The initial few days in China had convinced us that far from being an entertainment, watching television was more like a nightmare here. Nevertheless, we had put the TV to good use by watching movies that the umpteen torrent sites assist in downloading from and through the DVDs that we buy locally. At an average of about 12 movies per month, approximately a movie every 2 days, our statistics as of last night stood at 222 movies watched from Nov 2007 till date! The list that I had compiled diligently to reminisce later about this period of life in China, had movies of varied genres and languages; Retro, Contemporary, Latest Releases, War, Romance, Action, Thrillers, Sobbers, Crooners, Rib-ticklers, English, Tamil, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada and surprisingly Chinese too featured in it!
However, last night we attempted to watch “television” instead of a movie. Nothing had changed since the last 2 years. The Chinese media would easily win the “award for consistency”, hands down. It had the same three channels of CCTV 1, 2 and 3 respectively in Chinese!, two channels called “Alpha” and “Pearl” which sometimes show a couple of English programs but conveniently played Chinese ones last night, a channel called “Guangzhou English” where we managed to catch the closing titles of the Tom Hanks’ movie “Apollo 13”, "MTV China" which obviously played some Chinese track, two other Chinese channels that focus solely on advertising mobile phones and a few more Chinese channels the names of which I could not even decipher! There is no access to the BBC or the CNN on television unless one was living in Hong Kong. A “watchable” television channel was still elusive for us.
V and I voiced our disapprovals to each other at this Red Governance and returned to find our solace in the internet. I finally watched a few episodes of the Late show with David Letterman, on YouTube (through a proxy website mind you!) and hoped someone would discover “proxy” methods to watch TV channels too! Hmm.....any techies listening?
