Here & Now Issue 34 | July 2019

THE WORTHING BYPASS
This column will not change
your viewing habits
When it comes to querying ethics,
lifestyle choice and moral judgement,
the question from Andrew Marr and
his ilk to the multitude of jostling
Conservative Party candidates should
not have been, have you ever taken
drugs?
A far better line of enquiry to ascertain a person’s moral
probity and intellectual rigour would have been to pose the
far more pointed question, did you go for VHS or betamax?
It is of course, a trick question. In spite of the subsequent
propaganda that would suggest that anyone who opted for
betamax was an unsuspecting idiot, the reality is that VHS
was in fact the inferior technological offering at the time.
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The myth in my family was that the old man was a
technophobe and therefore chose the wrong package. Truth
be told, I advised him on the superiority of the lesser known
and soon-to-be-extinct alternative. It would not be the last
time I screwed up, as he would happily remind me.
The reason for seeking to redress the balance is that we
are caught in a maelstrom of competing choices that seem
to extract a polarity response from those in disagreement.
It would appear that the collateral damage of Brexit has
rendered us unfit to compromise on anything: it’s Netflix
or 4DX, Amazon Prime versus the multiplex and Game of
Thrones versus Shakespeare in the Park. Like a party full of
pot smoking Tories, it’s all terribly irrelevant.
I’m pro-choice. On everything. When Interstellar came out I
had to watch it on IMAX. Same with A Quiet Place. You just
have to watch that on the big screen in a packed cinema
with the usual popcorn and pop-guzzling masses terrified to
make a sound. The latest episode of Veep, on the other hand,
will lighten a packed train journey to the big smoke whilst
watching on your iPhone. Then there are the local delights.
A trip to the Connaught or the Dome is worth its weight in
gold to watch Aladdin with the kids (even if it wasn’t as good
as the original). Takes me back to when the old man took me
to watch my first ever film at the local picture house, with
Christopher Reeve’s Superman blowing my tiny mind in a way
that cocaine could never quite match. Or so I imagine.
News of the return of outdoor cinema to Worthing saw my
rose-tinted vista radiate a rainbow symphony and filled my
heart with celestial joy by harking back to an age that never
actually existed in this country. It’s what we at the Bypass
call an alternative. Something different to the norm. An
opportunity to bypass the mundane.
The days of the bi-polar two-party system are happily coming
to a close. It no longer has to be either/or. You can have
everything. It would be beyond silly to open a multiplex in
Worthing as it would destroy the ornate picture houses,
but that doesn’t stop you from travelling to neighbouring
shires for big screen IMAX blockbusters whilst savouring the
historic shrines on your doorstep.
Let’s not fall off the cliff-edge with betamax thinking, but
engage with every device at our disposal, toking on all the
while, if that’s to your fancy. I can only imagine. n
The Ubiquitous Hack
46 | July 2019 | HERE & NOW ADVERTISE NOW 01903 686100