The TV Dump (iv)

This contains spoilers...

Dead End

Jeffrey DeMunn must have thought he would be working for a while. If he had any sense when he got the job as Dale Horvath, he would have picked up The Walking Dead trade paperbacks and seen that he lasts a long time before he finally succumbs to the curse of the walkers. Imagine his surprise when he read the script of the 11th episode of the TV series and saw that he bites the big one a damned sight sooner than he (or the comics fan) probably expected.

There is a, possibly apocryphal, story going round that only Andrew Lincoln, Sarah Wayne Callies and Chandler Riggs - aka the Grimes family - are the only cast members pretty much guaranteed to survive the first three series, but the rest of the cast won't find out until the script for the next episode they're filming arrives. If it's true, it's a helluva production incentive for the rest of the cast to try and keep themselves alive - act well, stay alive.

I'd been horrid to my wife, who enjoys the TV show a damned sight more than me, and told her that in the comic Andrea, Glenn and Maggie are both still going strong and that Dale and Carol managed all the way to the TV equivalent of series 27, especially the way the current show is moving the story along. Of course, all bets were off almost from the start with subtle changes becoming massive changes and the introduction of a different bunch of supporting characters, presumably introduced because there needed to be more wanton killing of the group to keep the shock factor high.

If I sound a little jaded it's because I am. The comic book isn't the best in the world, but as an exercise in hopelessness, desperation and hell on Earth, it's probably the world's first car crash comic; you just have to read it to see who dies this month. That gives it an edge. a hook, to keep reeling them in. Time elapses in the comic a month at a time, so the stories seem to go on forever, but in comic style they take place over a short space of time; a year's worth of comics can be two days on average. The passage of time is easy, a couple of weeks can have passed at the conclusion of one arc and the start of another - the reader has the imagination to accept that the intervening days were too dull to chronicle or quite simply nothing happened and when you have a comic that moves the way The Walking Dead does, more than one month of sitting around the campfire discussing their predicament and gore fans get restless; besides, in the medium of comics, this is a wordy book by any standards already. WD has enough of nothing much is happening already, because like the TV show it is about the characters, the survivors, and not the scrapes they get themselves into - that's almost secondary, because, let's face it, there are only so many ways to dispatch a zombie before you start repeating yourself, it's just shown from a different angle or perspective. The comic could quite easily be an illustrated script.

The Walking Dead TV series, as I've said before in other entries, started phenomenally well, but frankly petered out pretty quickly by the time they got to the penultimate episode of the 6 part run. The new series started pretty poorly and now 11 episodes into the second season, the band are still playing on Herschel's farm - the place they found in the first episode of this series; like I said, they probably figured they could film it for about 80% less if they use a farm, especially if they limit the zombie count to an average of three an episode - saves on the make-up as well.

Like I said, the comic is no masterpiece, but the TV series is woeful by comparison. It is inhabited by thoroughly horrible characters and I'm not talking about selfish and nasty because of their need to survive, I'm talking probably selfish and nasty in the old world. Very few of them come out of the series in a good light and as Dale found out, being a good guy means you'll have your insides ripped out by a zombie; who, incidentally, was only there because one of Rick's family continued the growing theme that his wife and son have, of acting like complete and utter fuckwits. Between the two of them I'm surprised all of the survivors haven't died because of their remarkably selfish, yet sanctimonious ways. Rick Grimes should have shot them both or let the boy die and the wife run off with Shane, the cartoon villain. He really would have been better off without them.

I can't see the final two episodes suddenly seeing the cast up sticks and leave for pastures new, which means in the next two episodes we'll hopefully see the start of their being forced out. I apologise, but in the comic the slaughter of the barn inhabitants caused so much noise it attracted hundreds of walkers from all around who descended on the farm and forced them to move on, at the expense of some of Hershel's family and other minor characters. This didn't happen in the TV show, but I think it will happen as the season finale. But don't worry if you like this sedentary pacing; in the comic they find another mug to take them all in for a while before finding a prison to hide inside; but, like I said, with the current pace of the show, they'll find the prison in season 10, if it doesn't kill its viewers with boredom and hate first.

