TV Education.

Tonight I caught a few seconds of one of those super hero films. I came in at the point where the pouty young blonde woman with hair that’s just spent ten hours in a poodle parlour is doing mean about as convincingly as Trump does being a president. She screws up her eyes by way of indicating a snarl and shoots fiery bolts at the big bad guy with the bulging bronze pecs who then goes up in flames. Only he doesn’t because bronze doesn’t burn easily, so the handsome young good guy wraps him in black polythene and the world is saved from a fate worse than paying money to go and watch that sort of stuff. And it occurred to me that it probably had a PG rating, and it further occurred to me that there’s a rating missing from the list. U7: not suitable for persons over the age of seven. And then I fell asleep.

When I woke up the adverts were on. Ad after ad showed people ordering a range of lifestyle peripherals online using a mobile phone, and I really wasn’t sure for a while whether I was watching an ad for fancy furniture or an ad for mobile phones. (I had the sound off as usual.) And you know what? I somehow managed not to care.

I also noticed that there are a lot of TV ads at the moment trying to sell holidays to those with enough money to afford them. Anaemic people attired in innocuous dress and sporting smiles that are at best vacuous but mostly merely simpering look dreamily out onto a blue paradise while brown skinned people with artificial grins bring them plates of something unidentifiable to prove how wonderful life really is. And I thought of all those countless millions of poor people in the world who are suffering for want of food and clean water because all they had was taken from them in the name of imperialism so that the dreamily unaware could be persuaded to make a very small number of people disgustingly rich. And then I fell asleep again (because I’m still recovering from eight weeks of sleep deprivation.)

And then it was time for a re-run of a Father Ted episode. Ah, that’s better. Tonight’s running joke was ‘Oh no, Father, she’s not a nun. She’s a woman all right.’ And a level of sanity was restored at last (although I couldn’t be sure whether the rest had all been part of a bad dream.)