Bastard "Celebrity" this and "Celebrity" that.

I've come to the conclusion that adding the prefix "Celebrity" to the name of a TV show is tantamount to attaching the word "turd" to a dish on a restaurant menu.

I don't have a problem with celebrities per se.  After all, most TV shows and films are heavily populated with celebrities.  But most of the time, celebrities are in the right place.  Like items in the home.  Kitchen utensils are in the kitchen.  Bathroom utensils are in the bathroom.  And so on.  But should I find the toilet brush in the cutlery drawer, then the balance of my universe becomes upset.

In the case of celebrities, it's when they appear on quiz shows.

Very few celebrities have become celebrities on account of their general knowledge.  Fred Housego was a rare exception.  A few more are endowed with a well-stocked bank of important and trivial facts, but generally speaking, celebrities have a different skills set to people who have heard of at least two authors, three capital cities and four 'historical figures' outside of Marcus Rashford and Jamie Oliver.  

So, when I turn on "Celebrity Mastermind", I know that the show title is going to be as oxymoronic as a dish of "delicious dogshit".  It will often host one or two celebrities who won't embarrass themselves.  A TV presenter with a background in journalism perhaps.  It may also include a sports person, which is usually a bit awkward, because as much as we can admire them for their single-minded dedication and countless years of 24/7 focused effort in excelling enough in their chosen sport to attain celebrity status, it is exactly that single-minded dedication and 24/7 focused effort which has prevented them from investing time in learning any general knowledge.  At all. 

And then you might get a "Celebrity Mastermind" contestant who is a soap actor, a radio DJ or a reality TV show participant.  The Only Way is Chelsea or Made in Essex or some such crap involving culturally void half-wits.  These types of celebrities make a living out of showing off, so when they appear on quiz shows they show off in a way that the usual ordinary contestants don't.   I don't just mean on Mastermind, where its usual contestants are directed to demonstrate a level of robotic, emotionless decorum that you'd find cold even from a Victorian undertaker, but even on the quiz shows with normal behaving contestants, like "The Chase" or "Tipping Point".  These celebrities absolutely revel in the attention they can glean from their ignorance of the basic knowledge required to get above a grade U at GCSE.  And they really do revel in it.  Their excitable self-deprecating laughter at thinking the capital of France is Belgium, is not shame, it's a form of arrogance against everyone who is a sad and boring bookworm for knowing the answer's Paris.  How is it entertaining to watch the delirious showing off of a misplaced celebrity who is getting payment and media exposure just for being as thick as a fucking brick?

The other example of misplaced celebrity casting is their use in those shows that act as a compendium of nostalgic entertainment from the 70s or 80s, or those "50 best/worst" types of shows that we might gravitate to Channel 5 to watch on a weekend evening.  Typically, you get clips of whatever the show's focus might be... old adverts, songs, sitcom extracts... and these clips are punctuated by a "talking head" (who explains the context and slightly ruins the enjoyment as a result). Each one talks about the subject matter as if they remember it well, along with all the details, from their own experience.  When that "talking head" is someone who was a teenager in the 70s talking about a 70s pop song, or an actor who did loads of adverts in the 80s talking about adverts in the 80s, then that has some credibility.  But if I'm watching a 22 year old You Tuber whose 'funny' content gets them a million views each post, and whose own parents were born in 1981, telling me about the 1970s as if they remember them well and haven't just regurgitated what the researcher told them to say with their own 'funny' twist on it, then, really, mate, do us a favour and pretty please, kindly just fuck off.  And of course, film yourself fucking off so you have something else to post tomorrow, you fucking attention seeker,

Right that's the end of my rant.  I'll give this post a careful review now to ensure a sprinkling of vocabulary that only a genuine Mastermind contestant will know and then I'll upload it and share it online in the hope of gaining some attention.

Bastard School Dinners

Rice pudding. 

I was looking at the menu for the posh and wallet-traumatising restaurant Clos Maggiore in Covent Garden today. Mrs B and I have booked it as a birthday treat for me. We love a meal that makes you go WOW. And in an effort to decide in advance what to eat, I was drawn away from my obsessively ubiquitous choice of chocolate for dessert towards rice pudding of all things. Obviously not just rice pudding, but vanilla rice pudding mousse with amaretto and malt ice cream. And it has made me think about school dinners.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who ate something highly objectionable as a child that caused me to avoid that food for decades thereafter as you might avoid a trigger happy maniac with a paint ball gun that fires dog turd pellets.  This is because of school dinners.

Who came up with the idea of rice pudding? Savoury dessert is a rather disgusting oxymoron. Apart from when it’s cheese and crackers that is. Was it some traditional society that was dependent for survival on a single crop, which meant that they had to use it for desserts as well? Is potato cake a dessert? Whatever. Rice pudding served in schools, which was a daily occurrence, was just wrong. It tasted wrong. Like French kissing your cousin. No, thank you. 

So, steered clear for decades, then tasted some recently and thought, oh! When it’s not being boiled to buggery in a school canteen vat, it actually tastes nice. So, Clos Maggiore may well knock me sideways with what would be rice pudding at its very best.

Am I getting rice pudding muddled up with semolina? They both had the consistency of baby sick and one had a dollop of jam on top as if someone had just bled into your bowl.

At primary school, school dinners were so disgusting, you’d prefer to chew on one of the disinfectant blocks from the urinal. And dinner ladies (not mentioning any names, Mrs Adams) tended to be testosterone-imbalanced, gruff dictators who were too masculine for the army or truck driving, and who demanded that you “EAT  ALL YOUR DINNER,” or they would bark at you like the Doberman dogs in the graveyard in The Omen until you fully shit your pants.

Therefore, I took packed lunch to school. Not necessarily healthier, as I loved a crisp sandwich, so my mum indulged me with two slices of unbuttered Mother’s Pride and a packet of Prawn Cocktail.

But when I got to secondary school, St Ignatius lower school against all odds turned out a decent array of lunch fare. Especially the chocolate and syrup cornflake cake, which you could manipulate into a sphere, put in your blazer pocket and eat like an apple in the playground as you watched that day’s main event fight.

Finally, just to say, that I would not drink milk (unless mixed with a healthy sized tablespoon of Nestle milk shake powder) for many, many years on account of free school milk at primary school. A classic example of impracticable altruism. It was free, but without enough refrigerator space, it was warm and topped with a thick layer of cream. Fucking horrible. Thatcher was right to snatch it away in the early 70s.