On "John's Not Mad", And Why The Duke Loves DVD

Why The Duke loves DVD - #332453

When The Duke was a youngster, filled with childish notions, filling mine skull with flights of demented fancy concerning the ghosties and the Halloween's, when the world must have been etched in eternal autumnal browns, since that's all I can ever recall when I think back, back then I saw a program on the old television by the name of Ghostwatch.

I was unable to endure the entirety of those 90 terrifying minutes, and was put to bed, sniffling and crying and terrified of the folds in the curtains facing me.

Next day at school, or whenever it reconvened after the Halloween holidays, The Duke immediately went about trying to obtain a copy of this amazing piece of television. Surely to God someone else in that primary school had taped it? Surely someone had known it was going to be so amazing, so unfathomably terrifying, and had made a VHS copy?

I was beside myself with joy, when one such individual, a girl in my class, presented me the next day with a tape upon which she claimed to have recorded this chill-fest. I took it home, hands trembling, approaching the VCR like some Christian thrust into a coliseum, timidly stepping towards a slumbering lion.

The disappointment, man. I'll never forget that motherfucker, is what.

There was no Ghostwatch on the tape. What there was, though, was a fat bloke sexing with someone and then someone else comes in through the window with a shotgun.

Nowadays, I'd probably have watched it anyway, but back then, I had no desire to see this piffle, and was torn asunder when the tape fast forwarded to 02:35:00, knowing that there was no hope of the 90 minutes of Ghostwatch having been recorded on 25 minutes worth of tape.

Then, one day a couple summers ago, my fiancée, The Duchess, and I are wandering through Belfast. And I have an agenda in mind. Ghostwatch had been issued on DVD by the BFI. This program, never repeated, effectively banned, had finally been made available, that The Duke might once again relieve that pre-pubescent Halloween terror.

Thank you DVD. I love you, man, is all.

And I vowed, incidentally, that I would never leave myself in such a predicament ever again, and set about scouring the TV Times, making sure that if anything which even suggested that it might be of some worth were to be broadcast, I would have an arsenal of 180-minute blank videotapes awaiting its arrival.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

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