Yet another change of scene - television

Thanks to the (dark) magic of television, you don't even need to leave your front room now to visit other places. Good news for those who like to watch travel and wildlife documentaries on their huge tellies, great news for those who like to chow down on a family bucket with about the same table manners displayed by the lions on the screen towards that dead zebra.

There are three broad worlds that you can visit through the idiot lantern portal. Entertainment. Education. Drama.

Entertainment usually comes in the form of a continuing series, or soap. This usually consists of the big three. There's Coronation Street, which follows the lives of residents of the seminal street in a fictional Northern town in, from what I can determine, is a fictional bloody universe where no real world actions, events or sometimes physical laws apply. I saw a few seconds of it the other night and the characters looked exactly the same as when I last watched it in the nineties, I had to check that I had not just hallucinated the last two decades in the time it took me to make a cup of tea. I had aged and owned an iPod. Result! The competition is Eastenders, sponsored by Dignitas, a programme so relentlessly harrowing that every single one of its episodes ends with a helpline number and a voice reminding you that if you have been affected by any of the issues, call this number. If the BBC ever went down the X Factor route and made it a quid a minute phone line job, they could abolish the license fee overnight. And fund a mission to Mars. Finally the is the soap set in the countryside. Don't watch that one, suspect its the soap equivalent of 'Horlicks', I suspect other people I dulce, but can't think what would drive me to.

Education usually boils down to some superb footage, in slow mo, of a killer whale biting the head off of a parrot or something, followed by a blistering row when it emerges the while thing was mocked up in an underwater aviary in Hull.

Drama. One word. Downton Abbey. The programme is without doubt a phenomenon, and an excellent example of escapist television, recalling as it does a simpler age, that didn't really exist, where the pace of life was slower and the inhabitants of grand houses had little to worry about save exploding through an excess of kedgeree, Bolsheviks in the shrubbery and succumbing to one of the three fates of the upper classes; pox, ostracisation, or getting your knob caught in a servant, leading to one or both of the others. Viewers want the best for the characters, which is pretty bloody noble, given that they live in a castle. I suppose that the suffering the characters go through, complicated love life upstairs, rickets downstairs, generates empathy. But also, really, who wound't like to like a big bloody house with booze, servants and Elizabeth MacGovern on hand?

White van passengers

Standing by the side of the road, waiting for the lights to change, one has plenty of time to survey ones surroundings. But sod that, it's much more fun to stare at the occupants of the cars whizzing by. Someday, somebody is going to author the definitive spotters' guide to the British diver, with descriptions and illustrations of the School Run Mum, The Commuter, The Angry Man, The Fun Car Driver, The Soft Toy Farmer and so on and so forth. Next month, they'll start work on updating the guide, that's how definitive guides work.

A particular sub-set of traveller is the white van driver. Lots has been, well, not so much written as said about white van drivers. True, the vast majority of it is not social commentary in the formal sense, but rather along the lines of immediate feedback on the white van driver's skill at, say, filtering, usually delivered by somebody in a neighbouring car to an audience of an empty passenger seat.

And while much has been said and shouted about the white van driver, less has been said about the white van passenger, which is a shame. Because I think this is a particular social type that could stand some examination. Looking at white van passengers, you can't help but think that there is a story there. They occupy a special place, and not just to the left of the hand break. Rather, like the girlfriend of a a provincial gigging DJ who keeps other women away from her man simply through the power of sullen glower, they have a purpose of their own. Often, of course, this will be to load and unload crates of fanta, but there's something else going on there too.

The passengers essentially break down into three types; mates, girlfriend, family. Mates are there to help shift stuff from the van or to the van. A mate can be identified not just by posture - they are happy to sit in companionable silence for long periods - but by the little nest they make on the passenger side of the van to reinforce their sense of identity even though they are not the driver. The base layer is constructed of coffee cups and tabloid newspapers, further than that it's at the discretion of the mate except that before the invention of the Internet there would always be at least one soft core porn mag.

The girlfriend is rarer, but easily visible when present because her posture manages to convey 'I want to spend more time with you and if I have to spend Saturday in a van with you, I will, although it will not be pleasant'. The van driver's originally chirpy mood will be ground down throughout the day, turning very bleak indeed when he realises about three o' clock that his planned evening of drinking cider with his mates is unlikely to happen.

The family member is about the best. Specifically, small boys and dogs. Small boys, or girls, in a van are always uplifting. Somehow taking your kid to work in a van goes beyond the normal 'I have fucked up the child care arrangements, again' that typify the appearance of a child in an office. The kid is normally excited beyond even the power of haribo to induce giddiness, because they are finding out what happens to their parent during the day and, when you're a kid, there's nothing quite like seeing your parent at work and realising that other people do not call him 'Dad' and riding high above the rest of the traffic. You conclude the day learning that his name is either 'Geoff' or 'wanker'. You also conclude with a free tray of fanta but you're not to tell anyone.

The only family member more pleased than a child to ride in the passenger seat of a white van is a small dog, usually a terrier, usually with its head stuck out of the window looking happy beyond reason because surely there is no greater thrill than accompanying your dad on a job, unless it's sticking your head out of the window and letting your ears blow about in the rush of wind.

Personal what?

