A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

At a time when Matt would geek out with his fellow uni pals over ’90s TV series on a regular basis, I was still stuck in a positively rural Swiss middle school just getting into taping films and shows and sharing them with people in my class. It was actually my very tech-savvy grandfather who was the innovator in our family and had not only bought the first computer (a Commodore Amiga) but more recently a double-decker video cassette recorder. Which meant that we were finally getting his hand-me-down, our first family VHS player/recorder! So at the tender age of twelve, I finally got my hands on anything from Star Wars, Star Trek, Alfred Hitchcock and, of course, James Bond. Many of these recordings were missing bits at the beginning or at the end, were shown in questionably censored pan-and-scan versions and were of course dubbed in German. Nonetheless, the good ones got through to us and – unequipped with cell phones or social media – the schoolyard became the arena in which we would review, pan or marvel at the latest tapes making the rounds.