Tag: Television

I Love Commercials

I love commercials.  I think TV ads are cute, little, itty bitty movies.  So it doesn’t bother me that, for the most part, they’re lying to us.  Look, folks!  Like Skyfall, Terminator and Iron Man, they’re fiction!  Sit back and enjoy the show.

The thing that I don’t understand, though, is how TV commercials ever actually SELL anything.  The ads all exist in these weird-ass Never-Never-Land dystopias that can’t be a good idea to showcase the product.  For example:

Household Cleaners – The houses in these ads are filthy.  They’re disgusting.  Who lives there — trolls?  The furniture and floors look the family pet is a buffalo.  The kitchens are the greasiest, greasy combination of greasy-spoon diner and salmonella experiment known to humanity.  And the bathrooms!  OMG!  They’re covered in so much crud Gollum wouldn’t poop in there.  Even the worst hillbillies I know don’t live like that.  If you live in this kind of squalor, you don’t need “Extra-Strength” anything to clean it up; you need a match to burn it down before the Health Department shows up and does it for you.

Feminine Hygiene – Menstruating women are not that happy.  They just aren’t.  And if they do smile, it’s a lot more evil-looking than in the ads.  It’s not a good idea to remind women of this.

Automobiles – Everybody knows the internal combustion engine is a dick to the environment, and car ads prove it.  First, they drive the SUV through a stream, turning the fish habitat into mud pies.  Then, it’s up the mountain, in a 4-wheel-drive rampage to catch the sunset from the summit.  Perfect view!  Except they parked their three tons of automotive junk on a hundred-year-old lichen that just got its endangered species life smeared into the tread of an all-season radial.  Yeah, we’re not destroying our planet fast enough.  I want one of those.

Drugs – I don’t care what wonders the newest wonder drug does, the “side effects” litany scares the hell out of me.  Honestly, “may cause dry mouth, tremors, depression, heart attack, vomiting, internal bleeding, external bleeding, massive bleeding and your tongue’s going fall out” leaves me a little reluctant to try taking it for “occasional arthritis pain.”

Condiments (ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise etc.) – Nobody puts that much mayo on a sandwich.  It’s like they’re painting a barn — with a trowel.  The bread would be slimy, for God’s sake.  And take one bite and you’d have white crap shooting up your nose, down your chin and all over the room.  You’d look like a werewolf who just murdered an albino.

Snack Food – I don’t know anybody who delicately puts one potato chip on their tongue like it’s a communion wafer.  Nor have I ever seen anybody put chocolate in their mouth and suck it to death.  Nobody chews in slow motion, and not one person — ever! — eats just one cookie. Honestly, if people ate snack food like they do in the ads, they wouldn’t eat snack food at all.  why bother?

And finally:

Yogurt – There isn’t a man alive who doesn’t wish some woman would look at him the way all women look at yogurt – in the advertisements.

Originally written – March 2015

I’m An Addict!

They say that the first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  Well, here goes!  My name is WD, and I’m an addict.  Hard to believe, but it’s true.  Despite what you see, I’m stuck in a secret cycle of abuse.  Oh, I’m good at hiding it, denying it.  I only use it to relax – unwind.  I can quit anytime I want to.  But no, I can’t.  I’ve tried.  I’m an addict.  For me, one is one too many and even a whole series is never enough.

I guess my story’s the usual one.  It all started innocently enough; just a few schoolboys having a bit of a vicarious adventure.  I don’t remember who tried it first, but by the end of the summer, all my friends and I were doing it every weekend.  For a while, it was all we could talk about.  Fortunately, the habits of the young are fickle, and when school started, most of my friends drifted away to homework and hockey practice.  However, I remained, every weekend, watching black and white back-to-back reruns of Richard Greene’s Robin Hood and Roger Moore in Ivanhoe.  Soon, an hour a week simply wasn’t enough, and I began experimenting on my own – searching for a bigger thrill.  It was then that I discovered … Doctor Who.  I remember thinking, I’ll just try it; I can always change the channel.  But I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  I watched it all, even the credits, in the gathering twilight of an autumn afternoon.  It was a wonderful excitement, exhilarating and confused.  I was too young to truly understand what Time Lords were or the symbiotic relationship Who had with the Companion, but I wanted to know.  I wanted to open my perceptions to the sophisticated storylines, explore the language, and fill my senses with the ideas that I never found on regular TV.  I didn’t know it then, but I think I was already addicted — to British Television.