Shameful

On the flip side; the best TV show I'm watching at the moment is Shameless (US). It is... shameless. It makes even the brilliant early seasons of the UK version seem pale and uninspired, despite using many of the themes from those halcyon days of what is now basically a Channel 4 joke.

William H. Macy, Emmy Rossum and especially Jeremy Allen White are quite brilliant as Frank, Fiona and Lip Gallagher and they are surrounded by a simply superlative cast portraying the rest of the family and all the colourful supporting cast. I don't want to go on too much about it because I don't know if it's getting an airing in the UK yet, but if it doesn't, then it's worth trying to (cough) download them. You will be blown away!

MP F**k

I admit to downloading the odd programme, usually things I either can't get over here or to save waiting an eternity only to end up disappointed. The thing is, the sites are changing; most of the places I use seem to be putting up torrents for mp4 files rather than avi files and my DVD player looks at mp4s and goes 'meh' at them and ignores their existence. This has meant that the relatively easy job of downloading something like Shameless US has become a bit of a chore and that smacks in the face of the Internet supposedly getting easier. I think the easier it gets the more complicated people think it should be...

2012 - 10b

Shop Talk

After driving about for two hours yesterday afternoon, in an attempt to buy the wife a decent waterproof coat, at the right price, for her birthday, which is today, and failing miserably, I decided to nip out this morning, get her a bunch of flowers and some chocs to make up for her not having a present from me this morning.

Morrison's was full of wankers and I got in the wrong queue. Eventually I got out and realised that I also had to buy a cucumber, but figured I'd get one from the Co-op later. Fast forward 4 hours and we're on our way back from a woody dog walk and I venture into my local store, pick up a cucumber, felt robbed that it was 95p and went and queued behind a woman with more Muller fruit corners than you could shake the proverbial at and a packet of cut green beans. She proceeded to drop everything, not once, but twice and while this was happening two women, a mother and daughter presumably were in the queue behind me. The older woman tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Do you think I could go in front of you, I only have a loaf to buy?" I looked at her, already growing slightly frustrated at the Fruit Corner woman's incompetence.

"I only have this," I said waving the cucumber at her.

"We're in a hurry." She said. I stood there, dripping after walking in the rain and sleet for an hour and looked at her with a touch of incredulity on my face.

"I'm in a hurry too." I said, not really wishing to be an arse, but slightly gobsmacked that she could ask someone with as many items as herself if she could push in.

"Be a miserable bastard then," she said.

"I beg your pardon?" I said, but before I could say anything else the Asian checkout girl called me over.

"£1.05 please."

"It said 95p on the rack," I said.

"It says £1.05 here." I just stood and looked at her. She realised that I was digging my heels in and said, "George, could you check the price of cucumbers for me." George disappeared and the woman and her daughter were looking highly agitated.

George reappeared, "95p," he said.

"It says £1.05 here," the checkout girl with some kind of stubborn heel digging of her own. I suddenly thought, hang on, she sends someone to check, still doesn't budge and I only had £1 on me.

"Tell you what," I says, "Here's £1, we'll split the difference." I handed her the quid and walked out of the shop with her saying, "I can't do that." She could, she did, she had to, I wasn't coming back.

The Wheels Come Off

All season, Roger and I have had this feeling that Man Citeh would, to quote my good friend Martin Ship, do an impression of a clown's car and the wheels would come off. Seems that it was going to be the fate of Spurs rather than Citeh all along.

Personally, I blame two people for this slump which could see us battle it out for 4th place rather than breeze into a top 3 position. Those people are John Terry and Fabio Capello. If I need to explain to you why then you have no interest in football, so I won't bother.

And Finally...

All credit to my mate One El for his drag stint on Saturday night for a party. He went as Marilyn Monroe and looked a bit like one of the Python crew in drag. Big shout for his guts; I wouldn't have, but I know a few blokes who would have hit on him at a party. Marilyn always shaved her pits though...

And...

Even more credit to my wife, 47 today and still looking like she's in her 30s. Quite a remarkable achievement considering she's married to me!

