4:3 back in? Let's talk aspect ratios

[Spencer]

May i ask (as I'm far too young to remember it, and we had Sky anyway), if you watched a 4:3 picture (say, from the analogue), how would a widescreen TV deal with it; it would it stretch it, pillar box it or crop it?

IME, it generally stretched it to a 16:9 picture. The older Sky boxes use to switch to the correct aspect ratio (if not overruled by your TV preferences) but I could never get that to work for some reason from the Sky HD age onwards. In those cases, I switch to 4:3 using the TV remote because I can't stand stretchivision.

I remember my first widescreen TV, a Toshiba CRT, used to make an actual ‘clunk’ sound from an internal relay switch when changing between 4:3 and 16:9 every time the Sky Digital box detected an ARC flag. It was quite irritating, but less irritating than watching in stretchyvision.