WHO KNOWS…?

When it comes to matters of the modern world, I can be bloody ignorant sometimes.

Usually it's not really my fault… or at least if it is my fault, it's more to do with the fact that a lot of the "pop culture" references that just about everyone else seems very familiar with, don't really appear all that much on my personal radar.

This could be for one of many reasons.

Much "sport" fails to register with me, so a lot of "sportspersons" are not people that I would normally recognise. The entire Olympic experience passed me by to such an extent that the allegedly quite well-known people who feature in certain adverts are still just faces speaking words to me.

The only radio station I listen to regularly is Radio 4, so I don't get to hear all that much "pop" music and, because I'm most likely to only listen to that because "Test Match Special" is on, even the pop culture which has made it into the sort of breadth of mainstream where Radio 4 might be talking about it, perhaps even to the point where Aggers is making reference to it, it often still doesn't make it through my own personal perception filters.

To be fair, quite often a lot of the stuff is there but I simply fail to register it.

Then there are things like soap operas and great big Saturday evening "family entertainment" shows which just don't get switched on in our house.

And, of course, I don't read the tabloids, rarely see the sort of magazines which carry the celebrity gossip and tittle-tattle, and don't have children who might just keep my finger on the pulse about such inconsequential matters as what's currently "cool" or not, assuming that "cool" is still a "thing" of course...

Hell, I don't even go out all that much if I can possibly help it...

For example, I asked m’colleagues who the allegedly blaspheming celeb pop star lady was when the story turned up on the news a few weeks ago & I thought they told me that, whoever she is, she'd once been married to Russell Grant.

Obviously I misheard that, but I think that I may be just a little bit out of touch...

Then, rather troublingly, during a later conversation on that very same day, I did know who both "The Wurzels" and "The Barron Knights" were...

God help me...

Mind you, when someone asked me not to spoil the end of "BB" for them a couple of months ago, and I thought that they were referring to "Big Brother" and was just a whisker away from telling them that I didn’t watch the sort of telly that involves members of the general public when something clicked inside my mind and warned me off from taking that particular path towards revealing my own ignorance…

Although, come to think of it, I don't believe I’ve ever seen that other “BB” either, at least not to the point of knowing what's going on, although I did once have to create some artwork themed around the very first series, so I was reluctantly forced into some kind of "crash course" that I've since, rather mercifully, forgotten…

There was a singing nun, I recall, a builder, and a devilish gentleman with horns on his head...?

So, basically…

Who the hell knows…?

But let's face it, I'm just a bit of an old fart really... and you could argue, possibly with some justification, that I'm just trying to make a virtue of my own ignorance, something which I regularly deplore in others...

Then again, sometimes we all forget that those things which we're unreliably informed that "everybody's talking about" are all things that some marketing git has just decided that we're all talking about, even when it turns out that, even with a super-juggernaut like the latest footballing contest, more people are actually disinterested than otherwise, and many of those who express an interest are just following the herd because, in the end, we're all just looking at what everyone else is interested in and still playing to the rules of the playground and hoping to be accepted by the "cool kids..."

If that's still a "thing" that is...