Year: 2004

Returning home from a thoroughly pleasant work leaving dinner at a sadly fairly celebrity-free The Ivy last night, I discovered that we’ve finally received our very own copy of the cracking Preparing For Propaganda booklet, about three weeks after everyone else (“oh, is that what that is” says a disinterested Sal, who hadn’t even bothered to pick it up from the floor next to the front door–surely the actions of a potential terrorist, if ever I saw them. Perhaps I should phone the Blunket’s informant line Anti-Terrorism Hotline and report this “suspicious behaviour”…)

Given that everyone else has had a three week head start in stopping global terrorism, however, I felt it my civic duty to read the advice carefully. Essentially it appears to be telling us to go inside and watch telly, which seems fine to me. In that case I’m fighting global terror on a daily basis. Other selected advice includes such grammatically awkward gems as “try to avoid as much movement as possible”, and “loosen tight clothing”, which is just general good sense, really.

More shopping madness in Enfield’s WH Smith (home of the scary shelves)*

Near the entrance is a stand full of the most recent Harry Potter book (that yellow one, I don’t know what it’s called, Harry Potter and Bilbo go mad in the country, or something) with the following in large red letters: “Special offer, buy one get one half price!”

Now, I know that Harry Potter fans don’t like reading, but that’s just ridiculous: they appear to be no other books in the offer.

* I don’t want you to think I go there every day or anything. I just had something I had to get on two occasions this week. And anybody who says anything different is lying.

Now that she’s sold out moved into the private health sector, Sal gets to test a much more exciting type of patient than the doddery old ladies she used to get at the hospital. Not content with serving one of the likely lads, and some bloke who used to race formula one cars in Australia, apparently, today she’s going to be treating a king. We’re not sure what he’s king of though (apparently his patient card reads something like “Mr Prince King …”). I suggested maybe wishful thinking, but she seemed to think probably not.

Inspiried by the great Hasselhoff being in London at the moment (PopBitch’s Hasslewatch reports that they’ve received “over 380 Hasselspots so far”, including my favourite: “Last weekend the Hoff paid a visit to the Festival Hall to see Brian Wilson, where he was heckled by an American man shouting, ‘You are nothing without your robot car, NOTHING!'”), it’s worth briefly revisiting something I was talking about almost a year ago: those wonderful Amazon.com reviews of Looking For: The Best of. I’m not sure if anyone’s found the best of yet (ah, but aren’t we all looking for…), but there are nearly a third more reviews than there were a year ago (690 then, 1010 now). Fresh entertainment can be retrieved from this wonderful place on the Internet by playing Andy Baio’s Amazon.com Knee-Jerk Contrarian Game, and selecting only the lowest rated reviews to find the people who Just. Don’t. Get. It.

It’s not been a great summer break for my beloved Everton Football Club, as articles like this one: “Everton in Turmoil“, should attest. Amongst many problems, there’s been the boardroom squabbles, the exodus of players (which would be fine, given that most of the ones leaving weren’t very good, if only we could replace them), and the ongoing Rooney saga, to name but three.

We seem to have finally signed a couple of players, but I couldn’t help but notice in the BBC’s article about our signing of Australian defender Eddy Bosnar that he “does not qualify for a work permit and will be playing in the UK on a Commonwealth working holiday visa”. I’m sorry: Working Holiday Visa? I’m not sure that’s quite following the spirit in which the scheme was introduced, but whatever it takes to fill up a squad is fine by me. The old joke used to be that Aussies arriving at Heathrow just had to fill in the form with their name and the address of the bar they’d be working in, but I guess that should now be what position they’d like to play, and what time their train leaves for Lime Street.

Ah well, at least we can’t be relegated to the first division any more, no matter how badly we play.

It’s about this time of year (read: summer) when I usually find myself watching a quite appalling amount of dodgy “reality” television. Without really trying to, I’ve seen a shocking amount of this year’s Big Brother, but oh, if only that was the worst of it. Recently we’ve been watching another series of the incredibly poor Joe Millionaire, courtesy of that bastion of quality television Fox, via Channel 4, in which a bloke from Texas pretends to have lots of money in order to get women to like him (aided for some unexplained reason by Australian Prime Minister John Howard, pretending to be his butler, who is in on the scam). Because they’ve tried this before, for this second series Fox had to go pimping for female contestants in countries in Europe that didn’t get the original series, but you can tell it’s an American show because they’ve chosen to subtitle everything the women say, for the benefit of the hard of thinking, despite them all speaking perfectly good English (all of which rather reminds me of when MTV subtitled the Gallagher brothers in documentaries back in the mid 90s), but for some reason they choose not to do this with the chap’s Texan drawl (or for that matter, little grinning Johnnie Howard’s Aussie vernacular). At the same time, Channel 4 risk confusing us by forcing us to watch Average Joe, a similar dating-concept show that aims to show how there’s more to love that skin-deep beauty, in which a “beauty queen” gets to choose from a selection of average blokes (and she of course proves that there’s more to love than superficial looks by picking only the best looking ones). It’s worth watching if only for the comedy hypocrisy of the title sequence during which a deep voiceover poses the question: “can there ever really be love between a beauty and a be.. an average joe…?”

