Paul Casserly: Death of a PVR

Clive Owen in a scene from The Knick a 10-episode hospital drama. Photo / AP

Sometimes it feels like technology has turned against you. Paul Casserly mourns the death of his PVR and contemplates all the shows he had recorded but never got the chance to watch.

It finally happened. My newish mySKY+ box shuddered to a halt for the last time during my favourite show at the moment, The Knick.

Steven Soderbergh's foray into TV is a stylish mash-up of Sherlock Holmes, House (which is Sherlock as a doctor) and possibly Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. It's also not unlike Mad Men, or the recent masterpiece Masters of Sex, in that it evokes a period with meticulous detail and explores the evolution of the politics of race, sex and class.

Clive Owen plays the star surgeon Dr Thackeray of the Knickerbocker Hospital in 1900's NYC. He's developing new techniques and gadgets so it's a grisly affair, all trial, error, and bloody butchery.

There was no real Dr Thackeray but he is based on William Halsted, the drug addled genius who became the chief of staff at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Like him, Thackeray is a genius, and as luck would have it, he just happens to be a deeply flawed man too. He heals, he innovates and he shoots liquid cocaine between his toes. He dabbles in racism.

In his spare time, he is to be found hanging out at the local opium den and getting it on with Bono's daughter, Eve Hewson, who impresses playing a wide-eyed nurse.

So, yes cliché's abound, and like the good doctor, this is a flawed enterprise, but a strong cast, innovative cinematography and brilliant soundtrack elevate it greatly.

Anyway, there I was trying to watch The Knick when it happened again. The screen froze, the counter went back to zero and the guessing game began. "How far in were we?" Due to a quirk of whatever hard drive Ebola had infected the box, when the fault happens you can't just reload the recorded show, you have to use a thing called "Viewer Defined" and guess how many minutes in you were before the glitch.

Don't worry I won't bore you anymore with my techno-moaning, but after struggling like this for a few months I finally realised it was time, and that would mean a new box, and that would mean losing all those shows I had recorded and not yet watched. Like a squirrel I sequestered many more nuts than I would use.

My rat-like counterpart is said to misplace some 70% of all the nuts they bury. Likewise I would not watch many of things I had recorded but the thought of losing them filled me with dread.

Due to some unrelated but chronologically adjacent events I had reason to feel that machines have turned on me, personally.

Earlier that same day the hard drive on my iMac died, and, for the second time in my life, I dropped my phone in the toilet. (Tragically I was reading about the iPhone 6 when my iPhone 5 'leapt' into the excreta.) The loss of my PVR snapped the camel's hump. I had treasure I was not willing to give up. I had unwatched movies waiting for me, things like Samsara and Holy Motors.

I'd also hung onto the documentary film 7/7 One Day in London, which I had seen. That was possibly the most moving thing I'd seen all year, in which the survivors of the bombing attack on the tube and on the bus in London in 2007 retell their experiences in a brilliantly conceived and executed film.

As with anything this good I hang on to it for re-watching and for inflicting on people trapped in my lounge. "Oh my god, you have to watch this, just a few minutes." The movie Francis Ha was there - another film festival number that I was going to watch until a couple of my friends told me they hated it and had walked out so I had never had the guts to commit to a viewing. Still, I hung onto it. My friends are the same idiots who walked out of Breaking The Waves.

There was an episode of Coronation Street that I kept, with the addition of the "K" icon, which means I saved it for some reason I no longer recall. Perhaps Deidre's neck vein popped that night? I will never know.

"Damn this all to hell!" I bellowed, like a baby.

I will probably never see that unwatched episode of Benefits Street, although I loved the ones I caught. The show caught some flak; at least on my Facebook feed, from people who thought it exploited the poor. But compared to the popular local show Renters, Benefits Street seemed like a love letter to those on the skids.

I have a high threshold for reality TV, but Renters makes me think of people in rags being thrown to hungry lions and angry bears in ancient Rome. The suckers are not only poor and lacking in housekeeping skills, but now their meagre belongings and dog turds are a national amusement. I know, people watch it, and Police 10/7 uses the same demographic for impressive ratings, but 10/7 has at least some social utility, in that it can catch some violent "scum", and besides, wasted youth in Jap imports make for good TV. For that reason, Renters was not on my list, but another show about poor people living in filth was.

Al Jazeera's The Slum has been eye opening to say the least. The series takes us inside and above (via some ace drone footage) a variety of slums around the world and gives us a detailed and humane taste of their everyday lives. It begins with the words: "The UN believes that in 50 years 1 in 3 people will be living in a slum."

It's an achievement of dedicated documentary making, and a great way to shake you out of a cry-baby binge of first-world, techno-induced, self-pity.

Watch The Slum here.

* Have you recorded shows that you just can't seem to delete? Or had TV technology turn against you? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

- nzherald.co.nz