When I was on Trisha, and instead of being about committment, it was about Porn...

Being asked to be on Trisha was one of the most exciting things ever to happen to me near the bus station in town. I flatter myself that I was so stunning that they couldn't let me walk past without securing my TV debut, but the truth was that at the time I was with my housemate and he had a shaved head with a tiny blue tuft of hair at the front, which they clearly thought would look 'edgy and exciting' on television. And I was there as well, so they let me come along. Either way, we were told to meet at the very same bus station at some ridiculous time in the morning to be bussed to Norwich to be on Trisha (this was in the old days before she started using her surname and getting dropped from TV schedules left, right and centre). Apart from a mustard factory there isn't a huge amount to do in Norwich from what we could see, but it didn't matter because we were going to the TV studio to be in the audience on Trisha. When we got there we were shown into a room with some other people and a very serious-looking studio person came in. We had been told that the programme they were due to record today was about people with serious commitment problems, but she came in to break the news that the commitment problems were obviously a lot more serious than even the highly qualified mental health professionals on Trisha had realised as nobody from that show had turned up. Instead, she was sorry to tell us, the show would be about porn! Rarely has a formal announcement been so amusing, and Big Gay Housemate and I were chuffed to be involved. We wandered in to the studio to be greeted with a stripper, a woman who was still making porn at 8 months pregnant and a hooker who was paying her way through university. It was quite interesting in fact - I couldn't decide whether we were lucky to have a better quality of guests and/or audience than normal, or whether selective editing really can make anyone look like a complete spanner, but there wasn't really much of the shrieking 'You don't know me, you can't say anything' that was a feature of the show every other time I saw it. The only real problem was that there wasn't really much to say to these people - the stripper had all the stereotypical women all hot under the collar, and seemed like a genuinely friendly and pleasant guy, the woman who was pregnant was saving to take a break when her baby was born, and the hooker was so well spoken and matter-of-fact about her position that it was pretty hard to get riled. The pregnant woman came in for most of the stick, but I suspect that secretly most people were thinking (much like myself) that they had never realised there was a market for pregnant lady porn, and contemplating the high model turn-over there must be in such an industry. We were asked to make sure we always had our hands in the air to look like we were bursting with questions, which was fine until a slightly flushed looking Trisha came over to me and I asked the hooker an ill-thought-out question about having a career to 'fall back on' which I would have still said had I realised the pun, but would have been better prepared for the sniggers. The worst part about the whole experience was that they didn't tell us when the episode was going to be aired, and as a non-fanatic watcher of the show, the chances of me seeing it were minimal. However, this was while I was still working at the pub, so whilst I was prepared for a few people to ask me about it, I was distinctly not ready for the crazy lady who came in a few months after it was originally aired, pointed her finger at me like something out of 'Tales from the Crypt' and said 'It was you - you were at my house at 3 o'clock this morning. It really freaked me out - I thought I was still at the pub'. That was when I found out that the episode had been repeated in the grave-yard slot as well, and I spent an entertaing couple of hours trying to convince her that there was no reason to be worried, that I was actually on her TV and not in her head, and that although it seemed unlikely that I was in the audience on Trisha as opposed to another hallucination, on this occasion she could rely on her recollection of events without considering upping her dosage.

Do I use the toilet incorrectly?

I mean, there must be something wrong with me because I don't think I have ever managed to use one of those auto-flushing techno-toilets they have at airports without activating some kind of stealth setting, the purpose of which I can only imagine is to humiliate the user into such a state that they are incapable of committing any violent acts once airborne. Who is it that decided that any movement indicates a desire to flush? Someone with a psychopathic hatred for humanity, that's who.

Two words I love

Having spent last Thursday night entertaining a friend and his new Lithuanian squeeze, I am now the proud owner of a new facourite word. I neither speak nor write Lithuanian, but the rough pronunciation of this word is 'Ooshbackalooka', and one of the best things about it is that it means 'arse'. Not just any 'Oh arse, I've smashed my foot into a wicker basket and it's swollen up to twice its normal size' - it is not to be used in any context other than appreciation, such as 'That's a lovely Ooshbackalooka you've got there', which is an excellent way to complement someone whether they speak Lithuanian or not. My other new favourite is 'Asshat' although my affection is tinged with sadness as I fear I will never be able to use it in spoken conversation on account of my not being American. It is one of the things I find most cringy about this country - our inability to break out of our traditional toff pronunciation of 'arse' with a long 'ahh'. When hard-core slapstick show 'Jackass' hit these shores, I was initially entertained, then saddened and embarassed by the way people managed to strangle the pronunciation, coming up with 'Jack-ahhhse' and making themselves sound like tools. However, the beauty of 'ass-hat' is that it is as, if not more, effective written down as well as lending itself to the creation of other related parts of speech such as 'ass-hattery' and 'ass-hattage'. It also manages to combine amusing and insulting in perfect proportion, making it the perfect word to use when you want to draw someone's attention to the fact that they have just said or done something stupid, but you don't want to rest your judgement of them as a complete moron until they have had a chance to redeem themselves. Laughing at being called an ass-hat would be a good start.