And on top of this, Sally (for it is all her fault of course…) is making me watch ITV’s latest attempt to get a slice of the cheap-but-gets-the-ratings reality TV pie by importing Australia’s The Block, a show in which crap telly finally eats itself by combining the twin telly hells of property rennovation and house-related infighting.

Where does it end?

Oh for a happier time when I could waste my life watching a good drama or some new comedy, instead of wasting it watching events masquerading as “reality” but actually just being a cheap way of filling an even expanding amount of airtime on an ever increasing number of channels.

Wandering into WH Smith in Enfield at lunchtime I was struck by a most unusual sensation–a feeling of being crowded and every so slightly overwhelmed. It took me a few minutes to realise what was causing it–presumably in an attempt to cram as much stock into their limited floor space as possible, they’ve increased the height of all the shelve units around the store so they’re a couple of feet taller than they were before, and therefore just taller than me (where I was previously head and shoulders above them). Very, very odd, and not a little uncomfortable.

Is this what it’s like to be small?

This weekend, I have mostly been wondering how Julia Sawalha manages to keep her job. Perhaps you’re not familar with the advertising campaign for catalogue-based retailer Argos, in which she stars as hapless PA to Richard E. Grant’s ageing, but clearly very wealthy rock star. There’s been a whole series of ads, and usually the concept involves her covering up for some mistake or other by lying to her boss with the aid of shabby Argos furniture. This all started when she couldn’t be bothered to redecorate his house properly, so popped out for some cheap crap from Argos instead. One small white lie later (telling him it was all created by the fictional designer Arguus), and she’s up to her neck in it, forced to continue to fill his house with poor quality flat packed furniture whenever he asks after said designer.

The latest episode in the series has perhaps the worst example yet of her deception: it opens at an auction, where “Elvis’s fridge” is being sold. Julia puts in the opening bid, at £100,000, but then her phone goes off. It’s Richard E Grant phoning to see how she’s getting on, and while she’s on the phone to him, she is outbid by the chap behind her. But that’s no problem for Julia–she just pops down to Argos and picks up a suspiciously similar looking fridge, and Richard never suspects a thing.

There are two problems with this. The first is that Elvis died almost 30 years ago, and I would have thought that fridge technology might have moved on a tad in the meantime. What Argos seem to be implying is that the Electrical equipment they sell is the same as you could have bought in the 1970s. Well, no wonder it’s cheap.

But the main problem is that Richard E Grant thinks he’s paid over £100,000 for the fridge, while his PA has just popped down to Argos and bought a cheap similar one for a couple of hundred quid. What did she do with the other £99,500?

So clearly the message here is that if you want to defraud your employer out of a significant sum of money, while buying ancient electrical goods, Argos is the one for you.

Last night, after over three years of meaning to get round to it, I finally managed to see a performance at the Globe. At times, during Much Ado About Nothing, admittedly not one of my favourites, I was reminded that the comedies are–puts on English student hat, pretends to be in tutorial (wonders why no one is saying anything…)–er, like, a bit rubbish, aren’t they? You could argue that the same ridiculous plot devices occur in both the comedies and the tragedies (there’s people falling in and out of love at the drop of a hat, then jumping to conclusions on the basis of the flimsiest of evidence, and you can always rely on there being a friar somewhere along the line popping up to suggest that the best way to solve all the problems is if someone pretends to be dead), but it’s somehow more acceptable when it isn’t followed by a ludicrously contrived resolution in which everyone ends up happily married, and instead concludes with blood, gore, and entire families dead.

My inherent distrust of the genre aside, the performance was excellent, although I was very disappointed with the audience, which featured a few too many examples of that most cringeworthy breach of unwritten Shakespeare-viewing etiquette–people laughing at the jokes. Ok, I’ll let you off with the visual slapstick, but no one’s fooled that you’re laughing at that cunning play on the word “shrewdly” for any reason other than to let everyone know how clever you are for having understood it. It’s not big or clever, and I don’t care what you say, nothing that Dogberry the constable says is even remotely funny. Oh, and if the group of Italian tourists to my right who spent the whole of the first act translating the play to each other in a very audible non-whisper would like to go and do that somewhere else, that’d be great.

Gripes aside, it was great. I might follow this up by trying to see Measure for Measure at the end of next month. Anybody interested?

I think this is my new favourite BBC Online graphic (spotted in the wild here):

Is that the Republican Elephant and the Democrat Donkey engaged in some kind of lewd sexual act, resulting in some skyscrapers falling over? Is this satire? Or just a crap logo?