Back in the nineteen eighties, right wing newspapers reported that left wing councils were inventing jobs, or rather, inventing non-jobs, to give work to those who would otherwise be cluttering up dole offices and local unemployment statistics. The example I recall (probably the only reason I saw it was that it was on page two of The Sun) was that Liverpool City Council, at that time the sort of left wing regime more commonly associated with places that had just had a revolution, appointed a couple of chaps to be lamp-post counters.

This is very sensible for three reasons. Firstly, it gets people off the dole and into employment, with all the benefits that brings, including giving people public money in the form of taxable wages instead of benefits. Secondly, why shouldn't a council audit their assets - with metal theft so common now that 'signal problems in the Bingly area' no longer means engineering incompetence but is more likely to indicate that some scrote is even now legging it along the trackside with a few hundred yards of copper cable looped over his shoulder - knowing that you still have lamp posts and not chainsawed stumps along the length of Alma Road seems a pretty bloody good idea to me. Finally, just what the hell is a 'non-job' anyway and just who is the media to judge?

Looking back on royal appointments of centuries ago, we wonder just what the keeper of the King's quimsy did, although we can have our horrible suspicions. Might we not look back in future years and wonder exactly what an Executive Director of Resources does? I'm not all that sure that the Executive Director of Resources could tell you now, although I bet lots of other people in the organisation could, and that job description would include the words 'fuck' and 'all'.

Non jobs are an extraordinary feature of life at a certain salary level. The working classes have no such issue, you are either the guy that uses the lathe, the guy that cleans the lathe or the guy that drives the van and delivers lathed products to the place where they are bolted together into weapons. The middle classes have a bit more of a problem, but even there there are clear job descriptions to be found, you are the nurse that cleans up the lathe related injury, or the charity worker trying to stop the export of expertly lathed land mines to areas that have lots of schools nearby, campaigning instead for their safe disposal. But the is no doubt that among the middle and upper classes there are people who occupy salaried positions where it's not clear what they do, a conundrum muddied when it's reported that they still got a huge bonus even though their company performed badly, went bust or was closed down after what is now known as the 'Dorset dairy farm land mine dump horror'.

Surely the king of the non-jobs must be the role of 'personal shopper'. Why? Why does one need a personal shopper. This is, as I understand it, somebody whose job it is to help you shop. Who the hell needs help to shop? Here's the thing, if you need help to shop, you don't need to be in that shop. I am not talking about shop assistants, who are able for instance to tell you what a fridge does, or if a particular telly is the right one for you, which essentially boils down to 'if you want it now, how big is the car you are going to take it home in? A van you say? Excellent, let me introduce you to 'the mamothchav 8000!', no, I mean people employed by the store to help you pick the right cashmere scarf that you don't need.

If I wander into a model shop, I do not need to be told that I am going to go straight to the airfix kits for a Spitfire and I certainly don't need help in a bookstore. This is why real shops, like green grocers, don't have personal shoppers, because people do not need help purchasing carrots, they do not even need help purchasing kale. Can you imagine the reaction if somebody ponced over to you and suggested going for the organic cucumber instead of the one you were considering. You'd call the management, or the police. Yet it is apparently acceptable to tolerate this when purchasing a frock.

No, no its not.

Why would you even need a personal shopper in a clothes shop, to give you an honest opinion? Who wants that. If you want somebody to encourage you to buy those skinny cut jeans, then take a friend, your friend will tell you you look fabulous, immediately text 'OMG Judy has lost the plot' and, with luck, that will be forwarded to Judy before she has peeled herself out of the jeans that are cutting off the circulation to her feet.

Ok, maybe I can see why stores wouldn't go for that but surely, to drive the economy upwards, what we need are really crap personal shoppers, we need somebody who can't give an informed opinion about whether the blue or the red snood is the sight one for you, shrugs and just concludes 'get both'.

Or better still, your personal bartender. Booze in shops. Bringing all the fun and irresponsibility of going onto Amazon drunk, but in real life. It's long been rumoured that the next big development in computing will be a breathalyser with a USB attachment so that you won't be allowed on eBay if your blood alcohol level is at a certain level, say the one that leads you to think that paying a tenner for a slightly scuffed plastic 'Star Wars' pencil case is a good idea.

'Relaxed' shopping. It's the way forward.

A change of scene - movies

If you want to change your universe, then surely one of the best ways to do it is to sit in a dark room, devoid of distraction, and watch adventure, excitement, action, romance and drama unfold in front of you in spectacular technicolor, to a rousing soundtrack, eating popcorn. People have even started sporting glasses to allow them to see things in three dee and immerse themselves even more. And buying larger sizes of popcorn. With the 'bucket' now the standard size, can the 'barrel', 'bin' or 'skip' be far behind?

Life on the screen, even in two dimensions, can be much more attractive than life in the aisles, especially if you have just run out of popcorn. Glamorous and heroic types leap into action, fall in love and step in time with the plot, the music or the werewolves depending on your taste in flicks. Even if the film is unrelentingly dire, the will be something about the way the hero wears a sweater while staring moodily out of a window into the rain that makes you think 'hummn, nice chunky sweater'. Even 'the horse whisperer', a film so without merit that when having to sit through it I was rather hoping that the vet would turn up and shoot me, has pleasant scenery.

It is captivating, to gaze into an oblong of excitement where people have adventurous and glamorous lives, seemingly unencumbered by the fits of rage that grip any normal person whenever they accidentally see one of those BT adverts on the telly.