2012 - 10

Up in Smoke

I started smoking again around my birthday... last year. I kept it quiet, but I never really discussed my smoking with anyone, so keeping it quiet was easy. My new smoking regime was simple, 4 or 5 fags a day, to stave off the boredom of my then impending unemployment - a really sensible time to consider doing something that eats a huge hole into one's finances, you'll probably agree.

I was buying a small pouch of tobacco and it was lasting me best part of a week. When I smoked in the house, it was by open windows with the wind behind me or by the fireplace where there's a good draw from the flue. During the summer it was easy, I'd just sit on the patio or on mild or warm nights, sit on the back step. I was feeling confident that I'd managed to deceive the wife.

However, I started to make mistakes. I'd leave a dog end on the hearth, or I'd hide it among the ashes in the grate; and I figured that storing the other dog ends in my office bin, saturated with Hugo Boss and out of the way of prying eyes would suffice. Some of the mistakes were even simpler than that - leaving strands of tobacco lying on my desk; noticing, but not doing anything about the growing detritus on my window sill and the fact that the longetr I continued to smoke the more I just wanted her to find out.

Then back in November, when I started my new job, I started having a smoke at break - me and my assistant would leave the school grounds smoke one of her cheap fags as quick as we could and return to school eating Polos and spraying (herself) with half a canister of perfume. After a couple of weeks of this my chest began to get tight. I haven't actually smoked tailor-made cigs this century, the main reason being that they fuck up my lungs (more than just smoking in general). So I knocked the break time fag on the head and it was then that I realised, truly realised, that if my wife had not realised I was smoking by now then she must be dead. My assistant would come back from her break and despite her precautions, she smelled like an old tramp. I did less to cover my smoking up, so therefore must have smelled like an old ashtray whenever I got into bed at night.

But I persevered. I said to my mate Tony, who was convinced she knew long before I was, that I think she was overlooking it for a couple of reasons - I'd lost 3 stone; was not the most miserable bastard on the face of the planet and I was, at least, trying to hide it from her and doing more, ironically, around the house and garden.

It's the wife's birthday on Sunday and last night we were treated to our customary visit from her mother (an ex-smoker), who apropos of nothing (although both me and the wife have coughs) if I was still not smoking and I looked over at my wife who was sitting there with what looked like a smug smile on her face. "No." I said, as ambiguously as I could and the remainder of the conversation just highlighted what a complete and utter twat I am...

The most telling thing was that she knew almost from the moment I started. The second most telling thing was that whenever I was out in the garden at night smoking, the smoke would waft into our bedroom or bathroom window and she, being a non-smoker, can smell random cigarette smoke from about a mile away. I sat there and heard how she was completely aware of every trick I'd tried and felt stupid.

Many years ago, because I have actually tried to stop smoking more times than I've eaten exotic food, my then GP told me that I was probably in the worst 5% of people who want to stop smoking but can't. It's a statistic that people who smoke 20+ cigs a day are twice as likely to stop permanently than people who smoke under 20 and they were four times as likely to stop than people who smoke less than 10. In my pot smoking days, I'd smoke about 6 a day and I treated it like a treat, a reward or a way of unwinding; like a small scotch or a big glass of red wine; but the sad fact is once you're hooked on nicotine and it has had the chance to rewire your brain - cos that's what it does - stopping it is tougher than shagging a rotting corpse. The intervening years have seen me stop smoking for 18 months, 7 months and a host of under 6 months attempts. I have actually tried to stop smoking 14 times since my mother died - of a smoking related illness and just like my wonderful mum, I'm rubbish at stopping, but a world beater at stopping stopping.

I'm pretty sure that the now public info hasn't changed her opinion and I know that it hurts her a lot to see me with bad coughs and resignation that I won't be spending my old age with her; like my mother, I'm growing resigned to having a horrible death caused by something I loathe but love in equal measure. My only options left are - seeing a hypnotist or having a heart attack; I'm pretty sure being handed a death sentence in person by a cardio-vascular specialist will kick my sense of self-preservation into overdrive.

I am, it should be emphasised, a complete and utter twat.

Fantasy TV

Occasionally I have waffled on about ideas I've had that have never come to fruition or sit gathering cyber dust in a directory on my PC and backed up on a series of discs. But last week, when I was writing my periodic TV Dump thing, I realised that I was growing disillusioned with the majority of TV shows I watch and as we enter the stagnant month of March (when most US shows go on sabbatical and most English ones are waiting for another time of year), I'm faced with trying to decide which of my many 'box sets' I will sit and finally watch.

