Fear the apocalypse, especially if you haven't got a good supply of card and board games

I was glad to see The Walking Dead back on my screen after the Christmas break.  I do like a bit of hot zombie action, but, to be honest, there’s always been one thing that’s bothered me about the series since Season 1.  If a few hours of playing Fallout 3 have taught me anything, it’s that in an apocalyptic world you grab everything that isn't nailed down.  Ashtrays, empty cans, everything.  What you definitely don’t do is fight your way into the creepy pharmacy, bludgeoning the skulls of your former neighbours into mush with your sharpened crowbar, only to cherry-pick the one bottle of antibiotics you happen to need that very minute.  No, you sweep the entire contents of every shelf into an enormous sack, heave it over your shoulder and drive back to your fortified camp.  Hey presto! no more risky raids into town for pregnancy tests!

I suppose The Walking Dead has always made me feel a bit superior, like I’d know what to do better than the on-screen characters.  I’d have got rid of Sulky Shane a hell of a lot earlier, I’d have given the prison a lick of paint, I certainly wouldn't have relied quite so heavily on a chain-link fence to separate the ravening undead from my family.  Basically I reckoned I’d be pretty good in the face of the zombie onslaught and the end of civilisation.

Then Storm Darwin hit.  Trees came down, the power went off, and so did the water.  And I realised, I'm crap at this.  Without electricity I'm unable to cook, stay warm, or even amuse myself.  There have been a few programmes on recently that have looked at what society would become without electricity.  Revolution thought we’d all go a bit eighteenth-century, firing muskets at each other and ‘remembering’ how to sword fight.  Under the Dome had us all turning on each other in panic.  The Walking Dead just questions if we’d be able to hold onto our humanity.  I can’t think of a programme about an apocalyptic society without power that does quite well and learns to get along and grow apples.  So, by the middle of Day Two of the Storm I started to worry.  How long will it be, I thought, before the neighbours realise I have a phenomenally well-stocked larder?  And when the tins run out, how long before the fat bloke in No.6 starts to look like our food supply for the winter?  Even worse, how long before we start “playing at farmers”, to quote Carl, the stroppy, possibly psychotic, needs-a-haircut mother-killer from The Walking Dead?

By the time the lights came back on, I had a new respect for Rick, Michonne and the others.  Not for battling walkers, the Governor, and the worst case of the sniffles since 1918, but for coping with the boredom that comes with a lack of digital entertainment and a bedtime of whenever-it-gets-dark.  There’s only so much cribbage you can play…

On a side note, you have to feel sorry for Andrew Lincoln.  Some actors have forged successful careers out of limited talents; Keanu has done very well with his one expression, Harrison even better with none at all.  Andrew Lincoln seems to build his career almost entirely upon bewilderment.  In This Life (showing my age now) he played a lawyer who decided he didn't really want to be a lawyer.  In Teachers he played a teacher who decided he didn't really want to be a teacher.  In Love Actually he had a scene where he literally couldn't decide which way to walk.  In 2010 he finally landed a good solid job as a small-town sheriff in Georgia, only for his bewilderment to cross the Atlantic with him, and screw everything up again.  Now he plays a leader of a ragtag bunch of survivors who has decided he doesn't really want to be a leader of a ragtag bunch of survivors.  Someday I hope Andrew plays a man happy in his job.

Anyway, I'm quite bothered by my lack of ability to survive in an apocalyptic world without the amenities of running water or electrical power, so I'm going to go on a survival skills course up in Connemara.  I've looked it up on my iPhone, and apparently I can book it online.  

Happy Hugh Part Two

I’m enjoying Scandimania, the Channel 4 programme without any real discernible point.  This week Hugh went to Denmark, officially the Happiest Country in the World (as decided by the UN, so he kept telling us).  And then he talked to a bunch of happy Danes, who were definitely happy because they live in Denmark.  And not because they were the head chef of the best restaurant in the world, a successful architect, an actor so famous he gets his bum slapped by women when he visits London, a group of well-off teenagers in a country-retreat-school…..

Wait a minute.

You mean….Channel 4 got Hugh to interview a bunch of wealthy and successful middle-class Danes and determined that all Danish people are happy?? 

Next week he’ll be in Norway.  Bet you a fiver he talks more about the oil reserves, less about Anders Behring Breivik.

The Galloping Horde of Famous

Despite what ITV would have us believe, the human brain can only be subjected to so much crap before it turns on itself in disgusted horror and begins to self-destruct.  After 34 years, I have reached this point, and I don’t believe I’m alone.

