POINTLESS PURSUITS

I don’t watch half as much telly as I used to, you know. The thing is that most of the news programmes annoy me far too much and far too easily with their inane banter and obsession with the trivial, and most of the rest of it is precisely the kind of trivilal nonsense that the news programmes are obsessing about and trying to persuade us are so very important that we dare not miss them.

So I avoid the “talent” shows, the “celebrity dance” contests, the “sporting” competitions, and the cookery or bakery nonsense, and feel mental pins poking my eyeballs as the mind-snappingly awful trailers come around for another year of that Alan Sugary nonsense.

Actually, the trailers are getting weirder, aren’t they. Apart from persuading me to run a mile rather than watch any of this stuff, you do find yourself asking why on earth they believe that anyone would want to watch the programmes associated with them.

Take, for example, the “Everybody Hurts” trailer currently running for “EastEnders” on BBC1 – to me it just makes it look like the most miserable experience possible and not something I would want to waste half an hour of my life with on any given evening, but I don’t suppose that I’m really their target demographic, to be honbest with you, given that I abandoned that show at the same time as Susan Tully.

Sometimes I get home from work in time to see a hefty chunk of “Pointless” and I do sometimes find myself wondering whether I would be prepared to make a tit of myself on national television in order to try to pocket a grand or two.

After all, I usually do quite well, when it comes to answering the actual questions, and I’ve even been acing a fair few questions on “University Challenge” recently, which is usually a better guide to where my grey matter currently is, knowledge-wise.

The problem is (other than the fear of appearing in public) that I don’t have a potential partner, given that the Beloved is one-hundred percent adamant that she never wants to appear on television ever, ever, ever, and I don’t seem to have any close chums with a similar mindset, so if you DO fancy a bash at it, please feel free to get in touch.

Of course, what usually happens when I start to think like this is that a particularly fiendish edition of “Only Connect” comes along in which I fail to score a single point, and my confidence plummets through the floor and into the basement again, and I just know that it really would be the worst idea ever.

I have seen a couple of decent films lately, however, despite seeming to have no interest in anything appearing at the cinema for months now. I’ve been working my way through the “Millennium Trilogy” again, and quite liked the Ian Fury biopic “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll…”

You know, until I looked his name up on Google (other search engines are available) after watching the film, I had COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN seeing Ian Dury play at “Madstock” on the day I was unexpectedly dragged along to that back in 1992.

I also quite enjoyed some of the old “Falcon” films that were running in the wee small hours of the weekend recently, and I actually rather enjoyed “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” which I watched at the weekend, even though it was quite obviously the product of an utterly deranged mind.

Monday evening found me being sucked into watching “Star Trek: Generations” for the first time in a while, despite having owned it on DVD for several years, and I quite enjoyed that too, despite it dragging on a bit too long.

The thing that most alarmed me afterwards, however, was when I realised that this film, the first “Star Trek” film featuring the  rather earnest and talkative “Next Generation” crowd (“For God’s sake, stop chatting about your feelings and get on and bloody Zap something, will you?”) is now TWENTY years old… (!)

This means that in relative terms, it’s now just as old as those “old” science-fiction films like “Forbidden Planet”, “This Island Earth”, “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, “War of the Worlds”, “When Worlds Collide” and “Them!” were when I was watching them in special “seasons” on summer’s evenings when I was but a lad, although, to be fair, it didn’t look half as creaky as some of those used to do.

Those films have a lot to answer for, not least because I spent my summers sitting indoors watching them and having my imagination broadened instead of going outside and doing hideous things like “making friends” and playing ghastly things like “sport” when I was at that most impressionable age.

Nowadays, I do prefer to go outside instead of sitting indoors watching telly, but I guess that’s not surprising really, given that many of us invert our way of life as we mellow into old age.