A short list of TV shows I will never watch. Ever.

I was trying to decide what to write about today, and then TV stepped in to help.

I watch a lot of crap. I’m not a TV snob by any means. I can happily watch comedies, dramas, reality, news, documentaries, or any other genre. (What happened to Glitterball with the impossible word searches where the answers were all the most obscure things connected to the clue?! That shit was awesome!) Most days I watch a combination of all of those. (And before anyone attempts to pass judgement, I’m a devourer across media — I also get through plenty of books, newspapers, magazines, and journals. I don’t go out to see movies, but I watch them on DVD. On occasion I go to the theatre, though I’m usually happier to read a play. And I still find time to listen to music.)

Yet, in spite of all of this, there are many shows I will never watch. There are shows that do not now, nor will they ever, appeal to me. Here are a few of them:

 

1. Ashley Banjo’s Secret Street Crew (Sky 1)

Ashley Banjo, I'm guessing. It could be Gary Guitar.

This is the show that actually inspired this listicle. The ads for it just do nothing for me. Maybe annoy me a little, but they don’t even inspire any sort of righteous anger. Shows like this make me think a channel accidentally signed a contract with somebody who turned out a bit dull, so they’re frantically trying to put the poor sap in some extra shows so they can end the damn thing.

I’m going to make this stand for all dance-related shows. I don’t watch any of them, either. I’ll sit through a dance show if it’s live, but I’ll put the news on for background noise over any of the dance reality offerings.

 

2. Songs of Praise (BBC 1)

This guy is one of the presenters, I think. He's standing in a church, and has some sort of ghost-y methane cloud behind him.

How is this show on in 2012? Seriously. This baffles me. It’s probably my super-secular background (we’re all big on that whole separation of church and state thing where I come from), but this just seems like such a weird thing to not be on one of those weird God-bothering channels.

 

3. One Born Every Minute (Channel 4)

*Spoiler Alert* The kid is born.

I don’t get why people watch this. Is it for the high drama of hospital reality? Is it for some cooing paternal instinct? Is it for the chance to maybe see some vag? Maybe this will appeal to me at some point when we have kids, but even then… probably not. I like a good medical show — have you watched the online surgeries? They’re awesome! — but watching babies get born every fucking week… No.

 

4. Springwatch/Autumnwatch (BBC 2)

They like sitting watching CCTV videos of birds. Perverts.

This amuses me, but in a ‘why do people watch it and try to assign drama to it’ kind of way. I was watching some clip show and they were going on about some highly dramatic moment about a baby bird maybe not being able to fly and how they were on the edge of their seats and then the next day the bird was gone and had flown off. Really?! That’s what happens in your back garden and is a pain in the ass because you have to keep the cats in so they don’t go out and eat all the dumb ass birds that keep falling out of the tree. It’s not, however, compelling TV.

 

5. Martina Cole’s Lady Killers (ITV 3)

This reminds me of the Songs of Praise dude. Is this Martina Cole? She looks mean.

This is like ol’ Ashley up there. It is standing in for any number of programmes (almost all on ITV channels) that are titled in the “Author Author’s Title Title” format and that all seem to be bad crime drama, some of which are even meant to be documentary, somehow. These are shows that aren’t good enough to be either a single TV movie or a series, and that will only get viewers by announcing that it’s got something to do with the author of a book that you saw somebody read on the bus.

Tags: writing, lists, television, Channel 4, comedy, drama, BBC, ITV, not watching, bad tv

My New Pet Peeve

Pretty much anyone who has met me or interacted with me in any real or digital way knows that I get riled up fairly easily. I get annoyed with most aspects of life, and can hold my own in a rant to the death. (I don’t compete against Adam, though. His rants are on a whole other level, like when he found out that Viv was interviewing Brian May and insisted on her asking him questions that started out with what conditioner he uses, passed briefly through the issue of AIDS and Freddy Mercury, and then landed very heavily in a verbal dissertation on how Wayne’s World ruined Bohemian Rhapsody for him and he didn’t like it that much to begin with but now everyone thinks it’s ok to play it for anything.)

