Random play: Is DVD the new trivial pursuit?

By GRAHAM REID

Jet lag takes it out of you, not the least in that unfocused boredom that settles on your eyes when you are stuck in Sydney airport for five hours and you've just spent the last day and a half trying to get even that close to home.

This is when judgment is impaired and you buy glossy magazines you'd never otherwise consider. Or you wander aimlessly around duty free shops looking at ...

Is this a DVD player I see before me?

And so it was a couple of weeks ago that, after sizing up ridiculously cheap DVD players in a country which breeds them - but where negotiating skills in a foreign language failed me - I stood in Sydney airport with hours to kill, a credit card, and a belly full of airline wine.

The words, "Why not?" loomed large and 10 minutes later I was back in the same seat in the lounge with a large cardboard box of technology that cost $A550 ($690).

Even through the fug of weariness and wine I knew this was no great saving, but after three weeks away and with only trinkets - bookmarks, keyrings, T-shirts - to show, it seemed the right thing. I could see it now: "Hi honey, I'm home. Does anyone know how one of these things works?" And the 14-year-old would.

And so we acquired another remote control unit.

Everyone needs a DVD of course, all those optional extras you get, which show you things like the original storyboard (yawn!), a director telling you how wonderful his tedious film is (erk!), the trailers for movies which, if you'd seen at the multiplex, would probably have you saying things like, "No way!"

Yes, DVDs come with all kinds of time-wasting optional extras. But so far we've discovered some very funny scenes cut from High Fidelity, a period-piece doco about Yellow Submarine (which mentions the Beatles' kiddy-song in the same breath as Homer's Odyssey!), and an interesting-enough documentary about gladiators (better than the movie it came with).

This is hardly necessary for a fulfilled life. But when insulting nonsense like The Panel, Survivor and autopsies of sports matches appear on your television there's nothing better than digging around on a DVD and choosing your own rubbish.

So far we've only been stiffed once, when we didn't read the small print, which told us Cast Away was "region one." For those not in the know - as I wasn't when smiling in mute incomprehension at friendly Chinese men in Taipei's techno-marketplaces - for some reason DVD players and discs divide the world into regions, or zones. We are region four, along with Australia.

Somewhere small and inconsequential, say the United States, is actually another region, so a disc you buy there won't necessarily work if your player is zone-specific.

I guess the people who decided on a non-universal standard have eight-tracks and Beta-systems at home. DVD confusion is revenge of the nerds.

Ah well, we've got a one-zone-only player at home and that's that. At least it's our zone. There was day a few weeks ago when I might have made an appalling mistake and we'd only be able to watch Taiwanese films tonight.

Anyway, we're tuned in and once we find the remote can't wait to see the DVD of This is Spinal Tap which comes with an hour of additional footage, the "special edition" of Elvis' classic That's the Way It Is which has a "behind-the-scenes documentary ... "

There's so much to see, so much trivia to be assimilated, and hours of out-takes. Just more of everything, and sometimes subtitled in five different languages, only one of which you understand. Cool.

Jet lag. It takes it out of you.