Scabs!

September 21, 2026

No, not the picket-line crossing ones, the other ones.

You must have had this happen to you when you were younger, or maybe it still happens to you. You had a slip or grazed yourself, you bled, the scrape healed over, and an impossible-to-ignore scab knitted over the wound. As a child and as an adult, I found something really satisfying about picking scabs, despite my mother’s protestations that it would heal faster if I “left the bloody thing alone”. It wasn’t pain-free, either. You’d get to a point in the descabification process where the last little bit of ruddy mass had knitted itself a little too enthusiastically to actual skin, and although you knew it would hurt, you’d work away at it until all you were left with was a freshly opened, but slightly more healed wound. You knew in your own mind that it would heal faster if you left it alone and that Mother was right all along, but the urge to have another little pick would prove irresistible. And one little pick would lead to a bit of a pick-fest. This pick-fest would likely be called a “binge” in today’s modern parlance.

Which leads me conveniently to the modern-day equivalent of the scab on your knee that proves irresistible to pick at: The television series Lost.

Fetch the Iodide!

Like many a scabby knee, Lost began normally and innocently enough. We were flicking channels, looking for something to while away a couple of evenings, with little else to occupy our time, and then all of a sudden there was blood everywhere, and tissues were being applied to the freshly bleeding wound.

We binged Lost. Every single episode. Every annoying plot twist. Every ridiculous development. Every continuity error that had me shouting at the idiot box. Every moment where I found myself saying, “Oh, for pity’s sake!” while simultaneously pressing the button to start the next episode. Oh, and that bloody awful backdrop effect that looked horribly pixelated to me, but which Lin insisted looked perfectly normal, leaving me wondering whether the problem was actually Lost, the television, my eyesight, or simply my rapidly deteriorating mental state. I got new specs ordered as a precaution!

Anyone who has watched this (and I’m well aware that we’re rather late in coming to the party) must surely have experienced something similar, and I’m sure the scabby-but-irresistibly-pickable-knee analogy isn’t lost on folk. At the end of series one we’d kind of had enough, but there was just enough of a plot twist (that stubborn bit of scab-cum-flesh) to move us onto series two, three, four…

Obviously, we knew it would be painful AGAIN. We knew we should leave it well alone. We knew there were other things we could be doing with our lives. Useful things. Enriching things. Perhaps even going outside – the horror! Reading a book – in my defence, I was simultaneously watching Lost and reading The Metamorphosis (well, not simultaneously, obviously). Listening to a record. You know, something a little bit more culturally rewarding. Something less infuriatingly addictive! Crack, perhaps? (Don’t do it, kids!)

But there was something that kept us going back. And, like the scab, it proved a little more painful than you imagined. The trouble was that the pain didn’t diminish. In fact, it got worse as the wound and flesh knitted and healed. But that little frisson of pain was somehow irresistible and, a handful of weeks later, we’d finished the whole bloody thing. Every. Single. Episode.

Do you know how many hours Lost lasts? Do you?

Look, I’m not saying that Lost was totally awful. It wasn’t. Well, it was – see scab analogy! But there was just enough in each episode to make us want to go back, and eventually the “we’ve got this far, we might as well just get to the end” mentality had set in. I guess this is how computer games hook kids in. Presumably, somewhere in the background, a psychologist was monitoring us and occasionally pressing a button marked GIVE THEM ANOTHER POLAR BEAR.

Now, I’m led to understand that, having completed Lost, we will receive some kind of medal or certificate. Nothing has arrived yet, but I’m assuming it’s in the post. Perhaps it will arrive in a flourish of black smoke. No doubt when it finally arrives, it will be as disappointing as the final episode of the series. A slightly moist squib.

Sorry, I was asking if you knew how many hours Lost lasted, but I got distracted.

There are so many that it’s actually easier to measure their length in days. It’s akin to interstellar travel or traversing Charles de Gaulle airport.

I asked Ai how long it was and was informed that “the complete series runs to roughly 90 hours. That’s 121 episodes spread across six seasons. Ninety hours! Three days and eighteen hours.” Nearly FOUR BASTARDING DAYS of doing very little other than sitting in front of the television, watching people run around an island while becoming progressively more irritated with both them and myself.

It’s kind of embarrassing, really. No, there’s no “kind of” about it – it is embarrassing!

I began looking for musical equivalents in an effort to justify this inordinate amount of wasted time. My efforts were for nought. I turned again to Ai and asked what the longest opera was, in the hope that I could convince myself that what we had actually been doing was some kind of high-cultural endurance exercise. I was informed that “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is one of the longest regularly performed single operas at around four to five hours.” His complete Ring cycle comes in at somewhere around 15 to 17 hours, while Stockhausen, clearly deciding Wagner was a bit of a lightweight, created his seven-opera Licht cycle with about 29 hours of music.

This means that in the time it took us to watch Lost, I could have “enjoyed” the entire Ring around six times. However, given that I lasted precisely 43 minutes (perhaps it was 42, I forget) in the theatre when we travelled to Rome to specifically watch an opera before deciding I’d had quite enough culture for one lifetime, I’m not entirely sure this is a fair analogy.

Still, imagine the things I could have done with those 90 hours. I could have listened to countless records. I could have read books – I could be further on with Kafka than I am. I could have learned something useful. I could have taken photographs. I could have walked somewhere. I could have stared blankly at a wall and, arguably, emerged from the experience with a greater sense of personal fulfilment. I look forward to the Prime’s “PAINT!” series, where we are treated to a full seven days of the camera being pointed at a questionably lit wall where we, the viewers, are expected to watch the aforementioned pigment become increasingly less moist.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. We’ve started watching The Gentlemen. At least we got in early with this one and can pick at the scab over an extended period rather than binge-pick the bloody thing until it bleeds.

And this whole sorry episode got me thinking about television on demand. Not all that long ago, if you missed a television series (or even one episode of a series) you missed it. That was it. Gone. Unless, of course, you’d remembered to set the VHS to record it. And yes, I fully expect letters from readers telling me that I was an idiot and Betamax was the technically superior format. Or perhaps you had a friend who had recorded it, probably over their dad’s treasured copy of The Big Match, leading to an entirely different kind of bloodshed. There was no going back to episode one and consuming the entire bloody lot in a matter of weeks. Television dictated when you watched it, and when it was over, you had seven days to get on with your life before the next episode arrived.