Anyway, back to my current pet peeve. This is something that has been sneaking up on me for a few months, but has really angered me lately.

Folded receipts.

Do you see where this has all gone wrong? Do you Post Office? Do you see how you've screwed the pooch here?

I know, it seems like such a nothing thing. But think about it.

You go to a store, find some item that you want, make your payment, and then… then. Then some cashier decides that your receipt is simply too long for you to manage, so they fold it up. They fold it once. They fold it twice. And what was going to nicely slide into your wallet is now some piece of origami that makes everything all lopsided.

Even worse is when they hand you cash back with it, the notes and receipt all in some folded monstrosity that doesn’t belong anywhere except back in hell.

Or!!! When they have the two receipt deal if you’ve paid by card. So then you have two receipts folded together, in opposite directions because they needed to save their hand strength for folding so couldn’t possibly rip that last little joined corner apart. Oh no. That would be just too damn difficult.

Despite all of this, there is one further receipt hell. Waitrose. Mother. Fucking. Waitrose. Whether cash or card, they just fuck it up all over the place. Cash: One receipt, folded, with a handful of change, and a token. Card: Two receipts, folded, and a token. So there I am, needing to unfold the receipts to fit them in my wallet, and I now have to balance a small green token. I have to deal with my receipts AND be a good person. Fuck that.

So, yeah. If you ever serve me in a shop, don’t fold things. Don’t ever, ever fold things. If I want them folded, I can do it myself. I have fingers.

Tags: pet peeve, rant, receipts, shopping, waitrose

Luxury Comedy clip

Noel and Pele… blowing your mind!

The finest luxuries, like silks and emeralds and David Lee Roth, king of the lions

There is luxury to be had.

Remember back in November where I went to London at stupid o’clock in the morning? Well, since then, E4 has shown me a bit more love. It has involved a big basket of sweets, and now something even better — a preview of Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy.

The link came through this morning, but I was off to The Ethicurean for a slightly belated 6 monthiversary lunch with Adam. I got home, did a bit of work, and then snuggled in to watch it. (There was actual snuggling, thanks to a few days without central heating.)

I’ve been looking forward to this show since November. I can say right now, though, that if you don’t already like Noel Fielding and the various incarnations of his comedy, you probably won’t like this.

You know all the weird little asides and storytelling bits of The Mighty Boosh? It’s like that, only for the whole show. It’s vaguely held together by a bit with Noel, a character with a painted blue face that isn’t exactly the actor himself, who tries a new cereal and shows off a bit of his artwork.

It’s a strange show that has amazing cultural literacy and utter obscurity and absurdity. When he did a takeover issue of the Guardian Guide last weekend, Fielding ran down some of the influences for the show, though I couldn’t help but feel it was more of a test than a confession. This is a show that none of us are hip enough to completely get, a parade of inside jokes that we’re being allowed to see.

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

(That’s a link to a clip, should you want to watch a bit before tomorrow night…)

But that isn’t a bad thing. A Pele drawing blowing your mind with its variable readings is pretty much something we would do (and have done, repeatedly) when sitting around with friends. The lion, stuck in a zoo, trying to make the best of the situation, is almost darkly dramatic. The singing chocolate finger with a taste for war is… I don’t even know.

It’s a seven-part series, and there’s a lot in the initial ads that didn’t show up in the premier episode. I like it, but I don’t know why entirely. I only laughed a few times, but it’s not a laugh-a-minute type of show.

There’s a lot of French influences; it does remind me of Beckett’s absurdist plays. But it’s not just that. Thinking about it, it’s vaguely like when you go to a different country, or end up in those weird high number channels, and get sucked into watching some comedy where you don’t have any clue what they’re saying, but you end up amused anyway.

I want to say more about it, but I don’t know what to say. It’s baffling like that. It’s Boosh, but without the grounding sanity of Julian Barratt.

I look forward to it being on TV, if only because I want to know what others make of it, what references they pick up on, and whether it reads differently being in the middle of the night schedule rather than being watched at 4 in the afternoon.

Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy starts tomorrow night on E4 at 10:00. I’ll be watching it again and tweeting through it, most likely. Try it.

