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.

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.

Noel and Pele… blowing your mind!

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.

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.”

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.

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

The last time I was at the venue, there was more dramatic costuming than this time.

A few days ago, I was invited to go along to see a new play at a new theatre. I’d been to the venue once, a few years ago, for a Gwar concert.

I won’t bother reviewing the play. It was dreadful.

There’s always something doleful about an empty music venue. The stale smell of dropped pints of lager, joined by a vague ammonia note of past incontinence, makes it more obvious that it is a place where people should be. The emptiness is somehow more solid. The absence of people recalled through the evidence that they had been here.

So it was an odd thing sitting in this new theatrical space. The standing area in front of the stage was filled with stackable chairs. The rest of the room stayed as it was, with big heavy wooden tables and benches. This was not a room for drama.

There are rooms for everything, architecture tropes to which we rapidly become accustomed. We all know, and can call to memory, a variety of basic rooms. The doctor’s waiting room. The child’s bedroom. The grimy bar. The dark sitting room of an old country manor house. When these get shoved together — dingy music venue and black box theatre — something goes wrong somehow.

One of the shows there this season is an adaptation of Moby Dick (I worry for my beloved poor Melville) and as we sat there waiting for the show to start it already seemed better suited to that show. ‘I can see it working as a ship,’ Viv said. Looking around at the benches and black ceilings, smelling the scents of long-stale liquids, I agreed. The space will work as a ship.

At the end of the show, such as it was, the venue’s director or some such self-appointed title came to the stage to convey, in a quiet monotone, his excitement. He used the words ‘share’ and ‘sharing’ so many times it became even more difficult trying to stifle the giggling laughter that had started at the utterly baffling end of the play. But I can see the potential of the place, and maybe it’s good that they’re willing to stage such plays. It gives the Bristol theatrical circuit a place for the weak gazelles.

And maybe I’m just overly critical because I’m generally pulled towards more polished drama. As a television enthusiast, my preferred dramatic writing has had to pass a good deal of quality control. Even the worst television drama will be of a certain quality. Commissioning editors and producers have more on the line, and the financial realities won’t allow for ramshackle scripts to get in front of audiences.

This isn’t to say that all television is great, nor that there aren’t any ramshackle television programmes. It’s to say that it’s less common, and that the two-hour play I saw the other night would never get to be on television. (Although there’s also a good chance it wouldn’t ever get to be staged at a theatre that doesn’t smell of piss, with occasional methane bursts that I can only think were timed along with toilets flushing on higher floors.)

But there was so much influence of television within the play, down to a scene break (complete with a stage blackout) that can only be seen as an ad break, with the lights coming up a moment later for the scene to be completed with no actual break in the action. The end drew in elements of police procedurals, heart string-tugging dramas, and trashy chat shows. Rather than real world research, the play’s content was informed by a week’s worth of being planted in front of daytime Freeview programming.

My concern in all of this is what it says about the potential future of theatre. I’m a firm believer that it’s needed, and that even the best creativity in film and television can only be two sides of a triangle. There needs to be live theatre to keep the whole of drama sharp. So if something like this is being staged, and if a venue like this is staging thing, what the hell is going on? What happened to quality control? If any hack can get a play staged now, what are we to do? (I fully recognise the irony of writing this complaint in a blog.)

I’m no great critic of the theatre, but I can speak with some authority about dramatic works in general. As such, this show has left me somewhat despondent. How can there be any value to drama if something so bad is allowed to reach an audience? Is every medium of drama equal to its lowest example?

And yet writing goes on. It always goes on. Music goes on, art goes on, all sorts of creative practice goes on. Critics stand ready to devour, calling it derivative and repetitive. Influence is pointed out as a negative, thievery accusations fly.

So what are we to do? We are always standing on shoulders, whether we mean to or not. Buried under the ground, they sneak up on us. We can never do anything that hasn’t been done before.

This is one of my biggest worries as a writer: the impossibility of originality.

I know it’s something that many artists worry about, too. How to produce something new is a constant worry. The longer you wait, the less new is available.

At some point, a leap of faith is required. An acceptance that everything is stolen, nothing is new, and all is derived from the past is a prerequisite for creative practice, it seems.

