On not writing a great novel...

Pictured above...Santa writing the great Laplandian novel

Tis I again, after a bit of time off. I've been meandering around the house with various sickness symptoms caused by pregnancy. How come everyone is behaving like it's Christmas? Last time I checked there were twelve days and they don't start on December 2nd. The town was full of slavish shoppers purchasing everything in sight. Look I'm not down on Christmas, quite the opposite. I love the holiday season. One of the best things is that delicious period in between Christmas and New Year when time gets suspended and you can do your own thing, and everything is pleasant and xmassy. It's just that that time is not now, it's frustrating! Plus what's the deal with Epiphany? In other words where is it in this country? Other countries mark the day, our celebrations come down on Jan the 1st, even earlier sometimes.

As the more diligent readers of this blog will be aware, we've got cable. This means that you can watch 7 episodes of 'Only Fools and Horses' in a row if you so wish. Actually I like this programme because Del Boy is rather like my dad, well my dad's a Greek Cypriot version. The resemblance is uncanny, honest.
Normally I would not dream of parking myself on a sofa and staring at the tv but it's useful for pregancy sickness. The most ridculous thing is flicking through the channels, there are technically seven or eight hundred of the buggers. Let's do a flick...Scrubs, Takeshi's Kingdom, property programmes, Hugh Fernely-Wittingstall out with his upper class pals shooting passing partridges, Whose Line Is It Anyway? So it can be a Friday night in 1989 on a Sunday tea time. Cable obliterates time, you could watch Dallas at 3am if that's your bag, Tenko at breakfast, despite the fact that these were once prime-time shows but in the cable universe time is irrelevant. So despite my better judgement I sit and stare at the top 30 christmas TV moments. Yeah, writing the great English novel ain't going to happen tonight.

Cable TV

We've just got cable t.v. Never had it before, because I think it's best to limit the amount of rubbish you allow in your house. I mean, people wouldn't invite more junk mail through their letter boxes, so why would you want more crap beamed to you through the television? Five channels of trash is quite enough, thank you. Sometimes, watching t.v. is no better than watching a poo revolving on a plinth. Everyone knows this, of course; but they believe that watching poo-on-a-plinth t.v. is mesmerically relaxing after a hard day's work.

Oddly enough, it seems to me that most t.v. channels also know that they're just pedalling poo on plinths. Even on the part of the t.v. channels themselves, there's little or no pretence any more that what they do isn't anything but crap. You can see this by the utter contempt with which they treat their own programmes and films: they talk over the titles, "tempting" you with what's coming next; they have running banners on top of the programmes, again telling you what's coming next Wednesday week; they start a serial and then forget about it after a few weeks and substitute something else; they cut scenes in the middle, slicing speeches in half, with commercial breaks; they don't even bother to differentiate commercial break from programme with a title screen; and commercials go on and on and on. There's no pretence on the part of most t.v. channels that the programmes are there first priority. They are absolutely up-front that it's the adverts which matter to them: after all, they might slice film scences awkwardly in half, but they'd never do that with the adverts themselves. Oh no, we can't annoy the sponsors, can we?

None of this should surprise or even annoy us. None of this should even bother us. It's our own fault for swallowing the lie that watching the t.v. is easier than listening to music or reading books or (God forbid) going outside. And again, we don't swallow the lie unconsciously - we're all totally aware that it's a lie at the same time as swallowing it whole. So it's our own fault that we're condemned to a hell of watching crap revolving on plinths for ever and ever and ever.