The ABC of BBC Comedy and TV

I'm excited to see that the ABC will be screening Psychoville from May 5. It's a black comedy from the creators of The League of Gentlemen, a very weird comedy of which I own all the DVD's. I watched the first episode of Psychoville on its very first screening last year while in London and couldn't wait to see more. 

Right now I'm enjoying the repeats of The Young Ones on Tuesdays on ABC2. It's utterly insane and absurdist comedy, so unlike the self-serious nature of most else on TV. Naturally, I can't watch it live, but fortunately the Playstation3 PlayTV recorded size is only about 1 gig so I can copy the files off the PS3 and on to a flash drive and watch it on my laptop in bed after everyone else is asleep.

PlayTV is set for the "other" region thanks to those stupid Australian Freeview restrictions that don't allow copying of programs out of PlayTV. It means that I can't record or view SBS using the PS3, but I have other recorders that can cope with that.

I also required the free VLC media player to watch the recordings on my PC's. I used to be able to use Windows Media Player, but something changed.

I recorded an episode of the new Doctor Who series on my laptop using my DVICO FusionTV usb dongle. The streamed file was over 10 gig in size! The included converter software fails on attempts to convert the software, but maybe that's just the small amount of free space left on my hard drive.

I'm really enjoying the new Doctor and the episodes, though you can tell that the producers were fans of the Tom Baker era. I do wish that the composer Murray Gold would reinstate "the middle 8th" in the main theme as it is my favourite bit of the music. We ended up watching the first episode on iView. We had it on the big television, then Alex decided to race around with his noisy toy lawnmower, then the mother-in-law arrived to interrupt us. We tried to play it later but Alex was woken up and started crying. ABC's iView is a pretty cool application and the quality was quite decent.