Catching up what is missed

There are many reasons for missing entire series, year after year, of excellent television.

It may be you intended to watch a show, but disliked one actor who you saw in another series, and that was enough to put you off.

Perhaps you watched part of a not particularly good episode and wrote the whole thing off.

Perhaps a workmate with poor taste told you the show was no good, and you believed them.

Whatever the case, redemption is now available through video on demand services, which offer second and third chances to right past television decision-making wrongs at one's leisure.

Spark's Lightbox service is offering three months' free subscription to its mobile customers, and that (and someone lending us a DVD of series two) set the stage for Remotely Interesting to finally take in Parks and Recreation, just six years after it began, and four months since series seven finished.

Nobody can accuse us of not being up to date.

Lightbox has series one to five on offer for anyone interested in a catch up.

And Parks and Recreation, which I cannot recommend highly enough, particularly to those involved in local government, is just excellent.

Starring Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, a mid-level bureaucrat in the parks department of Pawnee, a fictional town in Indiana, the show is done in the now familiar documentary style of The Office.

Poehler may be familiar to some as one half of what was an extremely funny duo, with Tina Fey, hosting the Golden Globe Awards for the past three years.

The show's depiction of local government is spot on.

Public forums, for instance, always descend into shouting matches between angry and slightly insane people.

As Leslie Knope describes it: ''What I hear when I'm being yelled at is people caring loudly.''

Season one received mixed reviews, although changes for season two turned that around.

It is interesting to watch the characters become more rounded out and funnier through season two.

Meanwhile, BBC documentary Tigers About the House begins at 7.30pm on Prime tomorrow.

The show follows Queensland's Australia Zoo keeper Giles Clark as he hand-rears two Sumatran tiger cubs in his home.

There are just 500 Sumatran tigers left, apparently, and Clark is determined to give them their best start in life.

You just can't go wrong with tiger cubs.

They score a perfect 10 on the cuteness scale, and, because they are endangered, you can't really say a bad word about them.

Television gold.

Charles Loughrey

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