Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

How Good TV Goes Bad!

Apparently, the Fox Network is going to cancel House.  I have never seen the show.  No, I’m not a television snob who only watches PBS, nor do I have a philosophical disagreement with scripted TV.  I just didn’t watch it in the beginning, couldn’t figure it out in the middle and wasn’t willing to give it any time after it had passed its prime.  Over the years, literally thousands of TV shows have slipped past me this way.  By the time my friends convince me that the drama is riveting or the comedy hilarious, the program is two or three seasons deep and already going stale.  I usually tune in just in time to catch nothing more than saggy dialogue, lame insults and baggy clichés.  Sometimes, I go back and find a program’s broadcast youth in hit-and-miss syndication, but mostly I don’t, and I doubt if I will with House.  Grumpy medical people haven’t intrigued me since Doctor Gillespie.  Anyway, House was born, lived and is now going to die without us ever becoming friends…oh, well!  It had a good life.

Actually, House is an exception: most television programs don’t have a good life.  If they are bad, they die young.  If they’re good and nobody watches them, they die young.  If they are bad and tons of people watch them, they’re still bad and become a running joke (a la Gilligan’s Island.)  Plus, everybody from the executive producer down to the teenage viewer spends the rest of their lives trying to live down their association with that piece of trash.  However, the worst thing that can ever happen to a television show is that it’s good and tons of people watch it.  Only the very best programs can survive that kind of success, and most of them don’t.

Aside from a few excellent aberrations, really good TV is based on character and writing.  All you have to do is look at the CSI franchise to figure that out, and while Miami Vice kinda needed Miami, it could have just as easily have been Malibu or New Orleans.  This is the way it’s always been, since the dawn of television.  Even way back in black and white days, 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye weren’t that much different, and everybody knows that Star Trek was just Wagon Train with short skirts and phasers.  Good characters make good TV, and good writing makes good characters.  However, this is also exactly what makes good TV go so horribly bad.

In the world of television, professional writers pour miles of work (and paper!) into creating characters.  They put them into storylines that let them shine and give them clever things to say.  The sole purpose of this is to make these characters interesting enough that we, the audience, come back next week to see them again.  It’s a hit-and-miss proposition, but when it works, a television show becomes successful.   The characters become our television friends — witty, sexy, smart, comical, caring or just plain cool – in short, everything we wish our real friends were but never are.  After all, who would you rather have a drink with, Lucy, the smart chick from Alcatraz or your idiot sister-in-law?  No contest!

Unfortunately, this is also the problem: once these imaginary people become our friends, nobody wants to get rid of them.  The producers, directors and technical crowd — right down to the guy who pours the orange juice — have a good gig going.  They’re not going to kill the goose that’s laying the golden eggs.  Furthermore, the advertisers don’t care if we’re watching dancing Bavarian mud monkeys — as long as the audience numbers are up.  And the writers will sell their own mothers before they start the whole process over again.  After all, it probably took them ten years to sell this idea.  So the characters keep hanging around, long after the professional writers (who mostly suffer from acute, undiagnosed ADD, anyway) have run out of imagination.  The stories go flat and repetitive.  (How many ways can everybody love Raymond, for God’s sake?)  They generally outlast themselves by two, three or five years and keep staggering along, like wheezing pensioners looking for the Rest Home.  Either that, or the writers, sensing imminent unemployment, go nuts and call in the aliens or reinvent someone’s parent as a gratuitous celebrity to eke out another season or two.  And that’s how most good TV shows die, shadows of their former selves, alone and abandoned by everyone (often, even the original cast) only the most loyal fans remaining.  As old friends will, we sometimes come back for the last episode, like hangers-on at a funeral, but mostly we’ve gone on to other things enthralled by our new friends who are young and exciting.

Now that I think about it, maybe it’s too bad I missed House completely.  From the looks of things, it was probably an intelligent, interesting program.  After all, the producers were smart enough to retire the old boy before he was literally on his last legs.

