As you may have notice, a regular theme with my blogs (apart from the depressing love ones) is my dislike of Reality TV shows, and moan because I usually get sucked into watching them. However, that is not the same with Big Brother, and never has been. I have watched very little Big Brother over the past 10 years, and I plan to continue not watching Big Brother. However, because we live in a society where the media likes to tell us things, regardless of whether we want to hear them or not, and peoples’ lives are so dull, that watching people moping around a house for 3 months in classed as 'entertainment'; I hear a lot of gossip about it.
I have three main sources of information about Big Brother. One is friends who for some reason seem to love Big Brother, and will talk about it with other people who watch Big Brother and reminisce over the previous days shenanigans, who will dump who, who will be evicted next and also who they predict to win. Another is radio, where some presenters are also huge fans of this show, and constantly feel the need to blurt out over the airwaves their opinions of what has happened and constantly say 'If you're not watching it, you should' - But I won't. The third is the Internet. It doesn't matter how hard you try, you always get some form of exposure to it, whether you're just on the news websites, catching up on the days happenings or on Facebook reading people pointless status changes (the subject of my next blog).
I'm very sorry for being cynical, but really it's in my nature. You see, I don't really think being stuck in a room full of cameras and people you don't know and won't like for a few months, being part of reality. Now, mistake me if I'm wrong, but Big Brother falls into the Reality genre. The only bit of reality in the show is that they have a kitchen with food in it. I could go broader and say that dumping 10 celebrities into the jungle with a film crew isn't exactly reality either. Neither is a film crew following the 'day-to-day lives' of Katie and Peter or Kerry Katona. Reality TV is really not the correct genre to put it into. Cheap, Humiliation TV - Yes.
I do have reasons for disliking Big Brother, apart from the one above. Remember that lovely women, who graced us with her presence on TV and in Magazines not a few month ago? I forget her name... Oh, that's right - Jade Goody. They even had the cheek to make a Jade Goody Big Brother special, to commemorate her life, as if they couldn't annoy me enough. If this show never existed, she would be completely unknown to me and most of the civilised world. She would have gone about her normal boring life as a dental nurse in Essex and would have died a normal dignified death without all the media attention. She has become, unfortunately, a role model of the 20th Century, and I fear for education in the future. I don't want any future children of mine to learn about Jade Goody, or even have to hear that name, and if they do, I will have to tell them the truth about the vile women that once lived off the media, and it would break their little hearts and they'd have nightmares every night for the next 5 years, and it'll all be the fault of Big Brother. Sorry for being blunt, but I've taken the Jade Goody rant a bit differently this time.
Anyway, another reason for not liking this show is Scrubs. Because of Big Brother, Scrubs is hardly ever on Channel 4/E4 at the moment. I've had to go cold turk-ey. I've gone from watching 2 episodes a day to watching none a day, just like that. Luckily, they timed it just right, so I can at least say that I've seen every episode of Scrubs, apart from Series 8, which hasn't yet been aired in the UK anyway. The point is that Big Brother took away my Scrubs. Simple.
However, if you want to look at it from a positive side, you could say that Endemol had done more to make the streets safer than Jacqui Smith ever did by locking up those 16 prisoners, I mean contestants. It's not as if the contestants have ever had an intellectual conversation, it's sometimes a wonder they manage to string a sentence together when slagging each other off. The fact that a Big Brother challenge was for two of them to legally change their name by deed poll shows how low down the ladder of intellect. One of them changed her name Dogface and the other changed his name to Halfwit. Now if you were looking through peoples CV's, choosing who to hire, those two names would certainly not be on the pile of possibilities.
The contestants still in the house don't, or at least didn't last I heard, know that Michael Jackson had died. However, to quote Charlie Brooker from a few weeks ago, "If we was to make a list of things Big Brother contestants don't know, this would be a very long" blog. And last week, they put in another 5 new housemates into the mix, and already, within a few days, two have walked out. One because there was no-one in the house who he wanted to talk to, and I think he should be hailed as the cleverest, or at least the most observant contestant they've ever had in the Big Brother house. Although, at the same time, you could say, 'Well what was he expecting to find? Stephen Fry sitting in the corner calling him over for a friendly chat by the fire place?’