My issue is this leap. I know it has to happen, but as soon as words start going down, I hear the echoes of the past. I know who I’m sounding like, I know who I’m inadvertently ripping off.

Maybe this is a problem of being over-read and under-confident. I need to have the ego of Eliot to know that I’m stealing words, but the feeling that I’m doing it better. Even writing that, I feel I can’t possibly top Eliot (well, his early stuff, anyway… the late stuff is dreadful sap).

I write in a world that has already seen Beckett come and go, that has already despatched Chaucer, that has already spit out Wallace. I can choose a subject that has come after their respective death dates, but there is still the living authors to contest with. I will always fear that Pynchon is doing it better, that Delillo could trump my best choice of words, that Franzen is ready to publish while I perish.

But I have to get past this! I have to move on! I have to set the challenge!

To be creative, it is necessary to be a thief. It is necessary to not care. Let the hyenas chew up the words, laughing at the blatant influences.

Maybe I should save them the effort. I’ll footnote everything. I’ll show my work. I’ll admit that I’m stealing it all, that nothing is original. I’ll tell my story, knowing that it’s not my story to tell, that others have told it better, that others will tell it again in the future.

On Boxing Day, the conversation somehow turned to bad luck. Apparently, in addition to all the black cats and ladders, cutting your nails on a Friday is bad luck. (Whether biting your nails counts was unclear, but the logic provided at the time was that it probably does because it’s just cutting them with your teeth.)

There seems to be no end to the things that can cause bad luck. Beyond the legends passed down by older family members, there’s all the superstition provided from within. I’m terrible for that.

I’ve never been particularly fussed by good luck and bad luck traditions. I regularly ignore chain letters, walk under ladders, and just chuck spilled salt into the sink. I could waste my entire life living by the rules of bad luck. It could become an all-consuming passion, keeping me trapped by an endless list of things meant to be bad mojo.

So I can’t be bothered with all of that. I see it as something akin to religion. It just doesn’t make any sense to me, so fuck it.

Yet I get very superstitious about some things. You know those nutjobs who wear the same pair of underwear because their favourite sports team is having a winning streak and they conflate the two? Yeah, I kinda get like that.

Not in the underwear way, of course, but in that same mindset.

At the end of last year, I went through a ridiculous interview thing for a job I didn’t end up getting. The first interview went well, as did a few other things from around the same time, so I looked for a pattern. What emerged was the use of a certain shower gel and a toothbrush that I wanted to get rid of, despite being brand new, because I didn’t like the stiffness of the bristles. The second interview came, and I made sure to use the same shower gel and painful toothbrush. When the third interview came, I talked myself out of my superstition and used a different shower gel.

When I didn’t get the job, I thought in passing that it might have been different if I’d followed my routine.

I know it has nothing to do with any of it. I know that in a rational way. But day in, day out, I find myself doing little routines that somehow fit a luck pattern. Each day that I do X, something good happens, or nothing openly bad happens. Therefore, I keep doing X.

The thing about all of this is that it’s inevitable that the pattern will break. There will be a day where I don’t have a new bottle of soda water to take to whist. That day, as any other, there will be a 50-50 chance that I lose. If I don’t, I find some other thing that has carried over. If I do lose, it’s all down to the soda water.

I know I do this, but I keep it so quiet. I’m a smart, logical person. I don’t believe in god (that’s a whole other story!), and think religion is little more than codified superstitions, yet here I am, tying achievement to the most mundane things.

Maybe it’s some low-level OCD, the same thing that makes me knock the water out of my toothbrush exactly 5 times, every time. Or maybe it’s some natural inclination deep-coded in the human genome that wants me to have some religiosity. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s nothing.

No matter what causes it, I do it and am a bit ashamed of it. It’s a way of downplaying both accomplishment and failure, putting it on something outside of me. It’s not my failure, it’s that I wore different shoes.

I don’t consider myself a lucky person. I’m more likely the person who loses the £20 that somebody finds on the street. I don’t win the lottery, I’m never the 100th customer.

But I’m not exactly unlucky, either. At least as long as I do the same routine, say goodnight to the dog in the same way, and keep that 2p piece next to the computer.

As a postscript, I should also add that I’ve never been afraid of Friday the 13th, probably in no small part because my mom’s birthday was on January 13, so I always associate the 13th of months with her rather than any concerns about luck.