Valentine’s Day: A User’s Guide for Men

I’m probably the most romantic creature on this planet.  I cry during the love scene in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, for God’s sake!  However, it has recently come to my attention that Valentine’s Day has gotten way out of hand.  It used to be that the only people who were getting rich off romance were those grubbers down at Hallmark.  I’m not one to brag, but I’ve bought a card or two in my time.  These days, however, come February 14th, it seems like everybody’s got their hand in your pocket.  Cupid has gone commercial, and he’s charging megabucks for those arrows.

Back in the day, when love didn’t come at the end of an eHarmony questionnaire, people had love affairs.  (Relationships were what you had with your cousins and co-workers.)  For those of you under thirty, a love affair was that brilliant time when nothing mattered to you more than the dull ache of your heart, the sound of her breathing and the solitary sight of her in a crowded room.  In those days, no words remembered love, no action spoke its name and no credit card was its benefactor: the only cure was proximity.  Love meant close enough to touch, and when it didn’t — it hurt.  That was when Valentine’s Day was still special.  It was the unspoken promise that couples made to each other.  But enough about that: I’m here to bury St. Valentine, not to praise him.

(Before I go any further, and the politically correct crowd start organizing the lynch mob, I realize that relationships come in a variety of permutations and combinations.  Unfortunately, I have a limited working knowledge of much beyond the male side of male and female.  Therefore, that’s what I’m dealing with; anything else would be just guessing.  If you’re looking for all-inclusive or if heterosexual offends you, stop now and re-Google.  It will save us both a lot of time.)  Personally, I think it’s a sad day when people need to put a disclaimer on innocent stuff like Valentines, but such is the world we live in.  Anyway …

Recently, Valentine’s Day has taken a distinct turn for the worst.  It has gone from a simple “Be my Valentine” card at dinner to over-the-top romantic gymnastics that would make Casanova wonder WTF.   Here’s the problem.  Regardless of how much they lie to themselves and others, men do not know what women want.  They never did.  They’re never going to.  And that includes romance.  Yeah, yeah, yeah!  Men know all about the clichés: those moonlit walks everybody talks about, the candlelight, the roses and the hearts and angels’ music.  But when it gets down and dirty, single tear in the corner of the female eye, 99.99% of men are lost.  However, rather than admit that romance escapes them (like the last inmate going over the wall) they throw money at it.  This is a traditional male strategy that’s been backfiring since before Antony gave Cleopatra, Syria, Persia and all points east to make up for the annoying fact he wasn’t Julius Caesar.  Unfortunately, having once set these cash-eating bolas in motion, it was only a matter of time before they started spinning out of control.  These days, men are waking up on January 2nd, knowing that in six weeks, they better come up with something fantastic and poetic or ladylove is going to be pissed off until way past Labour Day.  And every guy older than Justin Bieber knows that that’s going to take some serious dinero.  It’s an anxiety trap that men have been building for themselves for the last decade, and it’s not pretty.

Therefore, since I am a public-spirited fellow and do not wish to see my brothers suffering needlessly, I’m going to let everybody in on a little secret.  I know what women want.  No, I’m not going to give that kind of information away free, but since I do have it, I can give all men a bit of advice.  Boys, put away your wallets and change your thinking.  Quit having a relationship, and try having a love affair.  Lovers don’t send bouquets of roses. (She’s not in love with the delivery man.)  They hand deliver a single flower.  Lovers don’t make reservations for romantic dinners, weeks in advance; they show up unexpectedly with a two hot dog lunch because it seems like a good idea at the time.  They don’t schedule together time with cooking classes, or dance lessons; they cook, they dance and they prefer the company of the one they love.  They don’t fit it in on Tuesday nights after yoga.  Yes, it’s a busy world, and there are kids and jobs and mortgages and insurance and on and on.  Big wow!  The truth remains that two people playing grab ass for a quick couple of minutes in the kitchen while the pasta’s cooking is worth more than any number of prefabricated date nights.  Lovers don’t have a script, and they don’t have a schedule.  They just enjoy each other’s company.

Tomorrow, guys, remember Valentine’s Day is for lovers – full stop.  It isn’t for people in “a relationship” who “have feelings for” each other.  That’s just a generous way of saying, “Maybe I don’t love you all that much.”  And of all the things that women want, that’s not one of them.

Talkin’ ’bout the i-Generation!