Which leads me onto a thought, maybe they should do a Big Brother meets University Challenge special, where all the contestants are university graduates with degrees in Quantum Mechanics and Econometrics and Mathematical Economics. Sure it may not be quite as 'entertaining' as the current Big Brother format with people on benefits and strongly opinionated hairdressers (not that I'm undermining people in those categories, I'm just generalising here), where people don't get along, argue and date, but it'd make a nice change from all that, but even then I still wouldn't watch it, so what does it matter to me?
Even the people from Channel Four who introduce the show don't even seem care anymore. A few weeks ago I heard one of them say "Now on Channel Four, you can watch a bunch of random people asleep if you want to...". And that is what it is half the time. During the night, when they're sleeping or just getting ready for bed, you get a live feed of the house, on your living room TV. That's a bit perverted, watching people sleep. You have to be either very addicted to Big Brother or be mentally unstable to watch that the whole night through.
Why are we currently on series 10 of this now awful and boring show I hear you thinking? Well, it’s because writers of normal scripted television shows, cost money and also are very unimaginative. They can't think up new ideas, so they recycle old ideas, and jazz it up a bit to make it look new and fresh. For example, the BBC has commissioned a new Sitcom. I say new, it's actually Only Fools And Horses, but a bit different. It's what they are calling a prequel, where it will follows the life of Del Boy as a teenager. TV bosses have to decide whether to waste their money on silly ideas like that, or cheaply make reality shows, and seeing as we're currently going through a credit crunch, it's usually the latter.
And there we go, and nice cynical blog, ranting about Big Brother, and yet again Jade Goody as well. I'm considering doing a blog special, where I consolidate all my rants about Jade Goody into one big blog. That's something for me to do, should I run out of blog ideas in the near future.
So, on that long note, I shall say Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
Oh, and here’s a shameless plug for you, have a look at this website; it’s my newest creation, a web comic. http://im-called-stuart.smackjeeves.com/
Well I say it's back by popular demand, that’s technically not true. I didn't have a group of people camping outside my house and waving around signs nailed to an old piece of wood demanding I write another blog on my driving lesson. By popular demand, I mean it is the blog that has gotten the most responses than any of my other ones. Plus it is something that can be a regular theme until I eventually pass my driving test. From now on then, every so often, I shall write a blog about the last few driving experiences. Maybe they won't be that entertaining, and demand will disappear but it saves me having to keep coming up with different blog ideas.
I shall begin, where I left off last time so it's now lesson 4, early in the morning, on a Tuesday. Where I live, this is considered to be dustbin day, so my driving lesson started by manoeuvring my way through dustcarts. Then off through the narrow country roads which seemed to never end, but when they did, I stalled it, just as I was pulling out onto a main road, so not very handy. Nether-the-less, I carried on and done another three-point turn and again, didn't hit the curb, which I think was rather lucky. And when I got home, as usual, I found my shirt was rather wet from sweat.
A week later, and again on a Tuesday morning, but this time as we sat in the car near my house talking, while we waited for all the school kids to get to school so I didn't run them over, a nosey neighbour came over to talk to me, eating a 10 minute hole into my lesson. She ended up talking to my instructor about fruit, out of all the subjects of discussion to choose. Anyway, after she buggered off, I began lesson 5. Had to drive around the dust carts again and then the lesson began properly. This lesson we covered reversing into a parking space, which didn't go too bad, but could've been better. Then it was time to come home, and to go home always requires a trip down a dual carriageway and for the first time I got into top gear and started to hit just over 60 MPH, which at the time felt great. He was egging me on though, with him keep repeatedly yelling 'boot it' at me. Also, I did stall the car twice, but at this point in my lessons, it is expected still.