I love my massive studio-style headphones

They are the only thing that stands between my co-workers and certain death. Because we have moved to an office which has no cafeteria and no staff room, in fact nowhere at all to get away from your desk without getting in your car and escaping somewhere more luxurious, I am constantly subjected to the noises of my colleagues crunching, sucking, slurping and talking through mouthfuls of food. The sound of this process ranges from vaguely annoying crisp eating by people who seem to be involved in ongoing competitions with themselves to see how large a stack of crisps they can ram into their gob in one go, crushing them up with their mouth half agape to those who willfully open a mouth full of half-chewed slop to share some worthless piece of information with someone who doesn't care, and certainly doesn't have enough interest to want to see the future contents of their stomach. I am sure that I make some noise when I eat, but at least I have some understanding of the size of my mouth, and don't consistently try to test its limits with just one more crunchy treat which will render me incapable of chewing with my mouth closed, thus subjecting everyone around to the sound of me snorting and grunting my way through the entire mouthful and possibly end in the unplanned consumption of a colleague's fist. But, fortunately for my co-workers, I have massive headphones and a wide selection of entertainment just waiting inside them to relieve me of my bile at their lack of consideration and unashamed gluttony. They don't know how lucky they all are.

Feeling old

I thought that the aches and pains I am increasingly discovering would be the thing that would make me feel old, but that was before I spent a day at home last week due to the snow. I did try to go to work, but when I saw the 4x4 in front of me skid, I decided that the world of internet marketing could survive without me for a day. Moreover, I decided that if I was going to die in the snow, I would want to be doing something a damn sight more worthwhile than going in to work just so that I could show my face and make it onto the leaderboard of 'people who respond to intimidation by risking their lives to get into the office'. However, when I got home, a mere hour and a half after leaving, the Boy Wonder was slightly underwhelmed, and responded not with wild elation that I had survived the peril of the snow and had also come home for an extra day of fun with him, but with a slightly deflated 'Oh - well I've got lots of jobs to do today'. Fair enough I suppose - I do rib him a little about his part-time status and sometimes his level of achievement on his self-employed days, but I remember when I used to have time on my own in the house to do all my jobs when he was at evening rehearsals, time which was suddenly snatched away from me when he started rehearsing in the day, and wondered whether I have made a grave mistake. Instead of offering to share those jobs, which are incidentally not just my jobs so much as household chores that the Boy Wonder is mostly unware of, I just moved them around so that I get them done in stages rather than a blitz one night a week. Ok, if I'm honest, some of them don't get done that much any more at all, but it goes to show how little you really need to achieve if you want to get away with the bare minimum. So, he got on with doing something incomprehensible with solder which will apparently revolutionise the studio in the spare room upstairs by requiring much shorter lengths of cable. I mustered up as much enthusiasm as I could, and it still wasn't enough to see any way in which this development would benefit my life, but inspired by his sudden enthusiasm for achieving things, and feeling as though I'd better pull something pretty good out of the bag in order not to be the lazy couch-potato on the sofa watching day-time TV while the Boy Wonder was in a creative world of success, I hit upon the most tragic brainwave I have ever had. Instead of getting the wellies back on and braving another dice with death in the beautifully snowy, but ultimately pretty shooty woods in the village, I hit on a desperately well-conceived plan to defrost the freezer, making full use of the snow to maintain the temperature of its contents whilst I fought with the sheets of ice which build up when the Boy Wonder absent-mindedly leaves the freezer door open overnight. I unpacked the food into carrier bags, plonked them in the snow, covered them with a bin bag to stop the new snow getting in, and then spent a happy couple of hours making ratatouille in between bouts of kettle boiling, floor mopping and finger shredding for the cause. It was a wildly successful venture and one which left me with a pleasant sense of multi-tasked achievement. However, there was a moment of sadness when I realised what had happened - instead of flinging myself into the white stuff for snow angel creation and snowman construction, I was excited about the idea of being able to defrost the freezer without ruining the food. I don't know when this shift towards adulthood came about, or even whether I would have noticed it had it not suddenly snowed, but I think it might be a step towards my apparently inevitable maturity. Having said that, as a child I remember having to spend a snow day when the school was closed ringing parents of the children who had not made it in to let them know the school would be closed the next day too, so maybe it's my Mum's fault for teaching at my primary school - it sucked the fun out of the rarest of treats, the school closure, and left me with a distinctly unhealthy approach towards the practical applications of snow.