And it's quite right and proper to be transported somewhere else for the length of the film, this is, after all, an escapist media. It's when people take the movie home with them that things start getting interesting, and sometimes a bit weird.

It can be as simple as using your iPod to lay down a soundtrack to your life, complete with theme tune and specific sounds for particular activities. Who would not, given the opportunity, want to have music composed for them to accompany, for instance, a montage of images of squeezing veg and deliberating over wine while on a visit to the supermarket. And would that drive to the garden centre not be a bit more interesting with some bespoke chase music? I once drove through the centre of London with the theme to 'The Professionals' on a loop and it was bloody terrific.

The worst offenders, even worse than the sort of people who like to talk about continuity errors on Internet message boards, are the sci if and fantasy fans who dress up as characters from their favourite movie and go to conventions. What strikes me as odd is that you get loads of different characters from loads of different franchises all mingling together, it's like the ultimate crossover event.

The problem is though that the bar has been set incredibly high. Ever since Carrie Fisher put on that gold bikini, there has only been one acceptable choice of costume for anyone at least half decent looking at a science fiction convention. The problem is that Carrie Fisher was indulging in quite a lot of drugs back when they shot Return of the Jedi, the sort that keep you thin. She was not indulging in quite a lot of cake, the sort that result in comments like ' are you sure you are on the right end of that 'slave Leia' chain.

But at least plump Leia's make the effort, and this is appreciated. On the other hand, painting yourself blue head to toe and repeatedly correcting people that you are from Pandora, actually, will not stop them yelling 'smurf!' at you at every opportunity.

A change of scene - clubs

While some strive to make the world a better place, others strive for a perfect world, a select few strive for their perfect world and the realists strive to make a part of the world a better place. And if that part is their part, so much the better! The realists establish clubs.

Clubs are areas of the universe where your rules, or at least the rules of you and people like you, well, rule. They establish a set of parameters for your universe, like no women, no pooches, or no people from whatever ethnic group fell out of favour during your formative years or possibly had an affair with your mother, or 'other nanny' as you may have called her.

Let's not get all snobbish about clubs. They start in tree houses and tents where kids brave septicaemia and dishonour by using a pen knife to swear eternal brotherhood to the person with the gash in their palm rapidly going very pale.

Clubs like initiation ceremonies. They are like gangs in that regard. The essential difference is this; if somebody is trying to insert something into you, you are joining a club. If you are tying to insert something into something, you are joining a gang. If you are doing either while wearing a blindfold, you are joining a society.

It's a simple enough proposition. Within four walls, or a set of rooms, or a cellar, you create what you consider to be a restful environment. Where you can relax after a hard day. If you consider that the leather in question might be, for instance, the wallpaper, or attached to shackles, or simply fashioned into a gimp suit, then certainly, that sort of club has its place, possibly in the aforementioned cellar, more usually and depressingly in the converted back bedroom of a semi in a dormitory town with excellent connections to the motorway and a population leaning towards middle management and intolerance of gypsies.

If, however, you consider that the best use for leather is to cover very comfy armchairs and provide the binding for collected back issues of 'Country Life', then that's much closer to what a real club should be. A real club serves two purposes - oh it allows for rest, relaxation and a place to retreat from the cares of the world, such as hustle, bustle, and family, but there's more to it than that. The two purposes a club serves are firstly to allow one to gather together with people of similar interests, be it political, recreational or vocational. The second purpose, almost more important, is to deny anyone who does not share your views membership. Essentially, you want any conversation to be minimal and agreeable, along the lines of;

"I say, this man Cameron. He's an absolute shit!"
"Quite so."

And that's that.

Yes, a gentleman's club is where you make your own universe, a bit like glue sniffing but with more leather and servants. A good club should be a place where one can get a decent drink, tolerable food and your view of the world reinforced whenever needed, all from the comfort of an overstuffed armchair.

A change of scene - drugs

If you want to change your universe, there are essentially two ways to do it. The first is to change your surroundings and circumstances and ensure that the steps you take in life lead you away from any disappointment or dissatisfaction and allow you to create around you another world, preferably one where people call you things like 'sir' or 'your Excellency'. This, however, takes quite a lot of hard graft and luck, unless you happen to have won the 'birth lottery' (and if you are reading this anywhere other than a shack in the middle of nowhere with the Internet powered by a solar panel and the GDP of your village is a goat, you are already doing pretty well out of the birth lottery, wishing for your own castle is just being greedy).

The other route is alcohol or drugs.

Alcohol in moderation is the socially accepted way to change your universe, removing inhibitions, making you wittier and better looking, and making other people better looking as well. Somewhere between the first and second gin and tonic, your opinion is unparalleled and your hair has never looked better. Alcohol to excess is not socially acceptable, you may have a fabulous opinion but you can't articulate it and the best thing that can happen to your hair this evening is that somebody will hold it away from your face later. Alcohol to excess changes your universe by moving it from the vertical to the horizontal in just a few very exciting moments.

Other drugs are available. Anyone who has combined a cold with cold remedy knows that an interesting side effect of a decongestant is that it appears to fill your head with cotton wool.

The are yet other drugs, which are branded with cool names to increase marketability and because nobody can be arsed to pronounce the full name of the long chain molecule that's marketed under the name 'crack'. These will take you to different places with varying degrees of success, be they giggly places, energetic places, paranoid places or places with bars on the window.