Lesson 6 now, this time on a Monday morning, so there were no wheelie bins to contend with, just little kids again, avoiding the nosey neighbours and it being bloody hot. This time I attempted the reversing into a parking space again, which I failed miserably with and after 5 attempts, we gave up and attempted the three-point turn manoeuvre which I seem to be rather good at. Again, I never hit the curb - surely this is a miracle. Anyway, on my way to do the three-point turn, I stalled it, but stalling it isn't bothering me yet. Also, I counted and overall I had 9 roundabouts, which are rather daunting sometimes, and then I decided I would park in a disabled bay for some reason at the end of the lesson, but he did stopped me. At the end of the lesson, he revealed to me that he felt like 'A Mouse trapped in a microwave'. I'm assuming he was telling me my driving scared him, which is good to know.
Lesson 7 and yet again it’s a Monday morning, but luckily it wasn't a hot day, so we didn't have to sit in the car sweating like mice in microwaves. Done reversing into a parking bay again, and this time it went pretty well, could have been a lot worse. However, I did stall it rather a few times, as for some reason I had forgotten how to use the clutch properly. Then we went on to attempt reversing around a corner, which went very well and done it one attempt, so I was rather 'chuffed' with that.
It's Wednesday afternoon (a week later), and I'm having driving lesson 8. It made such a change to me, and also for a change, I wasn't worried about it too much, in fact I couldn't be bothered to do a lesson - and this showed. The lesson started from school, so imagine the annoyance when I only stall the car once - in front of a load of my peers at the bus stop. Then I went and done a three-point turn, and for the first time, hit the curb. However, I did attempt to do reversing into a parallel parking space, and luckily I hit no cars, so this made up for it a bit. My confidence had been hit about two hours before though, after witnessing a pretty bad accident. But I survived however hard I tried to destroy the car. At this point in my driving lessons, I am coming home drenched in sweat still, so after every lesson, I have to make sure I have a bath.
When I wasn't going very fast, purely for the fact I was nervous at the start, he would shout 2 commands at me. It would either be 'Come on, Boot it' or 'Give it some more go-go's'. Now I have become more confident, and he no longer has to yell these commands at me, and instead he finds himself having to constantly remind me of the speed limit. I do still find those two phrases ringing around my mind, and I think I have many nightmares with him constantly repeating 'Give it more go-go's' in my ear.
Today’s driving lesson nearly ended in terror, but you will have to wait another month to hear about it. I’ve never done a cliff hanger on a blog before; I wonder how successful it will be. We shall have to wait and see.
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
Welcome to my 50th blog, and the chosen subject for today is Torchwood. I have a habit of only doing blogs on things I dislike, people I'm not keen on, the media and how it's run and finding the negative points in human nature, such as love. I thought, for a bit of a change, this cynic would do a blog on something I did rather like, thus why Torchwood is the chosen subject.
Last week Torchwood did a week long story line for Series 3. Monday's episode was entitled 'Children of Earth - Day One', Tuesday's episode was 'Children of Earth - Day Two' and so on, until Friday with 'Children of Earth - Day 5' being the finale. I really wanted the voice of the Geordie guy who does the Big Brother voiceover, or Marcus as his mother named him, to come on say the title of each episode. That would have made me chuckle, but he didn't so I had to do an impression of him saying that myself, everyday.
The story line was, to put it simply, the children of Earth being controlled by drug-dealing aliens in an attempt to scare the world into giving them 10% of the child population of Earth in return for not killing everyone and Captain Jack Harkness being killed and resurrected many a time. This is his party trick really, someone will shoot him, and then he'll come back to life. Essentially his life would be a real-life version of Grand Theft Auto, if he was real, which he isn't.
I actually don't like this. I think everyone who watches Torchwood or Doctor Who, knows that Jack can't be permanently killed, and he will always come back to life, so we don't need to keep having it demonstrated to us. I didn't count how many time he was killed last week, and I wish I had, because to me, it seems that the writers are not the most imaginative bunch; keep using the same bit time and time again. They would kill him off for the suspense of 'Would he come back to life?' which we all knew he would. It just gets boring. It ended up very similar to this - "Oh Jack's Dead, Alive again, he's dead again, no wait, he's alive, oops he's died again - clumsy fellow, what a surprise, alive again" and so on and so forth.