Spin-off shows

Having discovered that Jason King was a spin-off show I started thinking about other spin-offs which stand alone in their own right. I wasn't even aware that Mork and Mindy was a spin-off until years after my early introduction to their antics in the 6.30 slot on channel four as a kid, and when I discovered that the whole show was a spin-off from Happy Days I was bemused. I wouldn't say I was a huge Happy Days fan, but they were another one in the 6.30 slot, so I have seen quite a few, but never any with Mork or Mindy in them. And presumably, for a spin-off to have even be considered they must have featured in quite a few episodes. More confusingly, not only have I not seen an episode with either Mork or Mindy in it, I apparently haven't seen any of the subsequent episodes. Given that the lives of the Happy Days gang revolved around the Fonz's conquests and various school-related melodramas, you would have thought that they would have endlessly relived the time they spent with an alien, possibly even kept in touch given that they would presumably have been a good bunch of friends to have if you were keeping an eye on a socially inept alien. It was a bit weird that he and Mindy got married, but I still think it's weirder that Richie, Potsie and Ralph Malph never even mentioned their alien encounter and that Mrs C never even made cookies for Mork and Mindy. I never saw Laverne and Shirley in Happy Days either, although I never saw Laverne and Shirley the TV show at all until I was in the States. Wikipedia claims that Laverne and Shirley was the most successful spin-off from Happy Days, meaning that even Mork and Mindy's multi-season reign on the small screen was nothing compared to Laverne and Shirley's TV takeover. Wikipedia has also provided useful information about another 3 Happy Days spin-offs, the most entertaining-sounding of which, 'Out of the Blue' was apparently aired by accident before the main character had even appeared in Happy Days. This can only prove that my initial assumptions about a character's popularity being a key factor when deciding whether they warrant a spin-off series was incorrect. I am not sure why you would even create a spin-off series without even knowing whether the character will go down well, and evidently my instinct was correct given that neither 'Out of the Blue' nor 'Blansky's Beauties' have ever registered on my consciousness. 'Joanie loves Chachi' is one that I was at least aware of, but I don't think I have ever seen it and it seems reasonable to assume that it can't have been that great given the speed with which they cancelled it. Interestingly, this brief foray into the world of spin-offs has revealed that Happy Days itself was originally a spin-off of a show called 'Love, American Style', yet another layer in the confusing world of inter-show mingling which has convinced me that there should be some limit to the number of generations you can have of a show before realising it's really gone to shit. In the case of 'Friends' and 'Joey' of course, we have all realised that the limit should have been set at none. However, by far my favourite spin-off (and one which frankly I can't believe was a secondary idea given the fact that it is a truly spectacular show in its own right) is the Colbert Report. Why there was even a need for him to pay his dues on the John Stewart show is far beyond me, as I would imagine anyone with enough rudimentary brain function to either see, hear, or both wouldn't need any convincing to run with the idea of giving Stephen Colbert unlimited access to TV schedules to air his thoughts, hopes and dreams for the nation. I only wish he would bestow his mighty brain power on the UK and resolve all our national, international and personal issues - it would probably only take him half an hour...

Jason King

This show rocks - I'm not sure if you can make a show which combines a 70s dandy working in espionage and detection against his will, with a high quota of 70s-pointy-boobed attractive young women without hitting on a classic, but either way, it certainly didn't happen in this case! There is nothing bad about Jason King, from the way he wakes up and has to have a stiff drink before answering the door to his inappropriate ways of seducing women young enough to be his daughters. In fact, the only criticism that I can level is that my sudden decision to buy the Jason King box-set for the Boy Wonder for Valentine's day lead me to discover that it would cost me a whopping £40 which seems a little excessive. It's not that I don't think Jason King is worth it, just that I can't justify its purchase given that the Boy Wonder and I take a 'can't really be arsed' approach to Valentine's day. I did, however discover that Jason King is spin-off from another show called 'Department S', which also sounds great, but unfortunately also costs a prohibitive amount. I can't imagine what they managed to cram into 'Department S' that required the spin-off of Jason King - every episode of Jason King that I have ever seen has had a healthy dose of innuendo, inappropriate behaviour towards colleagues of the opposite sex and a wide range of condescending comments for use when talking to anyone who doesn't fully understand the nature of the extravaganza of espionage around which the story revolves. If Jason King was just one man in a show with other characters of similar calibre, I fear that watching a whole episode could have a lasting impact on our health, safety and expectations of those we meet in real life, leading to inevitable disappointment when they turn out not to have fictional alter egos or say things like 'It's a bit too early for coffee - I'll have a scotch'. Whilst I know people with dangerous drinking habits, people who have done very little of what they are paid to do for a living and people who have charmed their way out of trouble, I don't know anyone whose sartorial style is so uniquely 'of-the-moment' that I can imagine anyone wanting to replicate it for the star of their box office film.

Snow!

When it started snowing yesterday I thought it might be a bit icy this morning, but by the time we went to bed quite a lot had settled, so this morning I wasn't entirely surprised to see about 4 or five inches on the roof of my car. Now I am sitting at work, where we have been given a time at which we are allowed to leave, so I'm hoping that it at least doesn't get worse before then as I suspect it won't go down too well to just bail and go home. However, I suppose if it was that important to me, I could just leave and take the time unpaid, so I can't really complain...