Of course many people are wise enough to know that you can take things that are not illegal and abuse them. Solvent abuse, for instance. Glue sniffing is, apparently, a way to achieve a hallucinogenic state and therefore alter your universe. Presumably The other world that you escape into when glue sniffing is one that consists of a filthy concrete stairwell at the back of some municipal building, the last place in the world without CCTV coverage, with a bag stuck to your nose like a horse with the munches which, considering what glue was traditionally made of, is sort of ironic.

A change of scene - escaping into a good book

A good book can often be a means to escape, as anyone who has read 'The Shawshank Redemption' knows. A compelling thriller that drives you on to turn the pages in a hurry to get from chase to court room to electric chair to the page where the publisher explains that the author died leaving the book unfinished to anger management classes is a classic route, and a good book an be an immersive experience, causing the real world to drop away around you. This is quite understandable if the real world is, say, public transport, or prison, less so if that world is a beach or hotel pool. Presumably one can enjoy Harry Potter at any time, while sunburn and snacks served to you on a lounger are not part of everyday life for most folk.

The power of the written word can be demonstrated in two ways, the first is that one occasionally sees otherwise normal looking people walking along reading a book. Actually preferring to find out what happens to their favourite character next than look where they are going. The second is the reaction that coming across somebody with the same last name as you in a book elicits. Mostly, the reaction is to hope that the character does not, at any time in the next three hundred odd pages, commit an act of gross indecency with a goat. And while we're at it, is it just me, or is the 'gross' tacked on to any accusation of indecency with a goat wholly unnecessary?

Readers escape into other various other worlds. They can be dark and gritty reflections of the real world, with familiar landmarks seen through a glass darkly; Rebus's Edinburgh for instance, rather less mime and rather more murder than usual. Or they can be like our own but twisted, like Neil Geiman's London. Or they can be magically distorted, like Hogwarts.

The mother load of escapist fiction is science fiction and fantasy, especially where a group of writers create and populate a shared universe or where one writer creates a saga so vast that one feels that the time spent reading it roughly equates to the time they actually spend living in the real world in any one week. Certainly, by the time I finished 'Game of Thrones' I was surprised that I didn't have chain mail ring marks puckering my arse where I'd been sitting on my armour.

Just as fanciful as science fiction is romantic fiction, with the odds of some rich good looking guy falling for the quirky fat girl about the same as somebody developing instantaneous interstellar travel in their shed, although this seems to be the plot of quite a number of novels in each genre respectively (fat girl finding love = romantic fiction, space ship in shed = science fiction, for the avoidance of doubt. Geeky guy finding love with quirky girl = plot of the sitcom 'Big bang theory'). Guys read books about space ships in sheds because they would like to live in a world where they could look out of the shed window and see the rings of Saturn rather than a compost heap, presumably women read romantic fiction because they would like to live in a world where lots of dairy in the diet and romantic perfection are not mutually exclusive.

A change of scene

What between the riots, recession and no Downton Abbey on the telly on a Sunday night, one could be forgiven for concluding that things could be described as grim. And that’s just at home, when one turns on the idiot lantern to the BBC Speculation 24 channel (other ways of upsetting yourself and commenting on how a newsreader’s blouse is inappropriate are available) you let a whole world of misery flicker into the room. If it’s not the planet trying to make life difficult for people, it’s other people trying to do so.

Is it any wonder that people turn, in a variety of ways, to alternative realities? The great thing is that doing so does not require a huge glowing contraption that makes a whooshing noise and flings you to an alternative England where there are cool airships, the Crazy Frog ring tone was never invented and neither Hitler, Murdoch or Cowell attained positions of influence, rather people are constructing their own realities.

And they are well catered for. Stop in at any newsagents and, after you have bought your scratchcards and fags and noted down the number on the card in the window advertising a ‘large chest for sale’, you may notice the plethora of magazines that line the walls like a fresco pained by somebody with multiple personality disorder and a passion for part-works about quilting. The gateway to alternative worlds is here. Either different worlds altogether, inhabited by celebrities who although they notionally occupy the same planet that the public do, inhabit a different existence, or a minute focus on a part of the reader’s world, such as the one that collects lace.

And especially railway modellers. There are any number of magazines dedicated to modelling, military and civilian and by far the most populous of these are for railway model enthusiasts.

We have all, at one time or another, run a toy train around an oval track but, for the serious modeller, it’s much more than that, it’s the creation of a perfect world, where the trains have character, rather than being shaped like an articulated dildo and where they pull in and out of stations, normally small country stations, that have station masters and porters and are even probably manned at night.

Most importantly, the trains run on time. Because the modeller can write his (no ‘or her’ here) timetable.

This is indeed an alternative world, one in which the modeller has control of the rolling stock, every run and every shunt. Imagine the sensation of power and relief that a commuter must feel running their own train service. An alternative, preferable world, complete and to scale and never, ever, late.

Best. Broadcast. Evah!

Live broadcasting. All the enjoyment of normal broadcasting but with the extra element of danger that one might hear the word ‘cunt’ on the television (thank you ‘I’m a celebrity’) or on the radio (thank you ’Today’ programme). You are of course, free to use the word yourself around the house (it’s best to do so in private, as public usage, say in a boozer, could land you in a spot of bother) as often as you like, repeating and repeating like somebody trying to learn Tourette’s using one of those language tape things.