Anyway, forgetting that, I did actually thoroughly enjoy the short but sweet series. The story line was actually very good, apart from the occasional boring bit which just dragged on for too long. The series also gave the viewers a chance to practice a whole range of emotions from disgust to sadness and confusion to shitting ourselves. Pretty much everyone can agree that the scenes in day two, after Jack had been blown apart and his body started to grow back, was rather shockingly, confusingly disgusting.
After that the viewing girls were giving a treat as some would call it, and got to see his penis, if only for a few seconds. Every woman with Sky+ would surely have used it.
I think everyone can also conclude that the finale was a very emotionally based episode, and I'm not afraid to admit, I actually got a bit tearful. For me, I think the most emotional bit was when John Frobisher (The Secretary to the Home Office) got a gun and shot his family then himself, to stop them from having to suffer being taken by these Aliens. Other emotional bits in the series finale were when the army were taking the kids and the parents screaming, as well as when Jack's Grandson died, as a result of Jack saving the world again.
That's right, in this series; we also found out that Jack had a daughter and also a Grandson, just to make the series that bit more emotional. And as if that wasn't enough, Ianto dies in the arms of Jack, before Jack dies again that is, but don't worry, he did come back to life, but Ianto didn't.
There really wasn't much Alien action in those five episodes, which was a bit of let down really. For a sci-fi drama, there really wasn't. A lot of emotion, that makes it a drama yes, but otherwise it was just a lot of people sitting around tables talking, talking to silhouette of an Alien in a glass container, people with Welsh accents running and Jack dying. You see, I find it really hard to like anything on TV these days because I'm just too cynical about everything. I read too much into everything, and I'm very good at 'Knit-picking'; picking holes in everything.
I even found a continuity error, albeit a small one, but towards the end of episode 3, Mr Dekker, or the guy who was always wearing the brown coat as he may be more commonly known, was in one camera angle counting on his hands, but in another angle, he wasn't.
It seems the credit crunch has hit the big BBC dramas. With Doctor Who being put down to 3 episodes this year and Torchwood being put down to 5, without a huge amount of special effects. That's why it's been more emotion based rather than the normal action-packed episodes where they run around shooting Aliens or having sex with them as the previous 2 series have been. If you think about it that way, it was a bit of a cheapskate really, but hey, nether-the-less, it wasn't too bad.
That was blog 50 then m’lovelys, but blog 51 shall come soon.
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
In my idea of hell, there would be Jordan and Piers Morgan being played constantly on giant televisions everywhere. A few months ago on Piers Morgan's chat show, that came true, and they spoke to each other for an hour, talking about things I didn't care about (and in fact never watched because I never cared) but gave everyone the perfect reason to blow up their televisions. And last night, it came true again. Piers Morgan got two chairs and put them in Jordan's house, as well as a giant film crew to record another interview with Jordan, or Katie Price as she likes to be called, to talk about her extremely biased view of her break-up with Peter Andre.
The show started with an extract from their previous interview, of her saying hypocritically, that she was still in love Peter and would be together forever. Piers Morgan was quick to point this out in the interview and kept mentioning it to Katie. He kept doing a voice over in a stern; cuntish (is that a word? Well it is now) voice, where he summed up what the page 3 stripper had said in a language only a twat could fully understand. He even mentioned how she was hogging the headlines in the newspapers.
So, we go to a short ad break and come back to the 'Interview of the Year' and we get told all about the picture which apparently caused Pete to divorce Katie. It wasn't her fault at all apparently. I don't know who divorced who, and in fact I don't particularly care, but this was going to be a very biased interview from the start. We were only going to get one side of this argument. We have been told time and time again that Pete was the bastard in this story, and that Katie was the princess in this story. Piers even said that he had sympathy for Pete, even he could tell that this was actually her fault a bit.