Tags: Guardian, television, comedy, noel fielding, luxury comedy, mighty boosh, E4ers, E4

Shopping snippets…

We very briefly went out to town, where we went to a few shops in the Sovereign Centre. Overheard the following:

This is a coat. It is red. It is not a dress, and it is not available in cream.

“I’d like to order this, but in cream.”

“It won’t let me order it in anything but red. I don’t think it comes in cream.”

“But I’d like it in cream. I only want a basic dress.”

“This is a coat.”

“Oh. I want a dress.”

“So you don’t want this coat?”

“Is it washable?”

“It is 63% polyester and 33% viscose and 4% elastane. It needs to be dry cleaned it says.”

“I don’t want to have to dry clean my dress. I want something simple.”

“So you don’t want a coat, you want a dress?”

“Yes.”

“This is a coat, though.”

“Don’t you have it as a cream dress?”

“No. See this other coat has a dress that goes with it, but this coat doesn’t. And it’s only available in red.”

“If you didn’t know it was a coat, you’d think it was a dress.”

“I know it’s a coat, so I can’t say.”

“Am I wasting your time? I don’t want to waste your time.”

“No, it’s fine. Let me see if she can think of a way to search for it.”

“Oh, that would be lovely. I’ll get my glasses on. I’m having trouble seeing your screen.”

“You see this coat? This lady wants a dress that looks like that, but in cream. I can only get this search to narrow the 250 dresses down to white, but she doesn’t want white.”

Tags: overheard, shopping, weston

Over the shoulder boulder holders

At £30 a pop, I won't be burning mine.

Last night, on Playing It Straight, the boys were challenged to the “Bralympics“. In this task, they had to go along a line of women (and one man), removing the bra that each was wearing. Their vision blocked by a pair of joke glasses, the winner was whoever could unhook the bras fastest.

Somehow, in some production staff member’s mind, this would be a test of who is straight and who is gay. The logic, it seems, is that straight guys would have past experience with bras. Their attraction to women would have given them more opportunities to unhook bras and therefore more expertise in the task.

The oldest contestant, 27-year-old Dean, won the challenge, but it wasn’t as if any of them was stood there for 20 minutes, pawing helplessly at some woman’s back. (Although there’s a minor continuity issue — the strapless bra is a different colour for some of the guy — so I do wonder if one of them got the bra off by tearing it.)

I understand that this is all light entertainment, and by no means a scientific way of testing sexual orientation. The idea that every straight man is Joey Tribbiani, though, just strikes me as odd.

The pop culture representation of men and bras is extensive. Even within Friends, the various relationships of men and bras is discussed at length. Joey instructs Phoebe to show Chandler her bra because he’s afraid of them, not knowing how they work. Yet Joey can unhook a bra almost by sight. In The King of Queens, Doug is criticised for spending too much time trying to unhook Carrie’s bra, not realizing in the process that it was a front closure.

That was another thing that surprised me last night. Despite having four bras to unhook, the biggest difference between them was that one didn’t have straps. The bra closures were all the same — a few hooks in the back. There wasn’t even a massive difference in the number of hooks. The bras were decoration more than function.

There are all sorts of bra politics. The sexual revolution of various waves of feminism have taken bras off of women. They are portrayed as being an item of sexualization, as some perverted shackle placed upon us by men. You know what? They aren’t.

The wearing or non-wearing of a bra becomes a source of bullying in the pubescent years, and it has nothing to do with the boys. I have distinct memories of an older girl running her hand down our spines, checking for the feel of a bra. Those who didn’t have one got bullied and called babies or something equally clever. Only a year earlier, though, one girl’s wearing of a training bra was mocked. Girls are bitches at that age. You can’t win.

A bra is a necessity for some of us. A bra isn’t a chastity belt for the boobs. It isn’t the gateway to some hidden sex toy. It serves a function — one that I’m really quite thankful for. A bra is a symbol of the feminine, true enough. But it isn’t the evidence of anything other than boobs.

