Televisonandonandonandon

Back in Blog...

On my busier days, I find my time is taken up by at least 5 different activities (as long as I can count sleeping, weeping and trying to teach myself to be able to blink out of unison as 'activities') which I think probably counts as the third most dismal social life in the entire universe behind OJ Simpson and a disused fridge partially buried in a landfill. Entire weeks of my calendar are filled with tantalising 'To Do' lists, including items such as 'breathing', 'picking out new envelopes' and 'throwing away disused envelopes as the gum has perished after nine years sitting at the bottom of my bedside table'.

Luckily, I'm expecting my second cousin "Savagewithoutreservation" to come over tonight to catch up. We have such fun together. He normally starts the japery by playfully kicking my door off its hinges, jokingly punching me in the gut and hilariously picking through my wallet before pissing on the floor and leaving on the back of a motorbike driven by his girlfriend, Teela, who elegantly gives me the finger and drives off cackling as I'm bent double on the carpet trying to suck in wind and coughing up blood like a spitting cobra that's been cut in half with a rake. We have such fun...

Still, since moving into my new flat, I've found myself in the dangerous position of being back in control of every aspect of my life, leisure time and how I fill the hours between coming home from work and reporting to the parole board. This gives me a bit of a dilemma because, for the first time in nearly two and half years, I can pretty much please myself. Having lived with various landlords, my folks (stop snickering: I know... I know...) and in ratbag, metal grated, fear sodden hostels, located in the puddles that congeal secretly behind the backwaters of the USA, I've always had an agenda, or at the very least, been a guest. Now, suddenly, I'm the master of my own destiny. The freedom to explore the vistas of star sparkled excitement, glorious, thrilling challenge or character affirming, bleak and windswept defeats, are all open to me.

Or.... I can sit on my arse and watch the telly.

Yes, I have once again firmly grasped the remote from the sofa of life and am wearily flicking through the Sky menu, trying to work out if the gut-boilingly awful background music qualifies as some kind of human rights violation. It's been a long time since TV has played a significant part of my life and I was anxious to see how it had changed. Don't get me wrong, I have seen some telly in the last 2 years, but American TV is so awful, it seems as though it's been specifically designed to prevent you watching it, like some kind of perverse, Prisoner-esq social experiment, or a kind of oblique post-modern art form. After enduring that, when I've been in the UK and staying in houses not owned by me, politeness and common sense have meant that I have mainly watched whatever anyone else wanted to watch and picked up a book instead. Well, balls to that. Books.... I ask you...

However, I've begun to notice that things have changed in the digital era, and that something has gone badly wrong. On this, there are many, many far better blogs (hard to believe I know), dedicated to deriding TV's weakening output over the last 20 years, so I wont go into that too much. It is reaching a point where it no longer even pretends to be an outlet for cultural expression, more a declining and dying media slowly dragging on until it reaches it's inevitable event horizon, finally becoming a 32 hour a day rolling slide show of Simon Cowel's face altering imperceptibly apart from his ruby lips mouthing the word 'despair' over and over again. Meanwhile, across the bottom of the screen, a number flashes up so you can vote on which one out of Graeme Norton, Declan Donnolly or Thatfriggingmeercat you would like to come to your house and smash you over the head with a sledgehammer like a playful six year old hammering plastic shapes into the correctly shaped hole.

Although it's true that the overall quality of channels and shows has descended to sub-garbage levels, probably due to the proliferation of channels all desperate to leap up and down and distract you, I have noticed more and more just how little the schedules differ. When I come in from work, make my cup of steaming hot heroin and settle down for some hard core, remote prodding action, it's the same thing every single night, not ideologically, but literally. Every hour of every channel is exactly the same as that very same hour the previous evening, leaving you feeling drowsy and numb before you even settle into it. Now, I can understand the point of things like soaps having regular time slots, but they do it with the repeats as well, until you find yourself whispering 'Top Gear, Buzzcocks, Mock the Week, Top Gear, Buzzcocks, Mock the Week, Top Gear...' to yourself whilst slowly rocking backwards and forwards and waiting for Nurse Ratched to softly announce that it's 'medication time' and you can go for your tea.

The problem isn't the content, the problem is me. Why can't I break the cycle? Why am I trapped in this Groundhog inspired malaise, controlled by the 2 song visual jukebox pushing indifference into my skull until my entire sensory repertoire has been switched to a level below comatose and into the realms of Tess Daly-like zombification. The only thing approaching a response is chuckling sadistically at the pratfalls of the gormless interchangeable contestants on the inflatable, zero-budget, rat maze that is Total Wipeout. That show is on every day, at the same time and it's exactly the same show, every time and I still watch it despite the fact that it's totally awful. It's the TV equivalent of sitting on your arm long enough not to feel it when your second cousin's girlfriend starts bending your fingers backwards until they make a satisfying 'pop'.