We went back to Katie being a stupid hypocrite. One minute she hated Pete, the next she loved him. One minute she was saying she wanted privacy, which considering she is doing a TV interview about her private life, is extremely hard to believe. One minute she was saying she had left her Jordan life style behind her and wanted to be called Katie Price, just before she said that there will always be a bit of Jordan in her - she can't resist taking her clothes off when she was drunk. Okay, so half way through, and it seems we are talking to someone with a split personality. Just before going to a second break, we are left with her saying, in stronger language, that she didn't care what Pete thought, ringing in our ears.
Part three now, and we get onto the discussion about their latest reality show, with them in America, and Piers, with his eagle eyes, spots that they kept arguing, and asks why. Because they were with each other constantly and never had any private time apart apparently. Then an emotional, sympathetic bombshell is dropped on the Interview, where she calmly announced she was pregnant and the baby died, just before she cried, for about 10 seconds and goes back to calmly discussing it all, and saying again how much of a twat Pete was before crying again and saying that Pete dumped her just after the baby died. Then we get told about how she found out the baby had died, and continues to try and cry through her Botox. She then tells the story about how she triumphantly runs the London Marathon days after the miscarriage and bled the way through. Lovely image there.
She could have very easily have kept that to herself, there was absolutely no need to announce that to the world, so when she says that she didn't say that for the sympathy, it's very hard to believe. As you can tell, by the end of part three, I have grown absolutely no sympathy for her, and if anything have increased my dislike of her. She did however say that this Interview with Piers would be the only one she does on the subject of her divorce, so we can at least find solace in the fact that we haven't got to keep reading interviews with her, saying how hard life has been for the single parent with millions in the bank and giant boobs. But then who believes anything she says? I sure don't.
Welcome to part 4 and we are shown a few clips of Katie wearing hardly anything and showing off her 'assets'. To which Piers Morgan calls her a slapper. Now, this nearly made me walk out in the garden and hit myself over the head with a shovel again and again and again until I either died or luckily lost all my memory, because I have just agreed with something that Piers Morgan has said. I didn't however and I stayed to watch this interview.
Katie then goes on to state the obvious by saying 'I have a chest'. May have taken her over 10 years to work that out. She then flashed them at Piers Morgan. To which he said about a minute later 'Is there a chance of a new man in your life', and if you look, at this point his hands have actually moved to his private area, to which I think we all know was to cover an erection. He may be a twat, but he is still a man, and there aren't many straight men that wouldn't get a little excited at them being shoved in your face. So Katie then announces that she is now on the market, and thus this interview is finally ended.
My opinion is that they did break up for publicity reasons, but then I also believe they got married for publicity reasons, and I also believe they had children for the publicity as well as when they have an argument, it's for publicity. And there you go, my opinion is that their whole relationship was publicity based, and that they only broke up because ITV 2 wouldn't renew their contract for another series.
Anyway, to make up for this hour of hell, which was watched by 4.5 million other people, I watched Sean Lock Live on channel four, so it was evened out lovely.
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
That is a question that I've always wanted to know the answer to, but more so in the recent few months, as I would like to meet the person to see if they really are a complete and utter idiot. The relevance of the story on the public and the world is how I would decide the importance, and is how you would expect them to be ordered. The news is now ordered in a way to grab an audience and compete against other news programs/channels for ratings. The recent Michael Jackson death is a good example of this.
Everyone loved Michael Jackson, that much has been made obvious to us over the past 5 days, and every day since his death it has been the main news headline. Did he die as a result of the drugs he was taking? Did he die because of the stress of his upcoming tour at the O2 Arena? Who will get custody of his children? These are the questions that the news programs have been answering before bomb attacks in Iraq are discussed, the still increasing Swine Flu cases and forgetting the death of Farrah Fawcett, who died the same day as Michael Jackson and was big news until Jackson died, then her dead corpse just got pushed to the back of the news headline to make way for the freshly decaying dead corpse of Michael Jackson.
Another example of similar news stories being ordered differently is the metro crash in America last week which killed 9 people, and the Spanish train that blew up and killed 13 people a few days ago. The metro crash was the news headline of the day, and lots of emotional people were interviewed to give their experience of the tragic accident. Whereas the train explosion in Spain, which had more casualties, barely got a mention on the news, apart from a few dramatic images which made it look like a scene from a Tom Cruise film.
