After Watching Six Weeks Of Day Time Telly, I Like The Idea Of Suicide...

Welcome back blog readers, and just to reiterate, I'm not contemplating suicide, and if I was, I'm not so shallow that the cause of it would be watching Television. Anyway, there are two reasons for me separating this blog into two parts. A) because of the length; I don't like posting blogs that are so long that no-one is going to bother to read them, so posting it as two blogs give me more versatility to its length. And B) I'm going to mention Thomas the Tank Engine in this blog, and it didn't feel right talking about Sex and Kids TV in the same blog - however, it would have been a nice Juxtaposition.

Compared to night time television, watching television is just as dull. Also, in my title, I've lied again. Not only do I not like the idea of suicide, but I've actually not watched a great deal of television during the day time. Anyway, my current addiction on television during the day is Thomas the Tank Engine on Five. Because it's on early in the morning (about 8:30, which is when I'm still sleeping), I record it, and watch it at some point during the day. It was once my favourite show on Television as a child, and seeing it brought back to life certainly made me laugh when I watched the new stuff for the first time. For example, the theme tune I absolutely hate (however, you can (and I do) sing along to the new one), the original was far much better in my opinion, but then maybe that is because it was the version I was first exposed to, plus the original brings back so many memories.
However, because of new animation technologies, the quality of the show itself now is far better, with the mouths and people actually moving and the Fat Controller (There's also a Thin Controller as well) actually looking more alive, thanks to CGI, compared to his look in the original series which was a novelty salt dispenser. After 321 stories, you'd expect the show to have derailed (see what I done there), but the story lines entertain me just as well as they used to when I was 3 years old. I have a huge collection of Thomas toys from my childhood, kept in a cupboard and I was once a member of the Thomas the Tank Engine fan club, and I suppose I still am, because I've cancelled my membership. I love it, and I'm not ashamed of it!

Anyway, from something I love to something I loathe - The Jeremy Kyle Show. Jeremy, the messiah to the unemployed and host to the stereotypical Pickey families, is possibly one of the worst Television personalities currently on TV; just behind Piers Morgan and Kerry Katona, but just ahead of the Loose Women hags, which I'll get onto soon. He doesn't try and calm down arguments between families and lovers at all, or in any way help, he just gets involved with the ranting himself and ignites it so the audience can get involved which leads to the woman in the tracksuit (yet she only runs when she hears an Ice Cream Van) sobs, so Jeremy can then shout at her cheating boyfriend saying it's his fault, when it's Jeremy shouting in her face, telling her that she shouldn't let him walk all over her.
I will be honest, I watched an episode of the show yesterday, but so I can get material to write about, as I'm not really a big viewer of the show. He seems to have an anger issue as one minute he can be talking calmly to one of his targets, understanding the situation, where the whole time, in his mind he judges them, and then cracks and shouts at them telling them that they need to sort their life out, to which the audience, who he has herded in from the park opposite a Chip Shop, who all clap and boo like a pantomime audience who are high on caffeine from Cherry flavoured coke, thinking it was one of their 5-a-day. The show is essentially everything I hate about Britain and people in general.

Now onto Loose Women, which is a show I couldn't bring myself to watch because they just irritate me because the show is just a live feed of a gathering of middle-aged harpies, sitting around a table gossiping about their husbands and occasionally attempting to have a political conversation about something none of the audience know about and they themselves are trying to attempt to understand. They get one other person, whether they be male or female, to sit in the middle of the 5 caldron stirrers, to plug their new book or TV show and attempt to fit in with their biased views on relationships and celebrities. If these 5 women were alive many centuries ago, they would be considered to be witches and it wouldn't be called a 'TV Show', it would be considered to be coven (a gathering of witches).

Guilty pleasures of mine are these auction programs which are on during the afternoon. A favourite of mine is Dickenson's Real Deal, and I seem to be convinced I know more about the worth of these ancient artefacts and their worth than the experts on the show. When a woman brings a tea set and tells the expert that it has been in her family for over 4 generations and I sit their coming up with a price in my head, and I yell at the television when the expert announces it's worth less than my estimate. Obviously, they're right and I'm usually wrong, but I am still convinced I know more than them.
I quite liked a bit I saw the other day where a man brings on a portrait of a women, and the expert says 'This doesn't really float my boat', and I felt compelled to shout 'Of course it wouldn't, it's a framed piece of canvas, not liquid!' It's all part of my new sarcastic/literal sense of humour, where I take everything serious. It will annoy everyone soon, but anyway, this is my guilty pleasure of the daytime television schedule.

Something else, which can be watched during the night, and during the day, are these dating channels, which are quite funny to sit and watch, and are great for someone with low self esteem to watch, to build it up. I sit and watch it, only for a few minutes, and I read the comments which are posted on the channel, which are people constantly attempting to be vaguely humorous to get a reply to their dating ad. It's just the most pathetic thing to sit and read, but it makes me feel much better about my love situation, however non-existent it is. And it's called 'Rabbit', which in a subconscious way, implies that they'll get a date and have 20 children with them. There's even a channel called 'Gay Rabbit' which does the same thing, but for gay people, but I'm not going to go into the implications of that name...

Now onto the best news for the television schedule this year. Big Brother has now finally finished for this year. Apparently, a woman called Sophie won, and she has very nice assets from pictures I've seen, but it's quite obvious, one of her assets isn't her brains and wit. Either way, I don't care, because it's over and means that television isn't scheduled around live footage of people sleeping and sitting around bitching about everyone else behind their back. That therefore means that Scrubs will now be added to the daily schedule on E4 like it was before, so that's something to look forward to and watch again.

On that happy note, I shall end...
Toodles m’dearys
xXXx

Be Banished to Big Brother

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/