I tell you what though, I've definately figured out the answer. If only I can track down this mysterious 'Dave' character... I mean, who is this guy, that we give so much of our free time over to his cheaply acquired re-runs of game shows and Ray Mears' woodland based, ruddy cheeked scuttling? I always assumed he looks like the Evil Emperor from Star Wars, wearing a dark cloak and whispering vaguely intelligible threats of world domination if he can't secure the rights to old episodes of Come Dine With Me before the end of the year.

I suppose that there is something slightly comforting about it all, knowing that every time you're bored, or life makes you feel like clamping your testicles between the hot irons of a sandwich toaster, or you can't afford to eat anything more expensive than previously sucked mints rescued from down the side of your elderly neighbour's sofa, you can always turn to the endless show reel of Friends / Scrubs / Hollyoaks that makes up E4's entire schedule. This in turn leaves you free to switch off the dwindling embers of your mind, lay back, and shower yourself with nothingness. I'm sure that bit of down time must be good for the brain? It must be enjoyable, mustn't it, to be totally oblivious to sense, reason or quality? If it wasn't, Avatar would never have made any money, would it?

As for me, well I'm discovering that there's a time for sitting on your arse watching the telly, but you can't do that forever. Luckily, I'm the creative type, so I sit on my arse writing crap that's added, regular as clockwork to a never ending cycle of mind dribble for you to pick over with scant regard. There's no way Dave's got me in his grip, he can take his schedule and shovel it right up his.... oooooo, I like Frankie Boyle...

OldmcrichiehadablogEeeeiiiiieeeeiiiioooooohhhhhhTheEnd xxxxx

Ash 2 life, ash 2 reality...

I agree with Blog...

So, I've taken a break from the Leaders Debate on SKY and the frankly astonishing sight of Gordon Brown trying to swarm up to the Twitter generation by grinning in a vaguely sinister manner out of the corner of his mouth like a cartoon pirate. It's almost sad watching him offering weak platitudes to the centre left and filling every silence by grumbling tediously about fiscal policy while flanked by NC/DC (Nick Clegg, apparently auditioning for the vacant 'jocular everyman' slot on the sofa of The One Show and David Cameron sweating nervously like a sixth former waiting on the results of the head boy elections) and batting back and forth sense and relevance while a comatose audience of mannequins wonder where Ant and Dec are and if there will be nibbles afterwards.

Actually, I really wanted someone in the audience to ask if the collapse in the economy was responsible for Iceland claiming their revenge for their treatment at the hands of the British Government by inducing one of their volcano's to vomit ash into the air like a Geordie chav on a hen night spewing 14 Jagermiesters into a skip. Indeed, the unprecedented ban on air travel seemed to send the nation into a kind of existential crisis of confidence. News outlets couldn't decide if this was a story of tragedy; reporting the families stranded abroad and chaos at the airports whilst simultaneously showing gleeful weathermen, explaining tedious looking satellite pictures and looking smug at finally being on the "big" news rather than only being noticed for wearing quirky ties or predicting drizzle.

In fact most of the major news outlets accompanied the doom and gloom reporting of 200 million pounds a day being lost by the airlines in refunded tickets with slide shows of astonishing lightning storms taking place inside the ash cloud. The ethereal and other worldly pictures made my eyeballs sweat with glee whilst also leaving me with an odd sense that an apocalypse was coming. If I felt like that, with Google, newspapers and cuddly-wuddly weathermen to guide me through the science behind it all, it makes me wonder what people who saw Vesuvius erupt must have thought about it. They probably thought it best to bar the door and stay inside out of wrath's way "Oi, Claudius, come away from the door.... I don't care 'ow 'ot it is in here, there's no way you're going out in this.... what do you mean river of fire? Come away from that window you nosy boy and help me arrange pottery into useful places to be discovered easily in 2000 or so years...."

Yes, there was panic at the airports, panic in the stations, panic in hotels, panic in Majorca, panic on the ferries, panic on the beaches, panic in the fields and in the streets. There was panic in oceans, panic in the wood, panic in the schools, panic the homes, panic on the streets of London. I wonder to myself....

