- Why tuning into Sky Sports News terrifies the living daylights out of me with its constant assertion of playing the doom laden soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream. All I want to do is to simply find out the identity of the most recent Man Utd player being done for rape or to check out Brian Barwick’s pathetic jowl laden face…
- Why I can’t penetrate into the psyche of the ever elusive Moira Stewart. Seriously, when she reads the news I can no longer listen, only to become mesmerized by her Demon Headmaster gaze which is urging me to carry out sexually despicable acts on Huw Edwards…
- Why programs like ‘Can Fat Teens Hunt?’ continue to exist. Watching obese, mammary gland wielding male teenagers bawl their eyes out in denial of junk food is tantamount to presenting Vietcong torture methods live on TV. Can we not continue to live plentiful lives without having to question whether they can hunt or not?
- Why more people don’t listen to Charlie Brooker in his show Screen Wipe. The man’s a genius. Everything that comes out of his fire breathing cakehole is nothing short of the absolute truth. Read Dawn of the Dumb, a collection of his Screen Burn commentaries about the pathetic state of English TV of which includes an article doling out Brooker’s end of year TV awards: “The award for the show Most Impervious to Criticism goes to Jamie’s School Dinners in which Sir Flappy-Tonged Bumface himself saved the lives of millions of children – or so it seemed, given the orgy of self-fellating middle-class rapture that followed.” Spot on…
- Why people watch TV soaps. They must be the most deadening, suicide inspiring things on TV where you see blocks of wood stealing each other’s partners, killing each other and consequentially defecating over each other’s corpses. Truly repugnant….
- Why they insist on bringing back Big Brother and I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Everything that could possibly be done on these shows has been done, no one watches them anymore. The only thing that would work is if they combined both shows in some sort of cannibalistic, wood cabin nightmare deep in the Australian rainforest, where racism is let loose and the show ends my feeding Ant and Dec to the hungry contestants…

It’s got really cold, wet and miserable in the last week. Welcome another long English winter. The long dark nights are drawing in, the scarves, gloves and hats have come out the bottom of wardrobes, and thermals nestle underneath our clothes. This is your life for the next five months, so you best make do.

There is nothing worse than a double glazing advertisement. However, there is nothing worse than not having double glazing. How am I supposed to function in a terraced house, with irregular heating hours and with single paneled windows in the middle of an English winter? I don’t have a death wish, but death does indeed seem on the cards.

A balding middle aged man harangues another during another insipid double glazing commercial, I can hardly stomach it. My shivering wreck of a body takes me to a place that seems entirely closed to me - that of actually ringing the advertisements flashing number. I had always thought I was particularly hard; able to withstand both extremes of temperatures, but my sulky resignation to irritating marketing ploys defies all my previous self respect. I ring the number, the man from the advertisement seems a lot calmer now, he’s lost some of his flustered excitement and seems to want to get down to the real nitty-gritty of selling me some extra window panes.

What am I thinking! Am I the only person in the whole country that has been sucked in by the most excruciatingly painful advertisement on TV? What more damage can a winter do to a man’s own self respect!

Never has anything dominated the lives of OAPS, housewives and students alike as much as that of television soap operas. Here in England our most popular soap operas receive a large proportion of viewing figures, transform a lot of disparate people into immobile coach potatoes and wreak havoc on our perceptions of society. The blur between reality and fiction is sometimes an all too confusing juxtaposition for certain innocents in our society. These are the people that spit and shout abuse at actors playing particular villains when they go about the everyday, the people that fail to realize that it’s all just an act.

Eastenders; set in the (obvious) East End of London along with Coronation Street (Manchester) and Emmerdale (Yorkshire) command the weekly prime time slots (between 7-9pm). Then there are those shows heavily indebted to the student armies; Hollyoaks (Cheshire) and Neighbours (Melbourne!). Neighbours aside, what these shows all give us is a particular sense of ‘Englishness’ wrapped up into thirty minute decompressions.  Coronation Street takes us on a swooping tour of suburban Manchester life, full of industrialized factories, cobbled streets, terraced houses and the occasional scene of domestic violence or two. Eastenders being its racier counterpart shows all the grime of inner city life in our nation’s capital in a rather bleak or nihilistic way. Nothing good or any prolonged period of happiness really seems to befall the characters in this show, the seeming continual onslaught of calamities and life crisis seem enough to drive even the most hardened individual to the pits of utter despair.

Then there is Emmerdale which for some strange reason has a massive Finnish following. Obviously rural small village life has seeming familiarity with the Scandinavian audience, but are they well prepared enough for some of the more crazy storylines this show has had to endure in the past: plane crashes, fires, suprising demolitions?  Studying the English soap opera is a fascinating way of analyzing the ways we choose to portray these parts of England; unfortunately for us reality falls away in the need to attract large viewing figures.

In the early part of this century a particular television show aired by the BBC went hugely global. This show depended largely on the comedy behind its realism, which was that of a setting in the office of a paper company located in England. The shows leading actors became global successes and can now be found permeating into the highest roles available in the movie industry. To the foreign audience it was surprisingly successful despite its boundaries; such as a heavy reliance on irony and satire that a lot of audiences sometimes fail to make sense of. To us at home, it became an achingly real counterpart to the many people within this country that work in the environment of an office.

The English office is a feral beast, one that I have recently just come to know. Inside it lurks a wealth and variety of strange and wonderful creatures. There is the office geek, completely unable to say anything of any interest. There is the office psycho, who looks as if they have broken free from the shackles of a straight jacket and spends the remainder of their days twitching nervously and growling. There is the office predator, the leering male who offers to complete the work of any female coworker and constantly hovers and flits in between each one. There is the office wide boy, who thinks he’s everyone’s best friend and constantly boasts of his own productivity. There is the office grafter, constantly stressed and moaning, who takes their work home and agonizes over every last detail. Then there are the ambivalent ones, the unhygienic ones, the comedians and those that are always sick. Almost always accompanying this host of wild characters is a strangely eerie managerial type who one often wonders how it came to be that they ever showed promise for such seniority.

In England we love game shows. Again, this is not exclusive to our population but I do have to say: we really have been connoisseurs lately.

Deal or No Deal; a cultural phenomenon, not only lead to the resurrection of a television Jesus (with a scarily physical likeness) but also spurned a whole host of translations abroad. Take for example, the sexed up (in more physical way than Alistair Campbell’s dossier) American version. Doing away with the aesthetically distorted members (fat and ugly) of the general populace present in the British version and replacing them with the geometric perfectas of the American supermodel, our transatlantic counterpart oozes all the sex and glam we would come to expect. With this version comes an eccentric, balding gnome who is quite contrary to our own host but who has all the fervency of an excitable American at the gates of BuckingHAM palace.

Then there is the Dutch version and the Japanese and the Nigerian and so on and so forth…. John Fashanu has found work again since Gladiators; the dole office can breathe a sigh of relief. The point I am getting at is that our game shows are becoming a new form of British Imperialism, hell bent on invading the TV sets of those more susceptible victims spread out around the globe.

Look at ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’; the format translated for use in the other countries is crucial to our information gathering subversive agenda. Here, we use it to test the intellect of our closest neighbours, now we’ve detected their stupidity let’s advance and give them a proper old fashioned imperialist education!