Granadaland goes digital

It feels like it's been talked about for years.   Ah, right - it has.

The much-vaunted digital switchover came to Granadaland this morning and sixty years of broadcasting tradition were wiped out at the flick of a switch (probably).   Sadly, but predictably, neither the public-funded BBC nor the once federal ITV saw fit to mark the occasion with any kind of "farewell to analogue" special.   Granted, that sounds horrendously dull, but done well, it could have been an interesting and fitting look back at television's halcyon days.

For those days are now surely gone.   There's always the danger of a rose-tinted view of television from days of yore, but the plethora of choice heralded by digital is in no way proportional to quality.   Remember when television was just about modern enough to be good, but still remained a comforting, genuinely exciting presence in the corner of the living room?   It was probably around the mid-1980s, when we had four whole channels to choose from and the medium was a cohesive, homogenising force - while still being quaint enough not to broadcast for much of the day.   Now, it just feels like everything's been done before - only better.

As for the demise of Ceefax/Teletext, it's an insult that these once innovative (and still undeniably useful and used) services have been replaced by digital text, a set up so woefully inadequate as not to be worthy of the name.   The rectilinear graphics of our youth could have survived into the digital age - but nobody cared enough to save them.

Today, more than usual, I feel like an analogue man in digital times.