Perhaps I'm just pining for some good weather so that I can get out more again, but most TV that I currently look forward to ends up leaving me slightly cheated or empty; at times it's like being in a perpetual shaggy dog story or to put a comicbook analogy to it, like I have been reading Chris Claremont's X-Men for 50 years, just hoping he'll resolve at least one of his sub-plots.

It might have something to do with the rare moments I get when I watch a TV show and think, "Jesus, I could do this 100% better." This was why my good friend Martin Shipp and I had a go at writing a TV show a few years ago. I mean, we're both brilliant. I am the ideas man and Martin writes like he should be getting paid shitloads of cash for just being in the room, inspiring others. However, Seaview never got past the draft script phase. We wrote a pilot; reworked it, actually got together and paced the thing and then got a few friends to read it.

Some friends are just blown away that people they know have attempted something so ambitious, while others donned critics hats - the kind of people we needed to read it - and tore it to shreds. I've talked about this before, but the point is I still think the premise for the series is better than 90% of the shit that gets churned out.

Seaview is about a man who inherits a run down hotel in a quiet seaside village from a father he barely knew. All is relatively normal or so it seems, but what he has actually inherited is a hotel that serves as a halfway house for time travellers because the village the hotel sits in also sits on a rift in time, which allows the inhabitants to run a black market operation by which they travel through time and steal things they can use - everything from food to antiques and money. We both saw it as a kind of Ballykissangel meets The Twilight Zone and like all bad script writers, we had all kinds of things promised for the second, third, fourth seasons... I even went as far as wanting the main character to be the son of another famous actor, so they could play the same role but in different times. Like all bad script writers, I firmly believed that if we could sell the idea to someone the rest would be easy - the problem was we had to have a good idea to sell, backed up with evidence we could do it and the draft for the pilot had lots of intrigue but barely anything else.

Another one of my failed novels - Second Contact - could be developed into an excellent TV series, IMHO. It is the story of how a race of aliens arrives on Earth with the offer of enlightenment, gifts and technology that would allow the planet to take its rightful place in the galaxy. However, these advanced beings aren't the first aliens to arrive on Earth. Back in the 1950s around the time of the Roswell Incident, a spaceship lands and a massive cover up is put in place. Only people at the highest level of the government are aware and the aliens are repatriated into a new town in the mid-west of the USA. They live there for half a century, part of the USA but also kind of annexed from it. The town is situated next to an air base and the people there also serve to watch and observe this new colony of aliens.

The newcomers in the present are actually intergalactic bounty hunters and are anything but friends of the planet; they just want to find the original aliens, wipe them out and if the planet dies as a result, then so be it. Earth has, after all, been harbouring galactic fugitives. It offers all kinds of possibilities from varying perspectives and has the added beauty of I never came up with an ending for it so it could go on and on and on...

Around the time that Dexter was beginning to prove itself to be one of the best programmes to come out of the USA for years and around the time Martin and I shelved Seaview, I had this idea that allowed me to draw more insight from my real life - always a good thing when you do this kind of thing. The idea was about an award-winning child behaviourist, who freelances for councils and services working with the worst kids imaginable - murderers, arsonists, psychopaths or just simply kids who have gone so far off the rails that only drastic action will bring them back. The guy, Mark Rigby, gets employed by all manner of people and has an extremely high success rate until he is asked to work with a young girl with some extremely disturbing personality traits...

The real intrigue (hopefully) comes from the fact that this expert isn't who he claims to be, or, at least, that is what a social worker attached to the case believes. When she was at university, she dated a Mark Rigby and shortly after their graduation they were going to travel the world for a year, but her Mark disappeared and she never saw him again. 20 years later another Mark Rigby walks into her life and he has the same life as her ex, up to the point where her's disappeared...

Martin and I talked about this, but he could see where we'd be accused of treading on Dexter territory, especially as I saw the modern Mark Rigby as being quite a dark and unpredictable character, prepared to do anything to preserve his position. I had this idea that the modern Mark would be a real enigma and that very little of his real life would ever be revealed and what was would be ambiguous, slightly surreal and seemingly unrelated to anything he did now.