Live broadcasting lets us look behind the curtain at the performance of presenters who, in pre-recorded programmes look shiny, slick and flawlessly professional. The only time one saw fallibility was on the occasional clip shows made up of out-takes, where one witnessed an increasingly distressed presenter trying to record a segment containing the word ‘topple’ without getting a fit of the giggles, or being attacked by an enraged gibbon. Hil-hairy-arse.

On live broadcasts, anything can happen and it’s a wonder that it doesn’t more often. The most common threat is somebody larking about behind the presenter as they report from the sort of place where the public have not had media training, such as a council estate. And how much fun would it be to see MPs or Peers misbehaving behind Nick Robinson as he reports from Parliament? If I was an MP I would at no time be without a cardboard sign that could quickly be unfolded and read ‘hello Mum!’.

Normally, live broadcasts are reserved for occasions where larking would be unsuitable, featuring a regional BBC reporter in a North Face anorak (please address your letters of complaint about product placement to ‘your composter, the end of your garden, Little England’) looking sombre in front of a flooded high street or an otherwise unremarkable stretch of street made tragic by the abundance of petrol station bouquets or, god forbid, soft toys that line the perimeter of the police cordon.

Sports reporting is the exception. Sport tends to be covered live and a particular breed of presenter has emerged – somebody that can talk with passion about twenty two overpaid nancy boys sex pests kicking around a ball for ninety minutes, or two blokes clacking balls around a green baize table for, well, forever in my experience or, my very favourite, commenting on a Grand Prix, where it’s acknowledged that the most exciting bit is the start, requiring the commentator to begin the commentary at a pitch of excitement that horse-racing commentators normally conclude with, then maintain it for the next two hours. The god-like presenters of ‘Test Match Special’ cope with a five day schedule by only occasionally remarking on the play, the rest of the time discussing the local wildlife, what they got up to last night, last week or last decade, cakes and so on.

Football commentary, on the radio, is perhaps the apex of live commentary. There’s a quote reported by the late, great, Alistair Cooke that radio was preferred to television because ‘the pictures were better’. Fair enough but that quote is from the late 1940’s and whoever said it plainly hadn’t seen a fifty inch plasma job. So football commentators on the radio know they have to work extra hard to compete with somebody who can watch the match. On the telly. In a pub.

This possibly explains the approach that BBC Scotland took yesterday in its ‘Sportsound’ programme, where, around five o’clock in the afternoon, when all the Scottish Cup football matches were ending more or less at the same time (injury and stoppage time staggering the final whistles over a few minutes), they kept an open microphone to all the commentators at all the grounds.

No matter how close a commentator at a football match presses their special one way microphone to their lips, you can still hear the roar of the crowd, including the occasional fruity wanker fuck and cunt. It’s like somebody organised a flashswear. In the last minutes of the Scottish Cup, where the fans were urging their sides to either score to go through to the next round or to equalise and get that lucrative replay, the sound of the crowd was such that having the radio on was like standing under a waterfall.

That was as nothing though compared to the excitement of the commentators, one of which, reporting from Firhill (home of the greatest football team on the planet – Partick Thistle), managed a textbook ‘curse of the commentator’ with the fabulous ‘the score here nil nil and likely to stay that way and Queen-Of-the-South have just scored!’. There was lots of this sort of thing and, frankly, it was probably the best ten minutes of live broadcasting I’ve ever heard. The anchor/presenter/ringmaster/conductor orchestrating the whole thing did a fabulous job and, I don’t know about him, but I was wrung out by the time it had finished and needed a sit down and a fag.

Glued to the box

There’s a story about the very early days of cinema, when the Lumier brothers were showing footage of a steam train pulling into a station. The audience thought the train was about to run them over and fled as only startled French people can do. Looking back on this event, which is often used as an example of the shock of the new, one might be forgiven for using the term ‘quaint’ as possibly the most charitable response.

A century later and I’m in an electrical superstore, tinkering with the notion of a new telly. Naturally, one cultivates the reputation as somebody who entertains themselves via a good book or, if push comes to shove, the wireless. The truth is that books may furnish a room, but a 50 inch plasma telly would, in my opinion, enhance it still further. The problem, I discovered, is that I’d have to sell all of my books and possibly a kidney in order to afford such a telly.

But it was fun to browse. Many tellys these days come with a pair of dark glasses, not, as I thought, as some sort of ‘Blues Brothers’ gift pack, but because you can get three dee tee vee in your home. Some were better than others but, bloody hell, the LG one was something else. They were showing a showreel of various three dee things, like a baseballer hitting the ball at you, aeroplanes shooting past you and so on. And yes, I was dodging and shrieking like a girl, pointing and trying to swat away butterflies. This must have looked, to the casual observer, as hilarious as any fleeing Frenchman and trumped my previous triumph of making an arse of myself in a shop, which involved X Box Kinect and no sense of restraint.

The success of three dee tee vee is going to depend on the programming. Anything wonder of nature related is probably going to be good in three dee, especially if they rig up some sort of cheeta-cam fixed to the front of a big cat, although maybe the sight of running into a wildebeast’s arse at sixty mph is not tea-time viewing.

Sports events would be good in three dee. Sky already broadcast footie in three dee, to make the event immersive. Of course, to make it truly immersive, they should send round a hot pie at half time. Likewise, the final of Strictly was shown in three dee in cinemas. I really liked this idea, not the three dee but the idea of gathering together strictly fans in darkened rooms – it’s like the heyday of the gay club scene in NY, and the very definition of ‘fabulous’.

