The DVR has, of course, just one job…
One. Little. Job.
…and, not only that, but it was precisely that one job that it was designed for and the very same job that I bought it to do for me. Its main purpose, its raison d’etre if you like, as a Digital Video Recorder is supposed to be, you’ll be astonished to find out, recording television programmes digitally. However for various reasons that still remain unclear to me it has recently developed the annoying habit of sitting around on its electronic backside, and failing to record the requested programmes, rather like the kind of irresponsible employee that “couldn’t be arsed” to do the one little thing that you asked them to and then seems to think that it’s you that is at fault for even asking them to do it in the first place, and that it really shouldn’t matter enough for you to get annoyed about it just because they hadn’t actually done it.
Perhaps I would be less peeved if it didn’t then go and put up those terribly “helpful” messages telling me about what it hadn’t done and hoping it hadn’t spoiled things for me. Of course it spoiled my viewing enjoyment, you electronic moron! It might as well just sit there whining “It’s not my fault I didn’t ask to be bought!” and then start making jokes with its electronic mates and ignoring me. Hmm… maybe it has just hit some sort of electronic puberty…? After all, it is quite old in electronic terms, it being about eighteen months since I got it. That pretty puts it out to pasture in computing terms. In another six months, I suppose it’ll be as dead as the dinosaurs. I suppose that there’s some kind of signalling issue at the transmitter that is failing to zap out the necessary electronic trigger pulse or something technical and wizardish and jiggery-pokery based that would no doubt explain the problem, but I really don’t know.
Back in the old analogue and VCR days the only person I could hold responsible for failure to record my favourites was me and my own pathetic programming failures, and (perhaps) the occasional over-run of a snooker match, but nowadays I can still get everything right and have it still go wrong for reasons beyond my control. This we call “progress”, by the way, and I’m still not sure that I really like it.
Stupid machine!
Anyway, now I’ve got that out of my system, back to the purpose of this morning’s little missive. Despite the less than enthusiastic response of fellow viewers over the years, usually to what they perceive as intolerable cruelty, blatant cynicism or just plain embarrassing nastiness on occasion, I’ve always tried to keep up with watching “Have I Got News for You” which is now, rather unbelievably, broadcasting its 41st series. Perhaps it comes from being an old ‘news junkie’ anyway, but I suspect it’s just because I want to do better on that “7 Days” quiz on the BBC website, although I’ve usually already failed catastrophically at that when the obscure stories that it consists of turn up later during the actual programme.
D’oh!
One of the guests on that episode was Graham Linehan, one half of the writing team responsible for the sublime “Father Ted” and other shows, and someone who, as a writer, I rather admire. Not least because of his usual dry wit and for making the kind of leaps of imagination that I can never even hope to emulate.
So, inevitably, the show unrolled as it does, and we came to the “Missing Words” round, in which newspaper headlines are displayed with some of the words missing and the opposing pair of comedy teams are invited to guess what the words might possibly be with the ultimate aim being to amuse the nation with their fast thinking, amusing suggestions and witty banter.
One of the captions which appeared was this one: “(BLANK) has always been a sublime melange of the esoteric and the experimental” (I’m writing it out in case the image mysteriously vanishes and you don’t know what I’ve drivveling on about) and drifting across the soundtrack, in a distinctive Irish brogue came the words “Pretentious Prick” which were presumably the first attempt at filling the blank… as in “Pretentious prick has always been a sublime melange of the esoteric and the experimental”.
It got its chuckle.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
But it was a moment that just made me feel a little bit sad, and I don’t mean “sad” in the “pathetic” sense of the word (although you might disagree with me on that when and if you read on). Of course, my problem is that I really don’t see anything wrong with the particular collection of words making up that nearly-sentence. All of them are perfectly good, proper English words that do precisely the job they were intended for. I suspect that the chuckle I heard was both symptomatic of the modern cult of celebrating the “ordinary” and being dismissive of anything that makes a virtue of being thought of as being in any way “clever” that we seem to have embraced in recent years, and also the comic genius coming from just recognising that those were precisely the kinds of words that the audience might associate with pretentiousness.
This, of course (because everything’s always about me in the end), just proves to me that the various utterances that have hailed from Lesser Blogfordshire across these many months are indeed wholly pretentious themselves, which probably says a lot without having to say much at all. Two words, “Pretentious Prick”, have managed to say more than the thousands of other words that I have bombarded you with over the last half year or so. Two words that said everything about me that you ever really needed to know.
That the comment came from a wordsmith disappointed me further, of course, but then I realised that to write things that are popular with people, you have to be in touch with the people and use words in ways that resonate with those people, which is something I am obviously incapable of, hence (you see, I’m precisely the sort of pretentious prick who still uses words like ‘hence’) my relative failure as a wordsmith.
Perhaps I’m just feeling a little bit sensitive anyway about the subject of language as this was the week when TXT SPK like “OMG” (although not my own preference for that one: “OM(?)”) and many of its stablemates finally got slipped into the OED. Of course it is perfectly correct that language should evolve and develop over time, but it is rather heartbreaking that something so beautiful should be augmented by something so much more dreary and banal, if that’s not too pretentious a way of putting it…
By the way, in all the confusion, I’ve completely forgotten what the “correct” word finally was in that particular round of the quiz. Not that it really matters, I suppose, but I’m sure that it might bother me when and if I come to re-read this nonsense in a few months time.
Well...er...yes. I see, I think.
ReplyDelete