In case you're not aware of this story, a cargo train full of flammable gases blew up as it went through a train station, and as well as killing 13 people and injuring many more, it turned the surrounding area into a small village that looked like it had been hit by a nuclear bomb. In comparison to two trains colliding, I think the incident in Spain is actually bigger news myself. 
Geographical positioning and the countries power is usually the contributor to whether something is headline news or whether it gets featured in a quick 20 second news round-up. A fatal accident in America will get much more media coverage than a fatal accident in a less powerful country like Spain, as showed in the recent news.
It even counts for news stories over in the United Kingdom. If someone gets stabbed in London, its headline news, and Gordon Brown comes on the TV and gives his condolences to the family and someone from Scotland Yard will give an update on suspects. If someone gets stabbed in Summerset, it would barely get covered by local news teams, and not the national news, that’s for sure. I know if they covered every stabbing, the first 20 minutes of every news report would be a list of deaths, but that is yet another example of some guy sitting in the ITN newsroom deciding what the public want to hear, and making a decision of whether something is important or not.
I can't have a moan at the media, without bringing up Jade Goody, who died a few months ago of cervical cancer. I'm sure you remember that, because all the gossip magazines have talked about since is her death and how Jack Tweed is coping with the loss. Just because she was in the media spotlight, we all decided that was more important than every other woman in the country who was dying or suffering with cervical cancer. I've said this before, and I'll say it again. Numerous members of my family have had cancer, as have a lot of people’s families, and at no point did the prime minister call them brave, or Okay! Magazine never done a tribute to them. And why is she any different? All because she was on Big Brother.
People will argue that without her, thousands of women would never have had themselves checked out, but that was only because the media kept pushing the subject (something good had to come out of it all). At no point did Goody actively tell women to get themselves checked out. She did not die with dignity and it wasn't just her fault, it was the media's fault too. It was the fault of the news for constantly reminding us she was dying. And when she did die, we were shown footage of people crying and flowers being laid outside her house. That is why the death of Michael Jackson has been was compared to Goody's death; the constant media coverage after the death. Now it has become boring. What we need is Michael Jackson's body to spontaneously combust, destroying the whole of America to liven it up and make the story interesting again.
I'm not that sympathetic over celebrity deaths like Michael Jackson and Jade Goody, because people die every day. Maybe a Plumber from Leeds isn't as important as an American who has made a huge contribution to music or a women who has kept the tabloid papers and the gossip magazines in business, however they are still people, so why the news reporter can't just say 'Jade Goody has finally died... Now onto something more important - Barak Obama has just saved the world yet again, this time he managed to stop a meteor from colliding with the Earth.'
It can't all be blamed on the media though; it can also be blamed on you, the British public. It's because you've forced us to live in the world of celebrity, where all everyone seems to care about is either a celebrity’s personal life or who will be the next person to be evicted from the Big Brother house. And with written media dying out because of new technologies, the papers have had try harder to get readers. The Internet means people can access the news up to date, when they want and choose what they do and do not want to read/listen to and is also free.
The news today is concentrated on the recent hot weather. Announcing that today Kent was 4 Degrees Celsius warmer than the Caribbean. It's not a competition. I personally don't really care where we are hotter than, and everyone getting giddy at the thought that we are hotter than the Caribbean islands, but then I don't care about a lot of things on the news. Do I care that 4 people will serve a 44 years sentence between them for smuggling drugs into Britain? No. Do I really care that there is no prospect of a post office sell off? Not particularly. Do I even care that Gordon Brown insists he is honest about his expenses? Nope, couldn't give a flying monkeys (strange expression that).
So why do I even watch the news or buy the Guardian if I don't care about the news? I don't know really, because if I really want to know something, I would go onto the BBC website and have a look. That's sorted then, I won't watch the news again (for a while at least).
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx
Just one more thing. Have a look at this video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELyTBXzfQJ8 It appeals to me because it involves Hitler and is rather funny on the subject of Michael Jackson’s death. Have a look, you won’t regret.
