A final goodbye to VHS

Struggling to hold back the tears, Adam Lee Davies comes to terms with the end of a long love affair – with VHS

Michel Gondry’s ‘Be Kind Rewind’ (released on DVD this week) is a cooing love letter to the retro delights of VHS and all things lo-fi.

For some viewers, it might invoke a nostalgia for a simpler, dying home-viewing experience. But, for others, Gondry’s film represents a thinly fictionalised account of an ongoing obsession that the arrival of DVD has only served to inflame, as two video-store jockeys, played by Mos Def and Jack Black, refuse to bow to the juggernaut of digital progress by not stocking DVDs in their shop and favouring the plain old VHS.

The London equivalents of Def and Black might spend a Saturday trawling through the racks of Music & Video Exchange in Notting Hill or Up the Video Junction in the heart of Camden Lock Market. But even these stalwart vendors have been forced almost to abandon sales of VHS tapes. On a visit to Video Junction in Camden, the owner Nick showed me a storeroom stuffed with boxfuls of ‘unsellable’ VHS tapes which, to these eyes at least, was an experience akin to peeking into that warehouse at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’.

Naturally, there’s the odd drawback to buying secondhand videos. I recently came across an ex-rental big-box copy of Clint Eastwood’s hysterical 1982 Cold War potboiler ‘Firefox’ only to find that a pristine transfer was interrupted after 20 minutes by a Central TV ad break, circa 1986. Somebody had none-too-craftily taped over Warner Brothers’ version of the film with one screened on telly after Midweek Sports Special.

It seems only yesterday that the arrival of the VCR first allowed the hallowed vaults of cinema to spill into our front rooms. Costing a fortune and more complicated than manned space flight, these early players signalled the dawn of a utopian futurama and were often the most expensive thing in the house. I kicked off my own love affair with the aid of a trusty top-loading Ferguson Videostar that was spray-painted red with white ‘Starsky & Hutch’ lightning bolts down the side. Noisy, cantankerous and possessing a mind of its own, it was less a part of the furniture than a beloved family member.

The films initially chosen for release on this new format were either serio-comic Oscar plodders like ‘Kramer vs Kramer’ or antiquated Disney children’s fare like ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’. This would all change as dominion over the remote control ceded from dad to the kids, and the video floodgates opened. With a captive audience virtually assured, production values went out the window and lame comedies and exploitative ‘video nasties’ were churned out to insatiable playground demand.

When you can have any film imaginable delivered overnight by ordering on the internet, it’s hard to recall anything as pedestrian as idly browsing the racks of a video store or corner shop. But it was here that the true devotee was inducted into the VHS brotherhood. The original rental releases of these films invariably came in cases that were the size of cereal boxes and made of the same material as flight recorders.

We’re talking about the iconic puffy Warner Home Video ‘clamshell’ boxes here, of course, rather than the subsequent three-for-a-tenner versions knocked out in Woollies. These obelisks featured either covers that were faithful to the spirit of the original film poster art or, more commonly, hand-drawn scenes of licentious debauchery that bore no relation to the content of the film.

Even trailers seem less exciting and gleefully unhinged than before. Current trailers routinely restrict themselves to the latest arthouse crossover or high-concept behemoth, but back in the day they offered an entirely random and often inappropriate selection of promos: ‘On Golden Pond’ would follow ‘Maniac Cop’ and nobody batted an eyelid.

Nowhere was this laissez-faire attitude more apparent than in the case of the infamous Medusa Home Video, whose trailers were regularly peppered with swearwords, full-frontal nudity and graphic torture. But even these were less unpleasant than the ubiquitous explanation of the ratings system trotted out by Radio 1’s Simon Bates, in which he warned us to be aware of any upcoming ‘sexual swear words’.

Obviously, the films themselves are the same on any format. But, stripped of the distractions of commentaries and superfluous alternate endings, they present one with a viewing experience that’s far closer to the director’s original cinematic vision. Sadly, after it valiantly saw off Betamax and the Laserdisc, the game was finally up when the bells and whistles of DVD put the venerable VHS out of commission. Video recorders were all but discontinued, cassettes disappeared from high street retailers and magnetic tape became the province of crackpots, bores and Luddites – or, as I like to think of us, connoisseurs.

‘Be Kind Rewind’ is out June 30. VHS tapes may possibly still be found in your local charity shop, underneath the duffel coats and next to the George Formby 78s.

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