LAZY DAYS AND EVEN MORE SUNDAYS

We have, I fear (and even if it was even possible), become even more lazy when it comes to weekends than even I had thought possible. To be honest, before a very late breakfast, I did spend some time reading, and reading an actual book (with paper and everything), which is kind of an unusual occurrence for me nowadays, but that was about as productive as it got.

Oh, we talked about doing a lot of things. We talked about attacking the clutter that’s still claiming more than it’s fair share of the floor-space in the living room, but by Monday morning it remained strangely unmoved. We talked about going through the stacks of accumulated Estate paperwork just to see what we no longer needed, but it remains untouched and gathering that tell-tale film of dust. I glanced out of the window upon a bright, shiny day and thought to myself that the garden might be in need of some attention, but that was all of the attention it got. There was even a vintage fair which we considered heading out to visit, but somehow we never actually made it out of the house.

The mountain of washing up did get done, but mostly because we ran out of clean bowls, and the recycling made the great leap for freedom from the draining board to the outside dustbin which might not appear to be much, but in context it feels like a great achievement.

We did also venture out on Sunday and buy some paint, fully intending to restart the decorating which was interrupted by events last October and which we’ve struggled to resume, but, apart from adding to the growing pile of paint purchases which seldom make it from the can to the wall, and calling in at the supermarket to get the weekly food supplies with which to stuff our couch-potato faces, little else was achieved in the way of actual progress.

On the plus side, last Saturday "Columbo" put away six, count 'em, six murderers during the course of our day, as played by Jackie Cooper, Ray Milland, Rip Torn, Oscar Werner, and a pair of Martin Landaus, so fictional justice from way back in the televisual past was, at the very least, served.

Meanwhile, and because absolutely nobody is asking, I thought I would tell you how the year's rewatch of "The Six Million Dollar Man" is going, not least because I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to work my way through at least some of it this year, and, as far as achievements are going, actually doing something that I say I will, even if its as utterly pointless as this, is turning out to feel like a victory of sorts.

Anyway, my viewing marathon staggers along at a couple of episodes a week crammed into the moments alone when it fills the time as a pastime which is far too excruciating to share, but I don't think that I'll get much further than season three (even though I fully expect my "completist" gene to kick in once I reach the end of the season) because, to be perfectly honest, I had started to find it all rather monotonous and predictable at about the halfway point of season two and only staggered through that because of the prospect of getting to the “Bionic Woman” episodes.

Incidentally, those episodes turned out to be far, far duller than I remembered from childhood and, horror of horrors, also turned out to involve Lee Majors actually singing. Well, sort of. God alone knows what the Bionic Woman actually saw in him, but if I were Steve Austin, I’d’ve been asking whether I could have some bionic replacement vocal chords installed if I was going to get up to that sort of caterwauling…

Meanwhile, Richard Anderson's mournful silences as he stared off towards the horizon each week in the cough and a spit role of OSI Boss Oscar Goldman, presumably wondering where his credibility and his career went were bad enough, but his plaintive cries of "Steve... Steve!!!" whenever his favourite celebrity agent (who occasionally nobody recognised if the plot demanded it) disobeyed an order, started to make him sound more like a spurned lover than the head of a “Top Secret” organisation about which everyone seemed to know.

Also getting tedious were the many and varied excuses to bring in blonde female characters who were invariably played by Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as was...). These seemed to occur quite regularly, with nobody pointing out the similarity in appearance of the plucky female astronaut to the plucky female TV journalist, but that’s telly for you.

After all if Bionic Doctor Rudy Wells can change his head on a regular basis without anybody commenting upon it, sometimes in the blink of an eye, then you start to get the impression that the makers of the programme thought even less of the viewers that the viewers did themselves.

Mind you, in those “pre-internet” “Pre-VHS” days, people just didn’t watch this kind of telly in the same way that we do now, and weren’t able to nit-pick and dissect every episode as it was actually airing, so maybe nobody noticed. Funnily enough, I appear to have reached the point where I started watching them when I was a kid, because I had very distinct memories of the episode “The Blue Flash” when I got to it, and (although he isn’t in that particular edition) I remember very clear memories of thinking at about that time that Dr Wells had been a different person a few weeks earlier, but, in those “Pre-Google” (other search engines, etc…) days, I had no way of proving it…

And so the rewatch reluctantly plods along more out of obligation than from any pleasure it now is giving. The "light comedy" episodes can be a little bit cringeworthy, but remain slightly interesting when you can spot within them the roots of other "much-loved" seventies shows like "The Dukes of Hazzard" but, in general, those editions are better than the sub-James Bond antics of the cold-war spy tales, or anything involving villainy in the vicinity of car racing, horse racing or boxing.

Actually most series seem to touch upon those particularly tedious areas as plot ideas from time to time, and they're always so dreadful that I've learned by now to switch over immediately a racetrack or gym appears...

Still, Lee Majors seems to be quite good with kids, and experimenting with his facial hair options, and, in terms of mid-seventies adventure hokum, it's passable enough, and as a bit of nostalgia about a hilarious looking era of huge cars, cheap petrol, and villains in loud sports jackets, kipper ties, and greasy combovers, or wearing housecoats to match the décor of their motel room, it really couldn't be beaten.

Of course, I do miss that sort of villain on TV. Nowadays they all look like those shaven-headed, tattooed, leather-jacketed loons that you hope won’t catch your eye in the pub, and, quite frankly, a bit of variety wouldn’t go amiss in the world of villain fashions.

Where are the fluffy white cats and the Nehru jackets…?

Meanwhile, back on “Sixie”, more amusement can be had in spotting the more obvious stuntmen, especially when filmed in “super slo-mo” just in case you hadn’t noticed that they weren’t actually Lee Majors himself, although he presumably got on quite well with “Unknown Stuntmen” given that for his career "The Fall Guy" beckons...

Oh, before I forget… That book that I mentioned I was reading...? (Still… because unfortunately I’m reading far less than I used to…)

That’s "Screen Burn" by Charlie Brooker.

Charlie's a very talented wordsmith. In fact, perhaps he’s rather too talented. His writing is impressive enough to make my own feel so utterly inadequate that I might just feel like stopping doing it altogether for at least six months and trying to teach myself how to write this sort of nonsense properly. Meanwhile, if I continue to read his words, I might just learn how to be far more cutting about the TV shows I'm watching...