Tag Archives: irritating TV

Monday Off and a Freewheeling Mind

I don’t know if it happens in America but on UK Quiz Shows they often ask contestants about themselves instead of getting on with the questions. And the contestants seem, these days, to find it almost impossible to answer without starting “So . . .”

It’s something I have noticed over the last few years. I assume that either they didn’t do it a few years ago, or that I didn’t notice it. It is very irritating. To start “Err . . .”  as the brain picks up speed is human frailty, but starting “So . . .” just signals membership of a pervasive fellowship of irritating TV contestants.

Talking of irritants, I see that there has been a large number of complaints about bad language an episode of Love Island. I would have thought that the language was one of the least offensive things about the show. I’ve only seen clips of it on Gogglebox but the concept, the contestants and the general level of conversation is all dreadful too. Coming from a man who watches a TV programme about watching people watching TV, this concern with quality content may seem out of character, but I assure you, I do have standards. They are low standards, and Love Island fails to meet them.

I will leave you with a couple of poems. They were first published in Eucalypt 33.

the letter
from the lawyers
on the mat
lit by a sunbeam
—floating dust

that morning
in the coffee bar
I had no plans
to meet my one true love
—you said the seat was free

They could be reversed and read as a pair, I suppose, but that’s not how they were written. As the exotic beauty of the second poem has just given me a coffee and two fig rolls for elevenses approximately 42 years after the events described in the poem, there have clearly been no lawyers involved. For the sake of accuracy, may I add that there was a mutual friend sitting at the table too, I am not the sort of suave lounge lizard who finds it easy to approach strange women in coffee bars.

Coconut macaroons and hilarity in Bakewell. Can you see a theme developing?