I did something that was against my principles last night.

I have long been a critic of the shite that’s broadcast in the name of film and steadfastly refused to pay into any system that produces said shite.

Last night I signed up for Netflix.

Herself loves her television and in fairness has to rely on it or books for entertainment. So after a long bout of wheedling, nagging and emotional blackmail I decided to try Netflix because I’m weak I like to give her whatever she wishes.

The process of signing up was easy enough. The only problem was that I had to select three titles I liked to give them an idea of my preferences, but the choices they gave were terrible. They did offer “Breaking Bad” which was grand but I can’t even remember what other two I chose.

The came the slightly tricky bit. We have three televisions. One isn’t used at all, one is used rarely and the last is used all the time. The latter is the one in Herself’s room but it isn’t a “smart” television. So I had to swap it with the one that is hardly used as that is supposed to be a “smart” one. In my book, smart means being able to think for oneself and to come up with logical and coherent answers, but neither the television nor my mobile phone can do that I don’t know why they’re supposed to be smart?

Anyhows I eventually switched the sets after struggling with network connections, power plugs and HDMI cables and switched on. There is actually a Netflix button on the remote control so I pressed that. The set asked for my email address and password. I had already set those up on the laptop but now I had to key them in using an incredibly awkward remote control. That took an age and a couple of attempts but eventually got in. It works!

My problem now is getting used to Netflix. For a start, the process of finding a film or television series is fucking awkward using the remote control. I think I can sort that by browsing on the laptop [which at least has a keyboard] and setting programmes from there. I have a lot of experimenting to do.

We started to watch a programme. It was fine. No advertisements or anything messy, just straight in at the deep end. It worked perfectly with lovely quality picture but not so lovely sound [I think that’s the television’s fault]. Herself was over the moon.

Then it stopped. The screen froze and a little spinny thing appeared on-screen saying 99%. Aha, I thinks to myself, it’s buffering. But it buffered for ages and I ended up by rebooting the whole shebang. Not a good omen? And before anyone says anything about my Interweb being slow, I’m supposed to have at minimum of 3Mb for Netflix but actually have 76Mb, so it ain’t my broadband causing the buffering.

The reboot worked perfectly and our programme resumed,

Then it buffered again. Still 99%. Bugger.

I suppose today will be spent doing Interweb searches and/or tests of my in-house network.

The things I do for that woman!