There is a new thing happening with television watching.
Now that you can record everything and keep it for ever on the likes of My Sky, or be quietly confident that it will be endlessly repeated, or even more confident you can watch things on an online provider whether legally or semi-legally or even quite illegally, you can just put a show you feel might be good but which you can't be bothered watching right now on hold to a later date.
For this column, that show is Veep.
It has been four long and mostly excellent years since Veep was first broadcast in 2012.
We have been putting off watching the show, even though it stars the wonderful Julia Louis-Dreyfus, to whom all thinking men have been attracted since she was on Seinfeld in the 1990s.
We put off watching Veep even though it seemed funny and smart.
We put off watching Veep even though it was created by the stunningly excellent Armando Iannucci as an adaptation of the British sitcom The Thick of It, a show we completely love.
But now we've started watching it.
We didn't watch it from series one, episode one, but from partway through series two, for some reason not immediately explicable.
But we liked it immediately, and not just because of the use of rude words starting with ``f'', and even better words starting with "c'' which are almost never acceptable but which are great to use if you are in a safe space and among friends.
Everybody else probably already knows Veep is set in the office of Selina Meyer, a fictional vice-president and then president of the United States.
The series follows Meyer (Louis-Dreyfus) and her team as they attempt to negotiate the difficult political environment of Washington, DC.
The fifth season of Veep ended in June this year, with a sixth season ordered for 2017.
Like all the very best shows it focuses on the absurdity of the human condition and the amusing hypocrisy of all we say and do, particularly in a political environment.
Veep is repeating on Sky's SoHo at the moment, and will be elsewhere without a doubt.
If you haven't already ...
Meanwhile, HBO show Westworld has kicked off, also on SoHo on Mondays at 8.35pm.
Westworld is based on the 1973 film of the same name, written and directed by American novelist Michael Crichton.
Westworld is a technologically advanced, Western-themed amusement park populated by synthetic androids that cater to high-paying visitors who can do whatever they wish within the park, without fear of retaliation from the hosts.
That appears, from episode one, to involve mostly sex and violence.
The show stars Anthony Hopkins, and is clever and well produced.
We will watch episode two before we are completely convinced.
- by Charles Loughrey
