Low marks

I keep coming across repeats of old episodes of Dragons Den on Dave at the moment, with previous pitchers putting their grand ideas forward to a panel of entrepreneurs in the hope of securing investment and a spot of business acumen.

A lot of the ideas get rightly derided as rubbish and the poor soul responsible is packed off on their way. Often they don’t work, or the pitcher’s grasp of finances isn’t as sound as the investors would like. But sometimes they get dismissed on the basis that they have created a product for which there is no demand. As inventors, they’ve solved a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s a justifiable criticism, but there’s still a hell of a lot of products around us that fill no real need whatsoever.

I’m not having a go at purely material possessions here, or souvenirs, or random tat and window dressing. I mean stuff like bookmarks. Without bookmarks, how would your life go on? Well, you’d do what most people do, which is just stick an old train ticket between the pages of whatever you’re reading. Or a photograph. Or any bit of card or paper that comes to hand.

It’s actually quite nice, being able to attribute purpose to these tiny scraps that otherwise bear no continued value other than sentiment. It’s nice being able to hold onto these gig tickets and boarding passes and festival flyers and restaurant receipts, and often they’re not so valuable that you’d keep them otherwise.

They’re not your sole reminder of an event or experience, and without them you’d still have the memory. But it will randomly prompt me to recall a happy past occurence when I chance to glance at it again. It’s like scattering the stimuli for happy thoughts around your house as you’d do with framed photographs. But it’s often more personal than that; a crinkled little trinket that means sod all to all but the holder.

There’s probably some fortune cookie motto in the making here, about not judging a book by it’s cover, but being able to judge the reader by what they’ve separated the pages with. But I’m scared of phrasing it properly, as it sounds like exactly the kind of nonsense that someone would print on a giftshop bookmark and the tout to tourists for two pound twenty.

Background burble for background burblers

Just a quickie to say – if slightly belatedly – that one of my favourite elements of television (or ‘tellyments’) over the 2008 Christmas preiod was seeing the characters in Eastenders settle down to watch the Doctor Who crimbo special, complete with the music blaring out of the unseen set. Apparently there was a scene later when the Strictly Come Dancing theme could be heard blaring into life too.

Then in another episode broadcast last week, a character came home and turned on the set, apparently twenty seconds in to the opening credits of an episode of The A-Team, and we were treated to the sound of the theme music as he settled down to watch. Brilliant.

Most conversation in life is just small talk, made up of observations on recent telly, football or the weather, but as soap operas are filmed six weeks in advance or whatever, the writers have no way of knowing which salient details will be on the nation’s lips come the time of broadcast, so their characters remain resolutely tight-lipped about all three topics.

This just doesn’t ring true – the only thing that brings most characters in soaps together is geography, so surely they must have to turn to idle chit chat every now and again? Most characters spend their days either doing flip all, or watching their lives splinter to pieces, collectively lurching from one alarming crisis to the next. Surely you’d want to talk bobbins to someone down the pub every so often, either to alleviate your own crushing boredom or to take your mind off whatever audience-friendly calamity has befallen you this week? In both cases you may even want to put the set on, even if only for a spot of background burble.

But someone’s now twigged that while you can’t acknowledge the specific events of topical telly, you can at least get away with playing theme tunes. The only thing that would be better is if they’d just stick UK Gold on, then they could have any old bobbins from ten years ago burbling away in the background, then the characters could all go to the pub and discuss repeats of Friends or Prime suspect.

Or no, even better than that would be to actually be able to see the front of the television set somehow, maybe through a series of mirrors or otherwise unecessarily arty camera angles, and see how long it takes an audience to tune out whatever the characters are saying in favour of watching what they’ve got switched on. Especially if the programme featured is a principally visual one, like Pingu or Bagpuss.

Then finally, give the audience at home the option of pressing the red button to do away with the soap opera altogether, switching over to the lunatic penguin and the saggy cloth cat. Barely half the audience would make it to the end of the scripted episode.

Which hopefully would stop the writers making everything so bleedin’ depressing. Even the ficticious inhabitants of the burbling worlds they’ve created keep switching over to watch Doctor Who.

Know your limits

For an alarming amount of day-to-day information, I rely on sequences and gimmicks intended for children. I am incapable of remembering which months have 30 days in and which 31, without running through a short rhyme in my head. The other day I even had to recite part of the alphabet song under my breath in order to find something in a glossary.

However, with some topics, I’m content with my far-from-exhaustive level of knowledge. In many cases, I know as much as I frankly need to know. While I can name all the accepted planets in the solar system, I definitely couldn’t pilot a space shuttle. That’s should be more than acceptable to most folk. 

While not an experienced plumber or electrician, I have a good understanding of how the water filter and pump in my garden pond work, and have fixed both a number of times (although I concede that only having to have fixed them once would have been more impressive). I don’t need to know anything more about bees and wasps other than to stay away from them. I can probably name about seven of the twelve disciples and am no worse off for being ignorant of the other five.

Things that don’t really matter to my day-to-day survival can happily be consigned to the realms of trivia - diverting if remembered but harmless if forgotten. It is a shame that life doesn’t give you half marks for information, admittedly (being able to list seven disciples is better than not being able to name any of them, surely?), but quite frankly it’s unlikely I’ll ever be tested on these subjects.

There are, however, aspects of your life that’s it’s bloody important to be informed about. I watched some of a show called Urban Myths Revealed this week. The spot I caught investigated the myth that a parent once came out of a supermarket and while loading their shopping into their van, paused to place the child seat containing their offspring up onto the roof of the vehicle, presumably to keep him out of harms way. They then drove home.

Some versions of the story then say the kid remained unscathed but all corroborated reports include the kid almost immediately sliding off the roof as the van accelerates, which makes the whole thing slightly less entertaining, missing that vital twist at the end that makes it so incredible. An authoritative talking head on the programme called it ‘a cautionary tale’.

Now, stop me if I’m being over-simplistic here, but if you need cautionary tales to teach you not to leave your spawn on the roof of a moving van, I would question your suitability as ideal parental material. If your intelligence level is so low that such a lesson is needed, surely you’ll not have time to raise a child – you’re going to have to spend most of your day listening to other educational stories, ones that feature parents mistakenly feeding their young ‘uns cement, or fashioning nappies out of cobras.

If you’re currently unsure as to how these particular stories are going to turn out, best avoid the more taxing aspects of existence. Accept your limitations. You don’t drive around with a toddler on your roof-rack, and I won’t pilot spacecraft.

ffs

Metro ran a review of a new mockumentary-style comedy show on the BBC yesterday. It wasn’t a particularly positive review, and I didn’t watch the programme; its actual quality is by-the-by. But the review was a little irritating, claiming that ‘the creators of The Office might well hold their heads in shame because their success could be blamed for spawning all these ‘reality’ comedies…’

So what Metro are saying is don’t ever try and do anything remotely original, because even if you do it very well indeed;
a) lots of other people may subsequently use the same idea
b) you’ll be credited as being the originator of a concept and then derided if the output of other people – who you have nothing to do with – isn’t as good as your own efforts.

Instead, just do the same old tried-and-tested tosh that’s been done a million times, keep your head down and most of all, ensure that you don’t make the mistake of inspiring people to change the way in which they work.

ffs.