Indeed the future of television may not lie in three dee, smell-o-rama, rumblevision or any other gimmick, but in the collective experience of event television. And why stop at simply gathering together to watch your favourite programme? The next logical step is to develop the already established showing of certain films in certain locations and site specific theatre by developing site-specific screenings, or at least augmented screenings. For instance, which of the following would enhance your enjoyment of ‘Downton Abbey’; big tee vee? HD? 3D? Or watching it while wearing formal dining attire sat in a drawing room being served cocktails and repressing sexual longing for the girl in the flimsy dress who keeps stealing glances at you? Or no adverts?

Or maybe the future lies in interactivity, mashing up television footage with a games console. Can we really be that far away from a nature programme that shows us the wonders of the deep which and comes with a virtual fishing rod? Or the wonders of the veldt that comes with a virtual elephant gun? Actually, Ray Bradbury wrote an excellent short story about the interactive nature programmes which indicate that they are not always a great idea.

Of course, collective viewing of favourite television programmes might also mean that when somebody asks ‘what’s he been in’, an answer might be forthcoming without needing to fire up IMDB. This is especially useful in Dickens adaptations, where even the most familiar face can be buried under more whiskers than is sensible.

G&P Awards - Sport

Sportsman of the year – it’s been a great year for sport, as long as you were not an England rugby fan. 2011’s World Cup saw the unnatural prospect of having to watch a rugby match with a cup of tea rather than a beer, then saw the startling development that you can drink beer first thing in the morning, it’s actually just social convention that frowns upon it. The tricky think was to get out of the habit when the World Cup ended, but after a few days most of us were back to nursing a beaker of coffee on the train rather than a can of Harp. While the rugby team were rather better at throwing dwarfs than the ball, there were notable successes in other fields, with records set in badger baiting and deer chasing. However, the award has to go to Richard Carello, the jockey who distinguished himself this year at meet at Chepstowe by starting on one horse and, when it started flagging, tossing another jockey off of a neighbouring horse and winning the race on his horse-jacked mount. Caarello was, quite properly, disqualified for improper use of the whip in unseating the other jockey.

G&P Awards - Science and Technology

Innovation of the year – iSay! There was much excitement in the offices of G&P when ‘smartphones’ where introduced. This excitement was diminished when one actually started using one. They did not, it appears, automatically mute themselves during Opera. Nor did they automatically ring with an urgent, not to be ignored tone during the interminable second act of ‘De Fingermaus’, allowing one to slip away from the box and test the service at the bar. Worst of all, they did not self-erase browsing history or scramble text messages from annoyed mistresses. What, was the collective opinion, is so f**king smart about that? This all changes with the introduction of ‘apps’, an acronym of A Perfect Procrastination Solution, they are indeed supreme at wasting time. Previously, the staff of G&P thought angry birds were the ones one clipped but did not kill on a shoot, instead it turns out to be either a way for your sullen child to while away that difficult lunch when you tell him he can’t come home from Christmas after all because Daddy’s new wife does not like the way he looks at her in the hot tub, or you to while away the time during any meeting featuring a powerpoint slide with the word ‘vision’ on it. Occasionally though, there is a useful app. Such an app is iSay. iSay is an English translation app. Unlike other translation apps, that spits out tinny mechanised unintelligible versions of ‘can you show me the way to the nearest lavatory that features a Sturley and Armington flush mechanism’ and other phrases that one clearly needs abroad, it turns your phone into a PA system while at same time printing the message, dot matrix style, on the screen. So for instance, if one types in ‘would you mind awfully advising me where the railway station is please?’ it turns it into English Abroad: ‘WHERE. IS. RAILWAY. STATION!’ Now, this is doing nothing one cannot do oneself, but the clever bit is if one is having trouble being understood, one hits ‘repeat’ and gets, in this instance: ‘RAILWAY. STATION.’ ‘CHUFF CHUFF, YOU KNOW, THAT WE BUILT’ ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’. And thence on to the inevitable scuffle, local law enforcement involvement and appearance of British consulate. The G&P staff have used this in Wales and found it most effective.

G&P Awards - Food and drink

Restaurant of the year – Lots of competition this year, from places owned by celebrity chefs that, because the celebrity chefs are off filming, shagging or filming their shagging, are actually quite good, to Modern French, which is always quite bad, from places doing simple things well to places doing complicated things well to little places that just do the best red snapper straight out of the sea. G&P has catholic tastes. That’s why honourable mention goes to La Deedah, Anton Fircups new place in Knightsbridge, simply because one can order ‘vodka luge’ as a starter and, if you book ahead, the luge is in the form of a statue of yourself, with the vodka emerging from spigot of choice. Congratulations on Anton for scooping the ‘fist date venue’ award at last month’s ‘Grazia’ awards. But we also love the family run restaurant on the Greek island of Krappos. Their red snapper recipe, which has no red snapper in it at all, is much appreciated by any tourist staying for more than a week where, because of bountiful shoals and a truly buggered economy, red snapper if just about the only thing left to eat. The winner is ‘Lennies’ on the A437 just outside Macclesfield. This unpretentious layby café serves the best bacon sandwich in England, meaning the best in the world. Lidl bacon on supermarkert value white means that the bacon grease is half way to your elbow before you have the sandwich half way to your mouth. What sets this bacon sandwich apart is the particulates from all the lorries trundling past. Try the ‘asthma attack on a plate’ the next time you are there.

