built up a significant library of recordings, piles of blank tapes lying around, each with handwritten scribbles on the stickers. There were endless family arguments over ‘Which idiot taped over Dallas?!’ You could buy fancy plastic cases, often modelled to look like hardback books, so as to house your collection with more style. The VHS was a fundamental part of the social fabric throughout the ’80s.

The early ’90s saw another big leap in VHS use, with a growing market for purchasing, as opposed to renting, films on video. For a long time the cost of films on video had been kept high – typically between £30 and £75 so as to encourage people to rent them rather than purchase. Hardly anyone was going to pay £50 for a copy of The Toxic Avenger so your local video store coughed up on your behalf and then hoped to rent it out for more than 50 times at £1 a go, or something like that. As the ’80s came to an end, film companies realised that there was a significant desire for people to own their favourite films or TV shows, and most big films started to be issued in cheaper editions, six months to a year after the rental copy.

When you consider the speed with which technology is developing these days, it is testament to the durability and success of VHS that it has only really died out as we have entered the 21st century.

The better quality and extra bonus materials available through DVD won people over at the end of the ’90s and saw many replacing their VHS collections with this more expensive, but far sexier, new format. The launch of Sky+ and other personal video recorders changed the way we recorded TV content. As the 2000s came to a close, the manufacture of pre-recorded video cassettes had pretty much ceased, with only a handful of films being released in the format, and this was often more of a marketing exercise, such as with the film Paranormal Activity, than anything else.

Many people still own a VCR for watching home films or all the old stuff they have on tape, but the transition to digital is fast apace and the sturdy oblong video cassette is soon to be no more.

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