I feel bewildered at the supermarket checkout.  All I wanted was some milk and a cabbage, and suddenly I’m being slapped with blaring magazine headlines that shriek out unintelligible lines like

“MAX HAS SHAFTED US SAYS TOM”

“DANIELLE SLAMS CHANTELLE OVER RELATIONSHIP SLURS”

“JASMINE’S BEAUTIFUL – I’VE NEVER FELT THIS WAY ABOUT ANYONE”

Something at the back of my mind tells me I should know who these people are.  They’re clearly famous enough not to need surnames.  I turn to my wife to see if she knows who the hell Danielle or Max might be, and she looks equally blank.  This is worrying.  This is a woman who can recall exactly how much she paid for every single item in her wardrobe, who can close her eyes 20 seconds after walking into a crowded room and tell me what every woman is wearing, who remembers every single conversation we’ve ever had – and she doesn’t know who these vacant-eyed grinning flesh mannequins are.  On one level it’s reassuring; if she doesn’t know, what possible chance did I ever have?  I have trouble remembering why I’m halfway up the stairs.  But then comes that nagging fear again.  These people are on magazine covers – they must be famous, and the fact that I haven’t a clue probably means that my brain has given up.

It was all so much simpler a century ago.  The only famous people you had to remember and care about were the royals, a few writers, artists and the earliest movie stars.  Now we’re confronted with a galloping horde of so-called ‘famous’ folks – stars of film, music, sports, TV, politics, reality shows, the arts.  We try and keep up with them all, knowing all about their love lives, their haircuts, their antics, because to fall behind and fall out of touch with the latest fad, the newest meme, today’s internet star, is to face ridicule and exposure as a fuddy-duddy.  It doesn’t help that everyone courts the same kind of celebrity status, the endless striving to be cool.  Prince Harry is desperate to show that he’s just one of the lads (albeit a very rich and annoying one), and as for the Dalai Lama’s cringeworthy appearance as a judge on Masterchef Australia (“they ALL taste wonderful”), the less said the better.

Surely there’s only so many ‘famous’ faces you can see before you start to get mixed up?  I had a truly terrifying moment in the doctor’s waiting room recently, watching a TV with the sound off, when I couldn’t figure out why Rolf Harris was addressing the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis.  I notice with delight that I’m not the only one suffering from this glut of celebrity we’re pummelled with on a daily basis.  If a US reporter, whose job it is to interview celebrities, can’t tell the difference on-air between Samuel L. Jackson and Laurence Fishburne, I feel a little excused. 

My theory?  I think the government has something to do with all the reality shows that keep relentlessly farting out new ‘stars’.  I think they have a plan to crush us underneath such a weight of celebrity and confusion that we’ll vote for whichever candidate reminds us of our childhood TV memories.  Of course, if that was Sinn Féin’s plan, they've ballsed that one up royally.

Cardboard Pugs. And Kevin Reynolds.

A couple of years ago I asked my friends to come up with suggestions to ‘spice up’ golf.  I don’t play golf, I don’t watch golf, I don’t understand golf.  For me, it’s a turgid, drawn-out, snobbish horrendous affair played by overweight middle-aged men who think ambling across a ridiculously manicured lawn somehow constitutes a form of exercise.  Of course, that’s only my opinion, but it’s the right one.  My suggestion for improvement was ‘Drunk Golf’, which I’d pay to see.  Imagine an angry and increasingly emotional Colin Montgomerie…  I also liked ‘Speed Golf’, which would see golfers given 60 minutes to complete the course.  My wife’s suggestion was combine this one with ‘Naked Golf’ which frankly put nightmarish images in my head for months afterwards.  Just think for a moment of a naked John Daly hurtling desperately down the fairway, sweat cascading off his corpulent folds as he starts to panic on the 17^th.  Now try and sleep tonight.

Funnily enough, it’s that last idea which gets to the heart of my hatred of golf.  It’s not the ludicrous clothes, the obscenely vast expanse of land it consumes, or the huge payouts for something I refuse to acknowledge as a real sport.  No, my problem is much more shallow than all that.  Golfers are ugly.  Horrible to look at.  Faces like cardboard pugs left out in a shower of piss.  The fact that Tiger Woods ever got into the lady trouble he did is only testament to the fact that money is the greatest lubricant.

Ugliness doesn’t seem to be an issue with snowboarders for some reason.  I’m a bit hooked on the Winter Olympics at the moment, and the snowboard slopestyle has been a real joy.  It’s fun, quick, immensely cool and very video-gamey, and the competitors are beautiful enough to make my tears themselves weep.  And that’s just the men.

