These are dark times for Virgin Media customers. Last weekend, thanks to an ongoing impasse over fees, Virgin removed 10 UKTV channels from its service. If that wasn’t bad enough, five of them are free-to-air, meaning that approximately 4 million Virgin subscribers are in effect worse off than if they’d just had Freeview.
But the really bad news, the absolute kicker in an already terrible news cycle, is that one of the channels is Dave. Beautiful, blokey, moderately self-aware Dave; home to Taskmaster and Red Dwarf and Porters and a genuinely endless vortex of Top Gear repeats.
A life without Dave is already too much for some subscribers, with a #SaveDave hashtag forlornly doing the rounds on Twitter in the vain hope that someone will see it and restore a shred of normality to a life that’s rapidly transforming into a whirling, Dave-free nightmare. However, Virgin Media customers should not despair. While this is certainly an inconvenience, there are always workarounds you can try before cancelling your contract. For instance:
1) Find alternative programming
Shows on Dave might be good, but not many of them are that original. For example, if you miss its Would I Lie to You? repeats, you could always try watching the tonally similar 8 Out of Cats Does Countdown, which has just begun its 16th series on Channel 4. If you miss its Storage Hunters UK, try Storage Wars on the History Channel. If you miss Hairy Bikers’ Mississippi Adventure, you could always try watching any of the million other Hairy Bikers shows that are permanently on every other channel all the time. And if you miss Top Gear? There’s always New Top Gear, although you’re not a masochist.
2) Watch DVDs
Don’t forget that you can still buy physical copies of all your favourite Dave shows. QI fans can buy box sets of 13 entire series, for example, for the low low price of £120. Series 1-8 of Red Dwarf can be snapped up for just £44.99 and, while no Taskmaster DVDs are currently available, you can nevertheless buy a DVD of a five-year-old Greg Davies stand-up DVD for £10.42. Keep this up and you’ll never be short of entertainment again. You won’t have enough money to eat, but at least you’ll never be short of entertainment.
3) Discover other Virgin channels
Hey grumpy, don’t complain that Virgin has robbed you of Dave. Be thankful that Virgin has given you Investigation Discovery, home of shows like Dateline with Tamzin Outhwaite. And Horse & Country, home of shows like Equitrekking. And Quest Red, home of shows like Curvy Brides Boutique. It’s the same thing. It is.
4) Reenact shows
Can’t stomach life without your favourite Dave shows? Simply recreate them at home! Alex Horne has written a Taskmaster book for precisely this purpose, for instance. But why stop there? Why not reenact Timber Kings by building a log cabin in your garden? Why not reenact American Pickers by rifling through barns for antiques? Why not reenact Scrappers by doing the exact same thing as you did for American Pickers? Why not reenact Top Gear by punching a colleague until you’re fired? There is a whole afternoon of fun to be had here.
5) Spy
If you really can’t stand to be apart from Dave, there’s a lot to be said for lurking outside your Freeview-owning neighbour’s house and watching it through their window. True, there are so many ways to watch television now that it’s highly unlikely they’ll be watching Dave when you want to watch Dave, but that’s nothing a little pro-Dave propaganda won’t solve. Try engaging them in conversation on how much you like Top Gear, or what a cool guy Inspector Dave Corcoran from Cop Car Workshop is. If all else fails, you could always erect a large poster reading SOMETIMES IT ISN’T ENTIRELY FUTILE TO WATCH SIX-YEAR-OLD MOCK THE WEEK REPEATS AT NIGHT, TREVOR right outside their front door. Could work.
6) Just watch Netflix like everyone else does
I mean, duh.