Yet, despite all this panic, there seemed to be precious little once it became clear that the cloud wasn't simply going to blow away and become just another minor irritant, like the snow or the Conservative party, but a fully fledged threat to the viability of Northern Europe's airlines. With a combination of the recession, increasing fuel bills and losses going back to 2001 still putting a strain on the industry, the collective might of the airlines finally upgraded the ash from "dangerous" to "safe" which is the kind of leap of faith that I would certainly trust to a large corporation struggling to find profits to appease their shareholders, right up there with footballers offering marriage counselling or Tim Lovejoy opening a charm school.

Still, not all of the newspapers were convinced but the assertions that flying a huge metal object into a plume of broken glass, sand and rock is a good idea. The Daily Star (that beacon of sense and rationality) ran a suitably sensitive headline: "TERROR AS PLANE HITS ASH CLOUD" which was incomprehensibly pulled from airport concession stands because some namby-pamby travellers were a tad upset. The fact that the accompanying pictures and story related to a TV drama based on an incident that occurred 28 years ago might have weakened the relevance of the headline slightly with the Star incredibly being accused of sensationalism. Luckily, on Pg 3, Katie (from Bristol) says "The cloud of ash has been a worry". Phew. That's cleared that one up, cheers Katie. Now put some clothes on love, you'll catch your death.

Other than semi-literal representations of terror in the skies, most of the news has been taken up with grumbling travellers bemoaning the lack of planes flying into said plumes of danger and telling their tales of barefooted, un-business classed pilgrimage without so much as a free hotel room to call their own. Obviously, I'm being a bit flippant, but who are these people? Shouldn't you be at work, instead of taking the children out of school to lounge about by a pool on the Costa-del-Boy? These people got exactly what they deserved... an extra 6 days of holiday.... damn them.

I for one have had to cancel my worldwide tour, despite having made my savagereservations months ago (6 months I've been waiting to crack that gem out) and therefore disappointing both the fans attending the live blogs in New York, Rome and Swansea. The Icelandic audience were weak though. Ashen faced throughout (HAHAHAAAAAAA)....

sorry...

Takecaremylittletulips. xx

Vote.... or DIE! (not really petal)

Dear ballot blog,



Good evening my dears. Tonight is a night loaded with significance. A night that is crucial to the whole ruddy country. A night so exciting and thrilling that at least 12 percent of you will have the first clue what the devil I'm talking about. No, it's not all you can eat rib and taco night at TGI Heart Disease, it's the first meaningful political debate on these shores since Pitt the Younger offered Henry Addington out onto the cobbles for 'cocking a snook' in his general direction and they had a jolly good dust up.



It may not be the only form of political debate in this country (the entertainment o'rama otherwise known as PM's questions isn't exactly engaging, but, I swear it does actually happen. Actually, for all I know it could be hosted by Simon Cowell and takes place on the back of a live horse, but I've looked it up on Wikipedia, so it must be real), but tonight will be the first televised debate of it's kind in the history of this country, so it's importance in rescuing the country from the collective political malaise we're in, simply can't be overstated.... but dear Lord, I'm going to try.



As the debate is going on right now, I will refrain from commenting on it for now (it'll give my bile duct 24 hours to recover from the amount it had to pipe up to my throat to spew at the telly in furious, spine shattering rage). But as it's on ITV, I'm just pleased it wasn't interspersed with clips of Ant and Dec standing backstage and gurning at the camera the second Gordon Brown opened his hideous mouth only to discover he actually has a reasonable speaking voice.



For only the second time in my life, there is the real possibility of a change of government in this country, which fills me with a mixture of warm nostalgia for the last time and a blood thirsty, gurgling rage at what a wasted opportunity it was. The more I think about it, I lurch between these two conflicting ideologies like a pixel in a game of Pong, until I become a slobbering, gibbering mentalist, rocking backwards and forwards in my bath chair whispering something about being 'tough on crime...'



Actually, looking back at the above paragraph (I don't recommend it) it's actually the third time I can remember a 'very real chance' of a change in government. The first time, it was a fresh faced, ginger hued, Neil Kinnock who was challenging the ash faced, hair lipped, John Major in what was surely about to become a landslide victory for Labour. They were finally securing the advantage by means of harnessing the nation's collective exasperation over the Thatcher years and our desire to take it out on the whole bloody lot of them. It seemed like the tide had finally turned against the Tories, until Labour snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and lost in what was the finest hour of Major's career, just beating the day Norma put an extra Dairylea triangle into his lunchbox into second place.



