Michael Parsons
The older I get, the more I loathe and detest television, and after two or three drinks I have moments of clarity when it's clear that all the ills of our sick, sick time can be blamed on this wicked invention. In order to loathe and detest it with style and insight, however, I find it necessary to keep up with the latest ways in which the great Satan enters our lives, such as Telewest's new TV Drive, which I've been trying out. So pass the remote. And the crisps. And be quiet, this is a good bit.
TV Drive is the cable guy's alternative to the Sky+ box, but it features three built-in tuners, which means you can watch a programme you dislike while recording one you loathe and another you detest at the same time. In a way it's what those crazy kids call a mash-up of the two existing devices it has replaced in our living room: a basic Telewest cable box and a Freeview personal video recorder.
The Freeview PVR allowed us to store programmes on a hard drive. The combined box means that we get the benefit of the cable service, which has proven itself more reliable than the Freeview signal used by our previous PVR. Yours may be different, but our signal always seemed to hang inexplicably or get the jitters at times of maximum dramatic impact (no climatic penalty shoot-out or live Big Brother eviction was safe from blackout in our house)
The other cool feature is series record -- simply find a programme you like on the electronic program guide (EPG), click the yellow button, and you need never miss an opportunity to marvel at the descent of Western civilisation. You'll have instant access to every episode of Desperate Housewives (which for years I've been claiming is the poor man's Dallas. Now that the actress who played Sue Ellen in Dallas has announced her desire to appear in the current show, I think my wisdom is apparent.) It also reduces by one the number of vile electronics units desecrating the sacred space of our living room.
Telewest has done a good job of making a pretty complicated handset reasonably clear. There's a bunch of DVD-player-like controls at the top, which allow you to pause live programmes when you've decided they're simply too awful to contemplate and you have to go make a cup of tea to steady your nerves. There's also a bunch of high-definition programming, which I've yet to explore, but which I'm reliably informed will make the rest of the programming on offer seem dull and lifeless.
So, all in all, the TV service in my living room is getting better, but it still has a few curious failings. There's loads of other great video that I do like -- those hilarious clips of people playing space invaders with their own bodies, George Bush putting his frat-boy massage moves on Angela Merkel, and that sour-faced American woman punching another lady in the face really, really hard, all remixed to a tune by someone who sounds a bit like a friend of a Beastie Boy's plumber. This kind of viral video is available online, and is a defiant expression of the human spirit (the virus in question is called freedom, people), but I can't find it anywhere on my TV Drive. On the other hand, my TV Drive does offer various 'People do the craziest things!' clip shows, in which viewers send in videos of themselves falling off skateboards and getting their pets to sing. There is no more tragic insight into the human heart.
Telewest also provides both our telephone and Internet connectivity, so I can sit in front of my new TV Drive-enabled, flat-screen television accessing cable television content (Telewest TV) while surfing the Web on my widescreen laptop and accessing video content online (Telewest IP). The interesting thing about this is the light the two experiences cast upon each other.
My Telewest TV allows me to watch a reasonable selection of newish and classic films via pay per view, while my Telewest IP connection lets me order from thousands of online DVD services with much wider selections. With my Telewest IP connection I can interact with Web sites in countless different ways, writing, messaging, sending emails, chatting live, even creating an avatar and flying around in virtual space. The pictures, however, don't look great and sometimes it hangs inexplicably. With my Telewest TV I can click some buttons that take ages to respond to my input and which offer "interactive services" of dubious merit and great obscurity. I've never bothered with them, so it's hard to believe many civilians do, except for voting out vile people from Big Brother, of course. (Which I have done a few times, on occasions when I've been drinking since lunch time.) The pictures look great, but still sometimes it hangs inexplicably.
Remember convergence, that ludicrous buzzword? Well, the TV Drive is that buzzword made real -- it's a convergence play that brings together the power of a computer hard drive and digital storage with a networked cable box, creating an intelligent node with a memory at the end of the network connection. But that's only half the story. The really exciting bit is when I can access all that cable content on any screen in the house and also pull up a window on my TV to see my Flickr photos or the latest hilarious-video-of-a-monkey-slipping-up-on-a-banana-ha-ha! When Telewest lets me mash up my TV and my laptop, I'll have all the tools I need to contemplate the fall of our once-great civilisation, as it drowns in a torrent of reality TV programmes and skateboarding stunt clips. In the meantime, there's plenty to watch while the computer and television barons figure it out. So press that button. No, the other button. That's it. Now hit play.
Visit reviews.cnet.co.uk for in-depth reviews of many more products
