A week in a life of watching mostly bollocks on the bastard telly

Watching telly is like picking your nose. On a few occasions it’s necessary, sometimes enjoyable, but mostly just a habit that deserves strong reproach. We all moan about most of it. The appeal of having Twitter on my iphone is that I have something comfortably less mindless to do than watch whatever’s on telly – that is, tweeting about what’s on telly.

I’ll put the news on each morning, but fuck knows why. For starters, nothing new usually happens overnight (except the occasional celebrity death, to which I find myself indifferent) and I can’t even hear the TV anyway over the noise of my Coco Pops being assaulted by cold milk, because I don’t want to turn it up too loud in case I wake the kids. Secondly, the choice seems to be between BBC Breakfast News, which is essentially a magazine programme presented by and targeted at the more bland and twee Middle class/aged/England demographic, and SKY news presented by Eammon Holmes who has all the charm of dog shit on toast. Given that I usually wake up these days feeling like I’ve been sat on all night by Eammon Holmes, I ignore the TV (without thinking to turn it off) and read the Independent App on my phone.

Daytime TV deserves a blog of its own and fortunately for most of the year I am at work and so avoid the human abattoir that is the Jeremy Kyle show. Lucky for me, we have SKY+, so Mrs Bastard is able to record the lunchtime soap “Doctors” and I am tortured with this ridiculously puerile pantomime once we’re both home in the evening. I love it. The scriptwriters are unintentional comedy geniuses, and have assembled their lines of cliché-ridden dialogue with meticulous care. I suspect they bought a load of old Crossroads scripts from the 70’s, cut them up and rearranged them. It’s clearly an art form in the same way that defecating on canvas is an art form. I strongly recommend that you watch it.

After this, my daughter will watch a recording of that week’s Glee episode, which somehow I end up watching about three times. I’m not sure why it’s originally shown after 9pm, except perhaps to protect younger children from the effects of watching something so saccharine-coated that they could contract diabetes just by sitting through one episode. While she insists on watching Glee, I go and stir two jars of English mustard into the bolognaise that will form part of her dinner.

For some reason, no one in my house will ever turn the TV off. It’s stuck on like a clagnet on an arse hair. Irritates me senselessly. And it always seems to be left on unwatched when The One Show is on. This is where the BBC manages to screw with your mind by confronting you with a presenter like Alex Jones who is both nice looking and yet so utterly devoid of any personality, that the question of whether you fancy her or not can cause a crisis of dignity. Only when she interviewed the dead-eyed fame-whore Katie Price, did I decide that relatively speaking “I would.” But watching The One Show on a Friday when she is joined by Chris Evans is like contracting pubic lice and genital thrush simultaneously.

Late evening, with the children in bed, I regain at least 50% control of the telly and look forward to settling down with a glass of wine (see other blogs) to watch something less likely to make me want to hold my head against a hot stove and stab my testicles with a wedge of out-of-date cheddar. I have decided not to drink mid-week, so that means no wine on a Wednesday, but Thursday feels close enough to the end of the week to stay up late and finish a bottle during Question Time. This is when Twitter goes into overload. Usually it is over the now ubiquitous appearance of one social pariah or another, someone like Kelvin McKenzie, Baroness Warsi or a similarly objectionable, sensationalist bigot like the loathsome panto dame David Starkey.

Come the weekend, an evening’s viewing degenerates into farce. We might all scoff at the concept of watching not-very-famous celebrities doing what they are NOT not-very-famous for, on ice or otherwise, for weeks on end and then text in our votes for who is the shittest of the shit; but we still watch it. Well, I don’t, but like the inexorable arse-clagnet, its just there, hanging about and difficult to get rid off.

The pitiful standard of such entertainment helps to elevate everything around it, so much so that any old shit can pull in 10 million viewers if Ant and Dec or Harry Hill are plonked on stage to front it. Even Paddy McGuiness’s Take Me Out has assumed the mantel of Blind Date for making light entertainment out of corny flirting between the egocentric and the shallow. Personally, my preferred method of flirting is to stop myself from gobbing in someone’s face when I tell them to piss off, which is why I have so far held back from applying to this show. Come Dine with Me is far more appealing, as it successfully manages to distil around one dinner table a town’s most scathing bastard or bitch, most drunken opinionated lush, most socially retarded middle-aged man and one averagely bland straight (wo)man to act as a foil. Now that’s good telly! I might apply. I’m sure they’d enjoy a course of English mustard with bolognaise, followed by stale cheddar and mutilated testes on crackers.