There’s also something joyous about watching a sport you don’t understand, and the Winter Olympics are full of ‘em!  I don’t know a triple salchow from a double toe-loop and I enjoy figure-skating all the more because of it.  I love how ludicrously camp it all is, from the glam costumes to the looks on the skaters’ faces as they try and emote their way through their routines.  Most of all, I love how dangerous most of the sports are.  I’ve fallen on ice and it goddamn hurts.  Hurtling down an ice slide on a tea tray at 140kph is just insane, and I have nothing but respect for those gallant idiots.  Apart from the ones doing curling.  They’re just idiots. 

Oh, and I have to point out that my link between athletic ability and good looks doesn’t always ring true.  Just look up Kevin Reynolds, the Canadian figure skater, who has a face so hypnotically bizarre I can’t stop watching him.

Who's to go to Togo?

I was going to review Scandimania, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's holiday, sorry, inspiring and educational trip around Sweden, Norway and Denmark.  Apparently, those Scandinavians are happy.  Really happy.  So happy, in fact, they place 1st, 2nd and 5th in the latest league of happy countries, and old Hugh is going to see what's making them so happy.

I did say I was going to review it, but usually that involves actually watching the programme, and this was the week my satellite dish died.  So, no TV.  But why should that stop me?  I'll just use my creativity, my imagination, my innate wit to write about something I haven't seen.  Yes that's right, I'm going to guess.  Think of this as a Daily-Mail-knee-jerk-style kind of piece.

I could guess as to what Hugh got up to - I imagine, it being Channel 4, it was ridiculously stereotypical and just a bit sensationalist.  The first episode saw Hugh in Sweden, so I'm thinking he tucked into something messy and typically Swedish - crayfish? - before visiting IKEA and possibly an ABBA museum, and there was possibly a ridiculously gratuitous naked sauna scene.  Am I close?  Anyway, none of that's important because its not the content that bothers me, it's the concept.

It'd be all very well if Scandimania just wanted to entertain us, in a 'let's have a look at the funny foreigners' kind of way; "oooh, don't they like herrings!", and "gosh, don't they talk silly?"  But that's not what it says it's up to.  According to the summary I read, it wants to educate us about our happier, and apparently fascinating, European neighbours, to get to the heart of what makes them so bloody chirpy.

Why?

Are we meant to emulate them?  Is this a lesson in how to be happy?  If it turns out the secret of this boundless joy is their love of raw herrings, will we be straight down the fishmongers?  Will we all take up Swedish lessons?  Or, if it's the case that they have a good social protection system funded by copious and well-managed natural resources, which seems a bit more likely, are we really going to volunteer to pay more taxes ourselves so that we can tap into the Joy Parade?  I think the herrings idea stands more of a chance...
And that's my problem with it; it's typical Channel 4 stuff - naked entertainment masquerading as education.

I think it makes more sense to have a look at the poor miserable bastards at the other end of the league.  The miserable end.  The bottom three are, in descending order, the Central African Republic, Benin and Togo.  Instead of Hugh reminding us how awful our own lives are compared to those giddy Scandinavians, why not send someone to Togo, officially the most miserable place in the whole world?  I didn't see the programme, but I could think of a handful of facts about Sweden without even trying; I don't know anything about Togo, except they're fucking depressed.  I'd bet, after an hour of watching some wretched Togolese lad struggle to eat fufu, your own monochromatic life would seem as colourful and carefree as a jaunt through Oz.  Wouldn't that be a better use of Channel 4's purse?

And I wouldn't send Hugh.  Sure, he might have made a lot of programmes aimed at middle-class urbanites who like to see 'the country' as a nice quaint place populated by suspiciously hairy cider-drinkers, poachers and hippies, but you can't dislike him enough to send him to Togo!  Rwanda at a pinch, but not Togo.  No, if we're going to fly someone over to officially the saddest place on this planet, I want it to be someone who really deserves to have all the bubbliness and joy beaten out of them.  With pointy sticks if necessary.  I nominate the entire cast of Geordie Shore, although it's a toss-up between them and that wretchedly obnoxious kid from the 'Hello.ie' advert.  And if you don't know who I mean, I'm jealous of you.

In fact, just thinking about watching Togo Shore is cheering me up so much I can feel us moving up the league table right now.

Virtually Painless

Watching TV at 3am is a disconcerting experience, a bit like being the only sober person in the pub.  Something that’s usually relaxing and fun now seems awkward and disjointed.  Plus you’re damn tired.  And then, maybe because all the shiny polished shows were on at 8pm and you’re now watching ‘the rest’, the dregs of the scheduler’s barrel, you get some jarring juxtapositions.