In terms of unexpected victories, it was pretty well up there with the time David spotted Goliath off his line and chipped him from the halfway line. What seemed to swing the vote in Major's direction was the nation's collective fear to hand over the reigns to an un-tested, un-known opposition party and joy for the fact that he wasn't Margret Thatcher. The 'bounce' in popularity that the party experienced due to a change of leader was certainly similar to the one that Gordon Brown's takeover had on the Labour party, when he very nearly called a snap election within months of taking office and the Tories struggled to find their voice (As good decisions go, it was right up there with Hitler saying to Goering: "Let's have a pop at these Russians then...").



As a leader, Major seemed to bring a kind of post-apocalyptic serenity to the country, which quickly turned to numb acceptance, apathy, then ridicule. He was the last of the 'Spitting Image' generation, brought down by his depiction as a grey robot, obsessed by the quality of his peas, rather than an empowered world leader taking the country through the end of a dismal recession. The country had been ready for change, but bottled it at the last minute when Thatcher refused to lose an election to the nation, instead resigning to the will of her own party after they saw the writing on the wall. The Major years actually saw improvements - the inequalities gap reduced for the first time in a generation (and the last), inflation began to reduce, making business more competitive and Take That were only taking a minute, girl, to fall in love. To fall in luuu-uuve.



However, after years of greedy feeding at the trough of government and with a leader who didn't actually seem to have the fight to lead the party, the Tories began to tear themselves apart. The old dragons refused to leave behind the fun fair that Thatcher had bought them free candy floss at for two decades, so decided to stand by the tea cups, stomping their feet and making a spectacle of themselves. Infighting, backstabbing, undermining and a series of ridiculous sex scandals would dissect the party. It was to be a grizzly climbdown that would leave them unelectable for nearly 20 years leaving a political vacuum that was ready to be filled by two blokes with faces resembling the Joker and a wooden oar, who had a few beers in the pub and wrote 'New' in front of their party logo, eventually deciding to divide up power between them for a hundred glorious years.

Yes, 1997 was a glorious time. A time where left wing politically active singers larked about sipping champagne in Downing Street, where politics fell behind personality in the pecking order and the power of the media grew into a huge monster, threatening to swallow the system whole. The Sun won Blair an election, and we all rode off into the 'boom' years with a credit card in our pockets, listening to Mini-Disks and eating Sushi. People's lifestyles became more liberal and we became a generation of better educated, better travelled and ethnically aware gap year students. In the post Tory hype, we were distracted just long enough by suddenly having enough credit to make us happy, fat and bored.

I remember feeling, during my student years, that we didn't really have any great struggle to mobilise us. I wanted to be engaged, but felt less and less so. Tragedy in 2001 sparked a series of events which would lead us into a war we didn't want or need. I was afraid. I'm sure everyone was. I was affraid this could be a war on our doorsteps, fought by terrorist groups who's motivation I couldn't possibly understand from my own little white, middle class shell. So Tony and George took the war away from our shores and put it on theirs. It seemed like a clever political move, fighting "terror" and turning the whole thing into an insane, Orwellian perma-war movie broadcast from 'foreignland', keeping us afraid enough to stay politically immobile, without actually having to fight another country. A war against a noun can never be won. The adjectives are pushovers though. No spine.

It kind of backfired though, didn't it. We finally lost faith, and Blair himself found himself, like
Thatcher before him, essentially forced out of his own party rather than lose them an election. The Tories had bumbled from Dracula, to a Tax inspector, to a balding gnome in search of a leader who could unite them. One ring to unite them. One Camering.

So we get pretty much to where we are now. Apathetic, screwed over by a politics concerned by lining it's pockets, keeping us afraid, or pandering to our desire to spend money on crap, even when there's none of it about. Cameron hardly appears to be the 'new broom', with his sub-Blair smooching and terrifying face leering at us from posters. Brown might actually be gong insane, driven to grinning awkwardly from the corner of his mouth and dying behind the eyes. All he wanted was to lead us away from Tony's personality and drivel based politics. Now he finds himself appearing on Penis Morgan's chat show rambling on about his bizarre life while a confused public wonders when Ant and Dec got so old.

What to do about this bothersome election then? For years I was an advocate of spoiling your ballot if you hated all the candidates, if only to register your displeasure. The problem with that is the rise of far right, pork chop faced, Question Time celebrities, who prey on our apathy. There's got to be someone better than them to vote for... anyone... a piece of cheese... Boris Johnson... anyone.

Are politicians more or less competent than in previous years? Are they more or less trustworthy? Are any of them worthy of your vote? Probably not, but give it to them anyway. If nothing else, you could watch the debate and pick the one you'd least like to hit with a broom. It's only action that will get us out of this mess. Either that or a bloody big cloud of ash bringing an apocalypse. Sorry... that's obviously an insane fiction. It could never happen.

Screamifyouwanttogofasterxxxx