And, contrary to the cultural idea, it isn’t an innate skill of the hyperhetero male to remove them. There are bras that I struggle to get off, where a hook is being pesky. I’ve had a past bra that got thrown away pretty quickly when, on more than one occasion, it popped open with any of a number of normal daily tasks including, but not limited to, reaching down, reaching up, being hugged, and leaning back in a chair.

Yet here we are, once again, watching a parade of 20-something boys fumble about with four bras, claiming that a certain type of manual dexterity is somehow equal to being heterosexual.

As a final point, I refer to one of the greatest television comedies of all time, Seinfeld. The bra features regularly throughout the series, both in terms of male understanding of and female attitudes towards the bra. Here, though, is the ultimate breakdown of the concept that bras are innately feminine… I give you, the bro.

Tags: boobs, E4. bra, gender, men, Playing It Straight, politics, television, women

Where’s my cup of ambition?

Even she thinks 7 am is too early to make noise (other than a bit of paw stomping on carpet)

This morning started well. The dog didn’t ask to go out until the recycling was collected, which was later than usual this week. At 8:07, I did my zombie walk to unlock the kitchen door, and was back in bed before I even had a chance to get cold.

I went back to sleep. Half an hour later, there was a horrendous noise running through the house. Just the radiators, we assumed (the valves are faulty and are meant to get replaced soon), so Adam went to do the fix. In bed, half awake, I thought about how I should call the plumber. They were meant to be fixed this week.

The noise carried on. Adam came back to bed and announced that the house next door, to which ours is attached, is having blown-in insulation put in. There’s a guy drilling a massive hole in their house, next to where it joins our kitchen. It was 8:47 and a relentless drilling noise filled our house.

Adam and I both have a pretty simple philosophy about noisy work. Wait until 9. This used to be normal, right? When did it become ok to start road works and boiler installations and insulation blowing before 9 am?

When our boiler was installed, though, we were woken up at 7:30 to the sound of the plumbers moving things up to our front door, past our bedroom window. Not only did they clang around with their tools, they talked to one another. In a failed effort to be polite (amongst other more egregious bits of dickwad behaviour over the three-day installation), they would be quiet until they were away from the front door. The problem? They’d pick up to a full volume when they were outside our bedroom window. By the time they rang the bell (7:59, but I’m sure 8 on the dot on one of their watches), we were already awake and grumpy.

The following days, we made adjustments to our schedule, which just put us into some limbo that was like having jet lag for a week.

Neither of us work normal schedules. Our work isn’t a 9 to 5. It’s a whenever we get up until around 2 the next morning. We work in the quiet hours when all the other businesses are closed. Our constraints are always due to the closing hours of post offices and various shops. We can take time out on a Thursday afternoon to play whist, but come home and carry on with work.

It’s not a normal lifestyle. I do know that. But it gets a bit old when people think either of the two following things:

1) We work from home, and have flexible schedules, therefore we have no reason to complain when we get woken up at 8 am because we can just go back to bed.

2) We work from home, and have flexible schedules, therefore we can drop everything at any time of the day and just go back to things whenever.

Back when I did work a 9 to whenever (almost never 5), I would get up around 6:30. If somebody had come drilling into my walls at 3:30, nobody would have any problem agreeing that the driller is an absolute douche. Now, though, I’m somehow out of line when the same thing happens.

Working as we do, there is a basic understanding that the world doesn’t work to our schedule. We are the unusual ones, and can’t expect the entire world to stay quiet until we get up. But when did the acceptable starting time get so early? When did it become ok for companies to call at 7 am?

We do live a good life. We are lucky to have the lifestyle we have. We also have sleep problems, and were probably up working much later than you were. Insulation blower probably finished work at 4:30, got home and didn’t blow a single flake of snowy insulation again before he went to bed. We didn’t completely stop until we went to bed. At most, we put things down an hour before we went to bed.

There’s always going to be disruptions because of our schedule. We know that. But just don’t expect us to be nice to you if you wake us up after 4 hours sleep.

 

If you didn’t already have the song in your head from either various mentions of the phrase or the title of this post, let me hand it over to YouTube.

Dolly probably doesn’t actually work these hours

Tags: 9 to 5, getting woken up, grrr, insulation, sleep, time, tired, work, work day