On one channel you find yourself watching an infomercial for ‘No! No!”, the “virtually painless” hair remover that the nice helpful subtitles keep telling you is “not for genitals”.  There’s a pretend-living-room inhabited by Chief Leggy McTeeth and her brood of tanned harpies, all very excited to have been freed from the shackles of creams, razors and waxing.  At one point the Chief even wheels in her “hunka hunka burning love” who cheerfully depilates his own forearm cos, hey, even men have hairy bits they don’t want.  Don’t they?

It’s all cheery and enthusiastic, so much so that you forgive the truly abysmal product name.  I mean, ‘No! No!”?  If anything, it sounds like a pet name for female genitalia for the ultra-repressed; “in the Order of the Blessed St Pudenda, one does not touch one’s no-no…”

 In fact, you’re quite enjoying it all, and you can’t really fault women who want to get rid of their moustaches, until you flick over to another channel and see that Into the Wild is on, which isn't dregs at all.  We get to see Emile Hirsch throwing off the trappings of modern life, traipsing across America, and getting hairier (and thinner) by the day.  By the end, he’s so emaciated and hirsute he’s begun to resemble the Mekon with a flamboyant toupee.  And it all seems a bit self-indulgent when taken in isolation, but then you remember the No! No! and you think fuck, that’s what he was running away from.  Suddenly, compared to a life fighting a “virtually painless”, and losing, battle against the body’s own signs of aging – unwanted hair, unwanted wrinkles, unwanted hair loss, unwanted sagginess (Christ, if someone decided that shitting was unfeminine, these women would be rushing to have their arseholes stapled shut) – death by starvation in an abandoned bus in Alaska doesn't seem so terrible.

Now try and get the stapling picture out of your head.

The Following. And a satsuma.

Looking out at grim reality – economic meltdown, global terrorism, breakfast TV – its easy to see why so many people want to blot it all out with the likes booze, drugs and the incessant cheerfulness of Take Me Out.  I don’t need those extreme measures; I’ve got Season 2 of The Following, a show so delightfully insane it functions in a completely different universe.  On the face of it, the reality of The Following is not a happy one – after all, it revolves around the murderous cult and its leader, a ‘charismatic’ English professor who quite likes Edgar Allen Poe. 

To think that this is a depressing place is to miss the point however.  Sure, there’s a lot of shrieking and murderising, but I always come away from an episode with a smile on my face.  For a start, the main antagonist is played by James Purefoy, so hammy he’ll be featuring in the next episode of Kill It, Cook It, Eat It.  It’s not really his fault – he’s fighting against dialogue written by Kevin ‘Scream’ Williamson, who just doesn’t know how to give Purefoy any charisma or menace.  Purefoy’s solution is to lay it on thick, with the result that we’re treated to Williamson’s script being read like it’s a Jacobean tragedy, which is a bit like watching Daniel Day Lewis in an episode of Hollyoaks.  And who wouldn’t want to see that?

Season 2 has carried on much where Season 1 left off.  Opposing Captain Ham is Kevin Bacon, playing an FBI man so earnest I started to think he might actually be called Ernest.  He runs around a lot, getting to places just in time to cradle colleagues who’ve been stabbed.  And by golly there’s a lot of stabbing!  Kevin Williamson really does like knives!  In fact there’s been so much stabby action I’ve become a little bit blasé about the whole thing, and only got a bit interested when it looked like Purefoy was going to hit a vicar with a garden gnome.  No, really.  As it happened, he didn’t.  He stabbed him.

Episode 2 had my favourite moment of the series so far though, coming when Ernest discovered that there was such a thing as identical twins.  My wife thinks that his Carry-On style double-take was because he found out that the twins were both serial killers, and this would be unusual, but she’s forgetting that all this takes place in an alternate hyper-reality where James Purefoy can dress up as someone from Duck Dynasty and no one recognises him for a year.  In this world, the mad, mad world of Mr Williamson, its completely natural that twins would be creepy obsessive serial killers, albeit with different haircuts which is handy for telling them apart.  No, I’m fairly sure that Ernest had never, never ever seen twins before.  Perhaps in Following World they’re like unicorns and leprechauns?  If I’m right, and I hope I am, we’ve a whole season of comedy-style reactions to everyday objects.  Next week, Ernest will be startled by a satsuma.  Episode 5 will see him swoon when he sees a picture of a kangaroo.  Which is usually my reaction to Take Me Out.