h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If you're watching the top left corner of the screen that intently you're doing television wrong.

Most of them are grey and translucent and I find them completely unobtrusive.

>>I find them completely unobtrusive.

You're lucky. Unless of course you've got a blind spot in your vision there, in which case you're unlucky.

quotes, the only thing I watch on channel 5 is NCIS (and occasional episodes of Law & Order), which is why I am so annoyed at them dropping it for Big Brother. I suspect that the only reason they bought the rights to Big Brother was to increase their viewing figures.

May be worth checking when the 'mid season break' was in the US. For some reason Channel 5 do mid-season breaks for US programmes even if they're broadcasting them well after it was shown in the US. Cheesed me right off when they did it to Person of Interest.

I suppose putting a mid-season break after the first of a two-parter guarantees that viewers will come back after the break. I'd have thought the US channel would have had more confidence in the series and its fans, given that NCIS has been running for at least 12 years now.

US seasons are typically 22 eps or so, and they often film the 2nd lot while the first lot are airing (well, it was that way with things like Stargate SG-1...). AFAIK they used to start the US season in September and show them until just before Christmas, with the mid-season cliffhanger, then start in February for the last spurt before Easter. I think.

Anyway I remember when Sky started showing the eps in the UK before the US ones were aired and the US fans *finally* getting how annoying spoilers are

poop. Went too early.

PH: spoilers.

I realise that if you really really like a show you want to talk about it as soon as you've seen it. But if you really like it that much, is it too much to ask that you don't plaster teh interwebz with MASSIVE spoilers immediately or during a show being aired? (unless using the hashtag for live tweets or spoiler alerts)

TV viewing has changed, the internet changed everything. It really isn't too much to ask that you don't spoil fellow fans.

Even if *the books have been out for 20 years* some people weren't born then, or don't want to read them or whatever.

Pfft.

I remember when the first season of Lost was first being shown in the UK and people in the office had gone online to look up how the series was going to go and were loudly discussing it in the office. Apparently asking them to stop was unreasonable.

I used to work with someone who would say "Did you see x last night" and I'd reply "No, I recorded it to watch at the weekend". She'd then carry on talking about it. But then it was exactly the same if I said "No, it bores me to death so I avoid it like the plague".

Deb

'Lost' was particularly annoying as the instant it became popular it was bought by Sky television so we couldn't watch it any more...

Mid-series breaks are annoying, especially when the series returns without a fanfare and you've missed 4 or 5 episodes of the second half before you realised it has returned.

<BB<

You know when people say "can I get?" instead of "may I have" or something else that makes sense in English. "Can I get a ticket to Oxford?" a young man asked the bus driver today, what do they think the bloke's sitting there for? I felt like jabbing him with my walking stick! If you're lucky enough not to need a bus pass don't waste everyone else's time asking stupid questions.

Going the front page and finding an advert claiming there were 5 things that proved the bible was true. I found that annoying.

BB, it's not just the second half of a season that doesn't get a fanfare. Occasionally a series *starts* without any announcements. If you don't use a TV guide, online or printed, you won't know the series is being shown. We've missed episodes of things we like because of this.

>>You know when people say "can I get?" instead of "may I have" or something else that makes sense in English. "Can I get a ticket to Oxford?" a young man asked the bus driver today, what do they think the bloke's sitting there for?

Yet you could argue the same for "may I have"; the 'bloke' sitting there could equally think 'of course you may have one, now are you going to actually buy one?' Better to say quite bluntly "Sell me a ticket" if you want to avoid the situation you refer to.

Language evolves. "Can I get" may seem inelegant compared to "may I have", but may I have was probably regarded in much the same way when people started saying it. English is a language without formalised grammar, except the formalised grammar that was forced on it after people deciding it needed formalised grammar because Latin does.

Every word and phrase we hold dear was, at one time, a horrible neologism that demonstrated the decline of standards.

Yep - I missed the whole of the second series of 'The Waking Dead' because I didn't know it was on. I've not tried to catch up. I once spent a few years without a telly and missed out on lots of programmes such as 'Spaced', 'Buffy/Angel' the start of 'Stargate' and 'Smallville' etc that people raved about at the time. I just have to accept that I've missed it - life's too short to try to catch up and watch all the programmes that might be interesting, shrug and move on.

<BB<

Apparently the average Briton watches 4 hours of TV per day. Somebody else must be watching most of my 4 hours. Most days I watch TV for less than an hour. Recently I watched some episodes of Bones, which pushed it to more than an hour, but Pick has stopped showing Bones so I'm back to my usual viewing habits.

I don't know whether they include watching a DVD as part of the 4 hours. Watching a film on DVD is the only time I watch more than an hour of TV at a stretch. I could probably get rid of the television and just watch episodes on DVD.

"Yet you could argue the same for "may I have"; the 'bloke' sitting there could equally think 'of course you may have one, now are you going to actually buy one?' Better to say quite bluntly "Sell me a ticket" if you want to avoid the situation you refer to."


No one's *actually* confused, you're all just arguing semantics. It's annoying.

As an aside - Mr Dreadful, you do realise Person of Interest is back on, don't you?

Deb

Semantics? Isn't that what kids get up to?

According to my old copy of Usage and Abusage, 'get' is overused and misused. 'Have you got...?' is a colloquialism that has gained acceptance through use. The same could be said for 'Can I get...?'

I used to be fussy about the way English was spoken and written. I've grown out of it over the years. Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson helped.