POTATOES FIT FOR A KING

Now that my children are grown up, the best thing about the Christmas holidays is having time to myself. With work and to-do lists on hold, I love kicking back without any guilt and indulging in activities I don’t get a chance to do during the year. That might be deep cleaning my motorbike, finishing a book that’s lain untouched for months, or watching films. The various pressures on my time - usually family and work - and the rise of alternative entertainment - primarily YouTube and podcasts - means these days I rarely sit down and watch a film all the way through.

One film on my list was The King, which came out in 2019 and stars Timothée Chalamet as Henry V. The historical drama is loosely based on Shakespeare’s Henriad plays, of which I’m a fan. The film is on Netflix, which I don’t have, but which my wife’s sister, whose house we were going to for Christmas Day lunch, does. My contribution to the lunch would be roast potatoes (I got my wife’s family hooked on roast potatoes a few years ago, which gives me leverage over them). Even though the family would be out visiting, I arranged to get to the house early to roast the potatoes. Of course, I also helped myself to a cold beer and their television. An hour and 20 minutes later, the potatoes were about done and I was into the home stretch of the film when the doorbell rang. Oh no! The family had returned early, the house filled with kids, and the TV was turned off. My careful plan was in tatters. Would I have to wait till the following Christmas to see the rest of the film?

No, because I had a plan B. My sister-in-law and her family would be spending New Year in our village, in her parents’ holiday home. The house has a digital box with Netflix on it, so all I needed was to get them to sign in and we’d be good to go, and if necessary I could sweeten the deal with the promise of more roast potatoes.

On New Year’s Day morning the family decided to go for a walk, so I swooped in and asked my brother-in-law if he would help me set up my film before they left. Yet we noticed that the wifi signal was worryingly weak and that we had to use an old remote control as a mouse and cursor.

The whole process was agonisingly slow, with lots of restarts and swearing, but eventually we loaded The King on Netflix, only to get a message that this was an outdated version of the app and had to be upgraded. It took quite a while to download the new version of the app due to the pathetic wifi signal. Eventually it was done and we slowly navigated our way back to Netflix, and got another message telling us to upgrade the system app, which took even longer. Finally, we had The King back on the screen, and at the spot that I had stopped watching it a few days earlier. With a voila, my brother-in-law handed me the remote and went in search of his family.

I pressed play, only to realise that the film was configured to Spanish. I managed to change it back to the original but only after losing my spot and inadvertently turning off the app, which required me to restart the whole system and then wait until it found the wifi signal again. In fits and starts the film resumed and I managed to make my way through to the last scene, when it stalled again. There were three minutes left and all I could see was a spinning white disk in the centre of the screen. I was just about to restart the system when I heard the family returning home. Like the French at Agincourt I too was defeated by The King and, unless I give in and just pay for Netflix, I will have to wait until next year to watch those final three minutes.

Opinion