Food of the year – hot scotch egg. Of course.

Drink of the year – tea. Yes, that’s right, tea. Here’s why: Beer is your go-to drink when you are feeling thirsty or it is still first thing. Red wine is fine but needs a decent roast dinner to go with it and one does not always have access to an Aga, a cook or a decent fowl. White wine used to have a reputation as being drunk by the rougher sort of homosexulaist. Now it has the reputation of being drunk by ‘Lambrini girls’. Until it is rehabilitated and it is safe to once again drink with the rougher sort of homosexulaist, it is off the list. Gin is all very well, in its place. That place is the bathtub where it is distilled and where it can also be pressed into service as dissolving evidence. Scotch is an alcohol beverage perfected by a race who have brought the abuse of their own bodies to a fine art. Think; if you wouldn’t have a piercing, a tattoo or a deep-fried mars bar inside you, why would you have any other tartan product? Other drinks are available but frankly, they are all variations on the above. Cocktails? Any of the above with enough vimto to disguise the taste. This leaves us with tea. Because; there’s a ‘phone ringing, in the White House, at two o’clock in the morning and if there’s a crisis brewing there had better be a cuppa brewing as well, when you are taking a decision about whether or not to deploy the special forces in a supposedly allied country, you do not want to be doing this with a beaker of Jim Beam in your mit, you want hot, fresh tea. And as we have been asked, the G&P blend of choice is English Breakfast with half a spoonful of camp coffee, a pinch of an OXO cube and just enough Bovril to give the beverage body. And three sugars.

G&P Awards - Culture

Book of the year – ‘Only to be published in the event of my death’ by Christopher Hitchens is probably the most eagerly anticipated book in the Groucho Club, but in an otherwise rather dry year for publishing, where rumours of a hitherto undiscovered Stig Lasson pop-up book for children proved groundless the publishing event of the year was the publication, finally, of the last ‘Bellamy’ novel, many years after the death of the author of the Bellamy books, Deirdre ‘Dash’ Flintlock, RN. The discovery of the completed manuscript and its eventual use in the settlement of Flintlock’s estate by having one copy each sent to Flintlock’s creditors in full and final settlement was a unique approach to distribution and debt settlement. Given their relative rarity, even with the some-seventy copies that were sent to various wine merchants and pub landlords, the copies now trade hands at inflated sums, with anyone in possession of a copy of ‘Bagpipes point the way’ declaring it if not the greatest Bellamy story, then at least the equal of ‘The clockwork clergyman’, ‘Fear in the mobile library’ and even the accepted defining Bellamy novella; ‘The Smack of Skull on Willow’. Having been lucky enough to receive a copy in settlement of a debt as a result of a sporting bet (the same bet, ironically, that led to Flintlock’s untimely demise and the resulting ‘chamois leather affair’), G&P’s literary editor can confirm that in his final days, Flintlock was drinking heavily, smoking illegally and writing divinely.

Film of the year – the biggest story in film in 2011 year was that George Lucas did not release another edit of ‘Star Wars’. Possibly the campaign by fans to write down and then send Mr Lucas their most beloved childhood memories so that he can wipe his arse on them and send them back, forever corrupted, has ensured that he can now do this one a singular basis and no longer feel the need to do it collectively while at the same time destroying one of the best movies ever made. For G&P though, one film was worthy of special attention. Showing only in the small mobile cinema that travels round the few remote Scottish islands that do not consider cinema as witchcraft, the restored 1930’s documentary ‘Och Thatll Da’ (‘The Day the Herring Came’) is a silent, Celtic language, black and white documentary about the herring industry in 1930s Scotland. Unflinching in its depiction of fishing, gutting and the wearing of Fair Isle jumpers, for years the film was banned in certain parts of the world for its depiction of beards. Now though, with a new soundtrack by Philip Glass, the famous scenes such as the herring landing, the seagull attack and the infamous ‘two women go at each other with herring knives in a dispute over either a woodbine or a bloke, I can’t be too sure but Christ, she’s now topless and the other one is trying to drown her in a barrel of herring guts this is just wrong’ scene really have stood the test of time. The film, of course, went on to win the Golden Herring in Iceland as well as renewed bans in the sort of countries that have yet to accept Christ as their redeemer.

Television programme of the year – TOWIE, I’m a celebrity (note: check trades description act, benchmark: Su Pollard), the return of Big Brother. This really has been the year of ‘reality’ television. With budgets for scripts and high production values dwindling, the temptation to blow the budget on fake tan and hope for a double-page splash in ‘Heat’ was obviously tempting in 2011. A reality check on reality television this year came when one could not distinguish the ‘Iceland’ adverts that ran throughout ‘I’m a Celebrity’ from the show itself, because the people appearing in both were about as ‘famous’ as one another, and Iceland’s party platter looks like a bush tucker trial. Luckily, it wasn’t all dross. The CCTV and home-video-camera footage from the Derbyshire estate of the Eighth Duke of Monmouth’s of his gamekeepers’ seasonal battle with the poachers on the estate was perhaps the most compelling television seen on British screens for some years. Grainy, sometimes silent, occasionally narrated by either the clipped tones of a gamekeeper or the slurred voice of a poacher speaking around either a swollen mouth or a head injury, the series had many compelling moments, many of them in green night vision. Many of us learned, for the first time, that red arterial spray looks quite, quite black on light-sensitive camera. As well as the human characters – the gamekeepers such as Fowkes, Fellows, Mobb, the magnificently whiskered ‘Normal’ and of course the poachers; Scumm, Viles and ‘Agggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhmyleg’ there were animal characters, ‘Badgie’ the badger, ‘Dearie’ the dear and ‘Shipman’ the Staffordshire Bull Terror. Wonderfully anchored by Kate Humble, this was, to put it bluntly, worth the price of the license fee alone and in the G&P office gave rise to the catchphrase ‘Frozen Planet – you can stick penguins up your arse’. Not true, by the way.