Emma Peel

From Doctor Who, it was easy to graduate to watching The Saint.  After all, Roger Moore was just Ivanhoe in a tuxedo – wasn’t he?  No, he was more than that — stronger, with deeper plots and worldly situations.  Then it was The Avengers.  Just as my pubescent friends were discovering the hidden fantasies of Barbara Eden’s belly button, I had Diana Rigg all to myself.  For a teenage boy, Emma Peel had a dizzying depth of character, compared to Anthony Nelson’s do-as-you’re-told Jeannie or the submissive Samantha Stevens.  She was my fee verte, and I was a slave to her.  Sated with suggested sex, mystery and espionage, when The Prisoner was broadcast in the early 70s, I was unable to resist.  I wallowed in its nonlinear drama, letting it wash over me, week after week, until — hauntingly unresolved — it ended, and left me empty and cold.

I should have stopped then – gone cold turkey — but I was ready for the hard stuff: Monty Python’s Flying Circus.  Speedball comedy with a walloping high so potent that even today I find myself laughing outrageously in its etherealic flashbacks.  The Pythons opened my mind to non sequitur, the absurd, the tilted storyline, bizarre characterization and oh, so much more.  I don’t know how many traditional motifs I abandoned that winter.  It’s all a blur to me now.  But at the end of it, I knew I was never going back to North American TV.  I was hooked.

Since those heady days, I’ve spent forty years searching, always searching, for more of the roll-off-the-sofa/pee-your-pants highs that the Pythons delivered.  Through Fawlty Towers; Black Adder; Yes, Minister; Red Dwarf; Ab Fab; The Office and so many others.  Even Mr. Bean!  That’s how complete my habit has become.  And it wasn’t just comedy; it was drama, as well.  Mysteries, espionage, political intrigue — I’ve tried them all.  Night after night, I’d tell myself just one episode, but hours later, I’d still be slumped on the sofa — covered in cookie crumbs and stinking of Earl Grey tea.  The only thing that saved me from utter degradation was I’ve always had a violent allergic reaction to Jane Austen.  Otherwise, I would have been up to my eyes in costume drama.  Then along came Downton Abbey and I was lost.

Today, British television is easy to find.  My dealers were always PBS and The Knowledge Network, but now there are so many other ways to feed my habit.  Netflix, Prime, Acorn, Britbox — they’re all there – whole seasons of Sherlock, Broadchurch, Vera (back to the days of David Leon) House of Cards (the original with Ian Richardson) and even Lovejoy and Agatha Christie — if that’s what you fancy.  This year, I watched all ten seasons of MI5 — again, 60 years of murder with Morse, Lewis and Endeavor and, of course Top Boy and Shetland.  But it doesn’t end there because late at night when my skin crawls for long vowels, Manchester accents and proper pronunciation, I surf through YouTube for snippets of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, Cracker, The Inbetweeners and even grainy bits of Jimmy Nail’s Spender.

My name is WD, and I’m an addict.

Originally published 2013, and gently edited for 2020

Game Of Thrones: What’s Next?

game-of-thrones

It’s been two weeks since the end of Game of Thrones, and people are still bitchin’ about it.  The problem is there are just too many unanswered questions.  For example, who paid off Cersei’s debt to the Iron Bank?  What was the conversation when Grey Worm and the Unsullied show up on the Isle of Naath – unannounced?  (“Who the hell are you guys?”)  And who was that Dornish-lookin’ dude at the High Council?  So, in the interests of a little closure, here are a few (somewhat plausible) scenarios that could happen after the credits rolled for the last time.  There are tons more, but seriously, does anybody have another nine years to invest in the soap opera that’s Westeros?  (D’uh!  Of course we do!)

