You can rely on Ovid

When peo­ple say Net­flix, they are often re­fer­ring in gen­eral to the range of on­line plat­forms stream­ing films and TV se­ries, and such ser­vices came into their own dur­ing the lock­down. In our house, the Playsta­tion, the de­vice we use to ac­cess such ser­vices, worked harder than a health pro­fes­sional in a busy hos­pi­tal. I take my hat off to Sony be­cause the PS4 never let us down. On some days, my daugh­ter would binge on five straight episodes of Gilmore Girls be­fore my son would take over and pro­ceed to play Fort­nite with his friends for three hours.

I was the only one in the fam­ily who didn’t ham­mer the PS4 or on­line plat­forms, al­though it wasn’t, as you might think, be­cause I was too busy read­ing Ovid in the orig­i­nal Latin. The truth is that I tried re­ally hard to start clear­ing the long back­log of films and se­ries that had built up on my list in re­cent months, but it proved far eas­ier said than done, and in the end I didn’t get to see any­thing.

A big fan of George RR Mar­tin’s fan­tasy book se­ries, I stopped watch­ing Game of Thrones at sea­son five in the (I now re­alise overly op­ti­mistic) ex­pec­ta­tion that the next book would be out soon, al­low­ing me to read it be­fore get­ting back to the TV adap­ta­tion. Sadly, we’re still wait­ing for the book, and so I thought, what the hell, I’ll take ad­van­tage of the lock­down and watch the re­main­ing sea­sons. Then I dis­cov­ered that it’s on HBO, which we don’t have.

Un­de­terred, I smoothly tran­si­tioned to plan B: an­other TV adap­ta­tion of a book se­ries I love: Hi­lary Man­tel’s nov­els about the life of Henry VIII’s chief min­is­ter, Thomas Cromwell. The last in­stall­ment in the tril­ogy was out in March and after de­vour­ing the book in a week, I in­stantly went cold turkey. With hands trem­bling as the with­drawal symp­toms set in, I couldn’t open Net­flix quick enough, only to find that the BBC se­ries Wolf Hall isn’t on Net­flix, it’s on Filmin, which we don’t have (by the way, we have an in­ter­view with the founder of Filmin on pages 32 and 33).

Chang­ing tack, I thought I might have more suc­cess with a film, and for some rea­son I’ve had a han­ker­ing to re­watch The Road, with Viggo Mortensen, a movie I loved when I first saw it and as it’s a (quite ex­quis­ite) por­trayal of a dying world in which hu­man­ity has been all but wiped out, it seemed just the thing to cheer me up at a time like this. Back to Net­flix I went and, you guessed it, they didn’t have it. But it was on Ama­zon Prime, and I do have that. Vic­tory! I set­tled down to watch it with my son, but a minute in I re­alised it was in Span­ish. Not to worry, my son as­sured me, he’d change the lan­guage to the orig­i­nal in a jiffy and we’d be back in busi­ness. Ex­cept the only two lan­guage op­tions avail­able were Span­ish and Cata­lan. You’re jok­ing? It was filmed in Eng­lish and they lit­er­ally don’t have to do any­thing to it to offer it in its orig­i­nal lan­guage!

How about The Man­dalo­rian, my son sug­gested? We’re both big Star Wars fans so it seemed a good call. Ex­cept that it’s only on Dis­ney+, which we don’t have.

I gave it one more try. A block­buster, an ac­tion film. I picked one at ran­dom: John Wyck, with Keanu Reeves. I plugged in the title in the Net­flix search bar and be­fore I’d fin­ished typ­ing, it came up in the list of sug­ges­tions. Fab­u­lous! Until I saw that Net­flix has the third film in the se­ries but not the first two. How does that make any sense at all?

De­feated, I saw that my op­tions were ei­ther to take out a sub­scrip­tion for each plat­form, which would be un­jus­ti­fi­ably ex­pen­sive, or turn to Ovid, which I do have, in the orig­i­nal.