Awards, rewards, honours and disgraces - people of the year

It’s traditionally still just about the time of year where there are reviews of the past twelve months, and awards and honours are handed out to those that have made a positive contribution to society in general or the lives of the rich and influential in particular.

Here at G&P we, perhaps ironically, perhaps not, take a more egalitarian view about who and what should get an award or, shall we say, recognition. We are always pleased when somebody is honoured for outstanding contributions to the world of science, medicine or just having great hair, but do feel a little uncomfortable at the meaner awards and recognitions handed out by those who want to throw a spotlight on badness. This year, in particular, no such spotlight was needed, as bad behaviour was exposed in the full light of day.

So, in no particular order, the G&P awards for people of 2011 are:

Man of the year – lots of competition here, mainly in the shape of dead tyrants and terrorists who’s passing made the world either a better or simply a better groomed place. But without doubt G&Ps man of the year is Sconald MacDoon, the genius Glaswegian chef d’celebe who this year introduced the world to the hot scotch egg, a core of piping hot haggis surrounded by an egg, surrounded by whatever the hell it is that surrounds a scotch egg, and deep fried. The science has something to do with using the same technology that allows egg to be placed inside square pork pie and we understand that the hot scotch egg is to be official snack of the CERN team for 2012. Official snack for 2013 – Rennies.

Woman of the year – again, a year where women took centre stage, be it in CCTV footage showing a cat being placed in a wheelie bin (much more entertaining was the footage of the enraged cat being released) or Rebekka Brooks showing that you didn’t need to be smart or good looking in order to edit a national paper, all you needed was a readership slightly dimmer than you are. But the G&P woman of the year is Delcasier Fernandez, the Chipping Hombury housewife who, after a three year battle with her local council to have the street lights stay on longer and later to make the streets of her village safer for women, finally threw in the towel and instead opened a taser shop in the village. Sales have been brisk and in just three short weeks two flashers and a bloke who was out late hoping to see owls have been tasered in the goolies.

Animal of the year – while wheelie bin cat and Fenton (or to give him his full Kennel Club name ‘Fenton Fenton Jesus Christ Fenton Fenton Jesus Christ’) snatched headlines, G&P prefers to recognise working animals, be they the sniffer dogs that protect our troops in foreign parts, gun dogs of a different type that bring back the bird after a shoot, faithful hounds that savage hunt saboteurs or the weapon dogs that guard their masters’ crack dens. This year’s animal of the year is the regimental goat adopted by the Second Afgan Regiment of Foot as their mascot who, thanks to being tethered too close to a field kitchen one evening, was not just a source of regimental pride but also a sauce of regimental pride as, thanks to a bit of a cock-up in the catering department, ‘Belzie’ was served up as the winning dish in the regimental Masterchef cook-off the next day. Recipe available at www.passthesalt.co.af

G&P review of the year

It’s traditionally the time of year where there are reviews of the past twelve months, and awards and honours are handed out to those that have made a positive contribution to society in general or the lives of the rich and influential in particular. So why not?

The Gentleman and Player review of the year.

It started off cold, with snow and stuff. It then got very warm very quickly. In May the temperatures were such that one was knocking around in shorts and tee shirts while away from the playing field or exercise class. Was this unseasonably warm weather early in the year the ‘Arab Spring’ that everyone refers to? Or is that because it made everyone dress like Mediterraneans? Either way, it was warm.

Which was good, because Summer itself, although not cool, did not live up to the expectation. I had enough barbeque gas stock piled in my shed to fuel a space shuttle launch, had NASA decided to continue with the programme. They didn’t and mankind took a giant step backwards, the space shuttle joining Concorde in the cabinet of things we used to be able to afford to run but can’t any longer. We now have to rely on the Russians to get stuff into space. This is the same people that we rely on for our supply of gas and, if their success at launching rockets is any indication of the quality of their products, it’s probably a good job I never got round to using any of the stuff to cremate some chicken legs.

Later in the year we had riots in England. The media at the time and since tried hard to suggest that the trigger for this was anger. Anger at the police, anger at the ‘haves’ by the ‘have nots’ and anger at society generally. What it seemed to be most of all was anger at plate glass windows of J B Sports shops.

The year rounded off with protest camping. Interestingly, the growth in protest camping and the need for equipment was not enough to stop ‘Blacks’, the high street camping retailer (and so presumably best placed of all to sell you stuff that would allow you to camp on the High Street) going into receivership. This demonstrates that either the campers were actually so angry with society that they looted their equipment, or they bought on-line, just like everyone else.

Oh shit, just realised that Blacks is where I buy my barbeque gas. Good job I stock-piled.