Downton Blues

One of the more annoying aspects of Israeli life is the television system – and here I use the word loosely.  Nothing could be less systematic.  A program could start, say, at 20:45 for the first four episodes and then you tune in for episode 5 at the appointed time only to find that it started half an hour earlier.  Annoying.

I thought things would get better with the advent of cable, but I forgot where I was living.  The cable company, also being Israeli, is no more reliable than broadcast television.  I give you for your consideration the example of “Revenge.”  After showing 18 throat-clutchingly delicious episodes, some of them multiple times, it suddenly disappeared from our airwaves without a word of explanation.  Where are the last four?  Annoying.

But the real annoyance was one I cannot blame on the cable company:  I missed the entire third series of “Downton Abbey.”  How this happened is still not entirely clear to me.  It’s not as if I wasn’t looking out for it.  The problem stems from the fact that it is shown on Israeli Channel 1, the taxpayer-supported channel that is so mind-numbingly boring that most of the time it shows stuff on a par with the close-up of a thumb.  But after the first of the year I diligently checked the listings in the Jerusalem Post every week to see if the new series was starting.  Nothing.  Then, sometime around April, I learned from an oft-hand comment in the same newspaper that the series had run.  I had missed the whole thing!  Really annoying.

I sulked about this for a long time.   Who was responsible for the false listings, the Jerusalem Post or Channel 1?  More importantly, who could I sue?  I have a sneaking suspicion that the Hebrew newspapers got it right, so was the Post just incompetent or was there an anti-English conspiracy?  Ultimately, I went ahead and ordered the DVD from Britain.  Of course, I already knew the highlights of the season, thanks to spoilers that come directly – and unasked – to my computer from NBC News.  Still, now that I’m all caught up with the doings of the Crawley family and their hangers-on, I feel I can rest easy.  One less annoyance.