I am not a party person but I do have a party trick. I can instantly convert any letter of the alphabet to its number from 1 to 26 so can spell out words in numbers. As such I can tell you that T is the 20th letter and V is the 22nd. Ergo 2022 is the year of TV.

This brings me nicely to my latest rant. I may have mentioned this before. No soaps, reality tv or documentaries for me, I need escapism – other than quizzes, I watch mainly crime drama. I watched all the CSI variants (which are now over) and all those of NCIS. I have just found out that Season 19 is only on Disney+ in the UK, which as we know is a yet another subscription channel. I already pay for Sky, which is where the Fox channel was that screened it previously, but now I have to pay more. IT IS NOT ON!

CSI was originally shown on Channel 5 which obviously is terrestrial but then they stopped showing it. I was already paying for Sky for the football so when it moved over that was not much of an issue. I don’t think NCIS was ever on 5 but I could be wrong, however, Fox was included in the Sky network so again not an issue. It is an issue now though.

Why are there so many TV streaming services that are bleeding us dry? Netflix, Now, Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney+ and I have probably forgotten some. Paying for TV was foreign to us in 1990 but it is getting ridiculous. It is bad enough with the football where if you want to watch all premier league matches you need Sky, BT and now Amazon Prime.

I thought it was funny that NCIS had not started on Fridays because it is usually the first programme on in January followed by NCIS Los Angeles on Sunday’s (which is not on either). NCIS New Orleans is being shown but this is I believe the last series.

This reminds me of when I first paid for Sky. It was 1992 because they had nicked football from terrestrial TV and it was also the start of the Premier League. Shortly after, a US programme that was popular over here was nicked and I ended up taping it for people at the office so they could continue to follow it. The name of the programme? L.A. Law. I think I had to tape the last two series for people on a weekly basis.

A little side note here. Why don’t the BBC and ITV start buying US shows again? There is some good stuff which is far better than the crap we are fed – cooking, sewing and dog grooming. It is beyond belief what we put up with as prime time viewing these days.

In other news, when I came into my site to write this blog, I spotted I had a comment, which is about as rare as seeing a vicar at a wife swapping party. It said that my blog on Christmas TV being the worst ever (er… is there a theme here?) was a good article. The only other non spam comment I ever had on the website was also saying I wrote a good article on something else – I forget what now. Maybe I should have tried to be a reporter rather than a writer. Funnily enough, when we had the career person in at school this was something I briefly considered.

No good news yet on the new novel. If I have no luck this year I may have to self-publish again which is something I don’t really want to have to do again.

Aha, we need the sun always to shine on TV.