The Book Tower

I really love my Humax. Don’t be alarmed. I’ll start at the beginning.

Last Christmas I bought a Humax PVR 9200T. A Freeview box with a hard drive that has revolutionised our home life (it hasn’t cut down on telly-related arguments, but that’s outside the scope of this post).

First, a little history. Previously we had a bog standard Freeview box, one of the first on the market. It was always jamming and being taken back to John Lewis for exchange. When it was working properly there would be issues over recording programmes as the box had to be tuned into the channel that was being recorded. To record one channel and watch another you had to detune the TV from the digital signal. I know, I know. It’s now been confined to the bedroom with the spare TV, where my personal battles with it are more confined.

Our Humax was a revolution for us because firstly it dispensed with video tapes. Our tape mountain has now been cleared. Instead of filling piles and piles of video cassettes with films I will never ever watch, I can now fill up the hard drive of my Humax. It’s the same thing in essence, but our front room is now a lot neater. And our Humax is strict with us; if ever the roughly 100 hours of recording time is used up it will erase the older recordings first to make new room for further recordings. At the moment it looks like we are going to lose a lesser known Woody Allen film, one of the later George A. Romero zombie horrors and something called The Chatterley Affair. Phew, can’t wait.

I also get a great deal of warped pleasure in deleting episodes of EastEnders and How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria from the hard drive. This is very therapeutic. Programmes that have been recorded, in my opinion – also warped, behind my back.

Secondly, our Humax has a twin tuner, which means you can record two programmes simultaneoulsy. When it’s feeling really generous, it will even let you watch a third at the same time. Or playback one programme while you are recording another. Or watch two at the same time. Whilst standing on your head. Apparently the next model will watch everything for you and tell you what happened.

Thirdly, we can pause and rewind live TV. This is something I don’t bother with, although it sounds good when I boast about the Humax. My wife uses it though. She is always pausing live TV. She’ll shout “don’t go in there and touch anything! I’ve paused live TV!” I don’t know what the point of doing this is. When she eventually alows me to unpause it we are sometimes hours behind.

Finally, I can record every single episode of The Simpsons without having to lift a finger. I’ve my old friend the Humax to record them all, and it’ll go on doing so until I tell it to stop. We now have so many episodes of The Simpsons recorded that we’re going to find it really hard to catch up, but somehow I find this a comforting thing. I really love my Humax.