If you’re reading this, chances are good you were born in the 20th century.  If you weren’t, put this down, you precocious little beast, and go out and play.  For the rest of us, the 20th century was the cradle, the nursery, and probably most of the education of our existence.  As Herman Raucher once said, “It is our time, and we’ll never leave it.”  To us, it’s our life.  It’s not history; it’s memory.  The great events we witnessed are coupled with our birthdays, divorces, new cars and houses.  However, in a couple of hundred years (or maybe a thousand) when people look at our time, they’re going to draw a sharp line between the 20th and 21st centuries.  They’re going to separate us like exhibits in a museum.  Right now, we exist simultaneously in both centuries, like two pages of a book — totally different, yet intimately touching at every point and completely useless without the other.  In the future, however, we are going to be one thing and those precocious little beasts poking away at their iPads are going to be another.

As much as most people would like to deny it, we are the cumulative result of history.  There is a direct line from you and me back to the dim reaches of time, when the epic human struggle was merely to stand on our own two feet.  For example, if I wanted to be an intellectual smart-ass, I could trace the birth of our world back to shoddy obstetrics in the Imperial court of Prussia in 1859.  Or I could research (plagiarize is such a hard word) Paul Johnson and go back even further to a Frenchman’s hemorrhoids at the dawn of the 19th century.   My point, of course, is that there is no start to history — only final judgements passed on the results.

Our current 21st century’s i-Generation is a perfect example.  These are the kids who are adapting our world to Facebook and Google, one app at a time.  They’ve changed Wikipedia from a slightly tawdry secret to a tolerated research tool.  They are intent on sharing, not personal experience, but data with the world.  In the future, they will be judged in isolation.  Nobody will bother looking at the seeds and shallow roots provided for them.  Their obsession with consumption rather than creation will be seen as a character flaw – an aberration which was always destined to kill or cure our fat, wheezing planet.  Yet, the i-Generation didn’t just appear one day like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, nor is it even fully grown yet.  It still depends on Generation Y for its existence.

Generation Y! — those 80’s babies who can’t seem to decide if they are a stand-alone product of the Baby Boom or only just an echo.  Constantly harassed about the dangers awaiting them, these are the folks whose abilities have always outshone their underdeveloped egos.  They risk little and expect much.  Their literature is the graphic novel; their art, the expressive font; and their technological advances are made on the playing fields of virtual reality.  Generation Y stands alone — with its devices connected to the planet but they, themselves utterly isolated from it.  Not since the Dark Ages have humans been so devoid of contact with the outside world.  Generation Y lives and works in a series of separate technological villages, timidly toiling like Copeland’s microserfs, afraid to venture beyond their firewalls.  But they, too, did not arrive fully formed like a Botticelli Venus rising from the ocean’s foam.  They are the children of Generation X.

Generation X, the first generation of the Age of Entertainment.  They showed up just in time to see America leave the Moon, never to return, and George Lucas unleash his Jedi to battle the Death Star.  Raised on Sesame Street and Cocoa Puff cartoons, Generation X has never understood why the world doesn’t play nice like its television friends do.  Completely overshadowed, Gen X was forgotten and left to fend for itself.  As it saw the brave old world bending under the weight of its uber-ego parents, it could only step back in fear of the imminent collapse of power, oil and profit and seek salvation in Spielberg and Scorsese.  Still, we must remember Generation X was never abandoned like the solitary child of the goddess Hera, twice tossed from heaven. It was born into the rarified air of the Baby Boom.  It cut its teeth on impending disaster, with only discredited institutions and disassembled Gods to comfort it.

And so it goes; back and back, each generation shaped by the wants and fears of the ones preceding it.  If history judges the early 21th century harshly, it will be because the i-Generation believes that clicking Like on Facebook can change the world.  Yet, it is we, from the 20th century, who taught them that.  I-Gen is the product of two generations of constraint and constriction.  The Xs and Ys watched the world of their parents and grandparents falter, assailed on all sides by everything from financial ruin to pandemic disease.  So they taught their children to be wary, to keep their distance and to “Stay strong.”

John F. Kennedy spoke of his generation (what we call “The Greatest Generation”) as “born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.”  I don’t have many regrets, but I do regret not being able to hear what the i-Generation will eventually say about itself.