The Dothraki – Suddenly unemployed (it’s not as if rape and pillage are marketable skills) the Dothraki are pretty much screwed.  A lot of them hitch a ride home on whatever ship will take them.  However, the ones that remain end up bitter old men, working in the stables shoveling horse poop for rich people or giving pony rides to bratty kids at Name Day parties.

Daenerys Targaryen – After Drogon carries Daenerys’ body away, he flies to Meereen and drops it at the feet of Daario Naharis.  Always the pragmatist, Daario summons Kinvara, Melisandre’s Red Priestess boss, and commands her (on pain of death) to bring Dany back to life.  After some argument (and a knife to the throat) she does.  Overjoyed, Daario hugs Daenerys, but she pushes him away screaming, “Where are my dragons?”  Realizing that the love of his life is batshit crazy, Daario builds the world’s first lunatic asylum and puts her away.  However, he commands all the guards and attendants (on pain of death) to maintain the charade that Dany is still Queen of the World and any day now, Jon Snow will show up and put her on the Iron Throne.  Eventually, Daenerys escapes, but by this time, she’s so looney tunes she thinks she can fly and jumps off the parapets of the Great Pyramid.  Daario breathes a sad sigh of relief and continues to rule the cities of Dragon’s Bay, wisely and well, for many years.  He dies quietly in his sleep.

Drogon – Since dragons live for millennia, after dropping Daenerys at Daario Naharis’ feet, Drogon spends the next several centuries getting ambushed by every wannabe tough guy trying to prove himself by “slaying the dragon.”  (This includes a much-mistold encounter with St. George.)  Finally, fed up with constantly looking over his shoulder and wanting a little peace and quiet in his retirement years, he moves to “a land called Honahlee” and changes his name to Puff.

Bran Stark – Absolutely useless as king, Bran spends most of his time flying around with his raven friends — just like he did during the Battle of Winterfell.  When called upon, he generally stares off into space and offers enigmatic instructions that nobody understands.  Invariably, all his best advisors get pissed off and quit, leaving the Six Kingdoms in the hands of the two drinking buddies, Tyrion and Bronn.  Bars, brothels and bingo halls thrive, and King’s Landing becomes a Vegas-style tourist destination for the rest of the world.

Davos Seaworth – After leaving the Small Council, Davos opens a school for illiterate sailors, called Sink or Spell.  It’s an incredible success, and soon there are franchises all over Westeros.  Davos becomes rich, buys Dragonstone, totally renovates the place and turns it into a retirement community for pirates, smugglers and other seafaring folk.

Samwell Tarly – After years of frustration, Sam also quits the Small Council (he wasn’t actually a maester, anyway.)  He moves Gilly and the kids to Castle Black, where he can be close to his only friend, Jon Snow, and pursue his passion for writing.  Away from worldly distractions, he produces a number of respected volumes, including Greyscale: Kill or Cure; Gendry Baratheon: The Man Who Should Be King; and his most famous work, The Girl with the Valyrian Dagger.

And finally:

Arya Stark – In her quest to find what was west of Westeros, Arya’s ship, the You Know Nothing (homage to her brother/cousin, Jon) sailed to the edge of the world.  Apparently, the Flat Westeros Society was right.  They narrowly escape falling into the abyss and, after a few mutinies, manage to make it back to land.  After that, Arya spends many years trying to jumpstart a series of business ventures (including forming a mercenary group called The Second Daughters) each one more unsuccessful than the last.  Reduced to living in abject poverty (with a serious ale habit) Arya’s life changes dramatically when Samwell Tarly’s biography of her, The Girl with the Valyrian Dagger, becomes a surprise bestseller.  She goes on the lecture circuit and earns a decent living, making personal appearances and selling autographs.  Unfortunately, her estate would miss out on the big money when the HBO miniseries, Arya, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Alex Baldwin (as the Winter King) is cancelled in preproduction and replaced by something called Game of Thrones.