I still think it's a good idea.

Tying this section into something else; I decided last week to add to the My Monthly Curse blog. Now that it has finished and I have an unexpected hole in my life, I've taken a suggestion made to me and tweaked it to suit me and t least two more entries are scheduled looking at the comics that have influenced me or I rate really highly. I talked about comics for 167,000 words and rarely touched on the reasons why I started reading comics in the first place.

One of the comic series on the first list is something called The Griffin, a kind of Rebel Without a Cause meets Superman with a bit of Starship Troopers thrown in. It was a prestige 6 part series by Dan Vado and Norm Felchle and told the story of Matt Williams, a young rebel who joins an alien army, is endowed with super powers and then, after 20 years, decides to go home, even though it is punishable by death. I read it again the other week and couldn't help wonder why it was never optioned for a film. It is quite a simple but expertly done little story that would, with current CGI, transpose to the big screen with ease and with very little changes to the existing story (not that that would ever happen). If film producers are really strip mining comics for future big screen blockbusters, they would do themselves no harm looking at this.

March of Unpredictability

My obsession with the weather never changes, but I suppose that this has more to do with my belief that I'm more human when the sun shines on this side of the world for more than 12 hours a day. I think my worst nightmare would be to become a vampire...

The end of February was stunning; there were a few days that could easily have been May and my sun glasses got an early year airing and even if last week was a bit misty and murky, you couldn't help notice that there was a warmth behind the cloud, especially when foggy days in February usually mean sub-zero temperatures. I stood on the school's artificial playing surface watching some of my charges play football on Thursday and the sun was shining and there was far more sweat on brows than you would expect at a time of the year when jumpers are worn rather than used for goalposts. It was glorious and I felt slightly disappointed that I had to go back into my stuffy room and miss the wonderful sun light.

Today, while sitting here, I've seen it start murky, then rain and now the sun is out, the temperature on the patio is 13 degrees and anyone with a memory would remember that 13 degrees is actually about 3 degrees less than it was on this corresponding day last year. The reason I say this is because the wife's birthday has, for most of the 29 years I've known her, been either cold and wet or very cold and snowy. She has often joked that even if we see no snow throughout the year, we'd see some on her birthday; but last year, we walked out with the dogs on March 4 wearing no jackets and basking in 16 degrees of heat. It was weird, but it made a pleasant change.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is awful; it's going to get very wet; it's going to start to get very cold and by the time the vast rain belt gets over us, the rain will start to turn to snow... Back to normal then?

Stuff

• I am currently listening to Vs by Pearl Jam and Orang's Herd of Instinct (which is a bit like Talk Talk lite, but that might be because it's Talk Talk without Mark Hollis or Tim Friese-Green).
• I am not reading anything but will start Chavs when the wife finishes it.
• One of the two nectarine trees I have grown from stones, the one that never lost its leaves throughout the entire winter, has just started to sprout new ones. The other nectarine tree, which did what all normal trees do and shut down for the winter still looks like a twig stuck in a pot.
• Still a bit miffed by Blogger's refusal to allow me to do much with my blogs. If I want to change a font or a size it allows me to do it in the editing stage, but once it's published it seems to ignore all these instructions...
• I'm taking the dogs out on my own today - Lexy disappeared again last week for a couple of hours and is on leash punishment at the moment - and earlier than usual, because I still haven't bought the wife a present yet. When she finishes work I'm taking her to some fancy shop to buy her a new waterproof coat; at least that's the plan. Then it's on to Pooja for a nice meal and then home for copious amounts of filthy dirty sex. At least, that's the plan...

The TV Dump (iii)

Being Pooh

The disparity between Being Human and Being Human (US) was massive. Russell Tovey, Aiden Turner and Lenora Critchlow's development was excellent; the drama never overblown, the humour never forced and especially for the first two series, the supernatural side was never too forced. It was a series about Being Human.

The US (or, to be pedantic, Canadian) version with Sam (Doomsday) Witwer, Sam Huntington and Meaghan Rath seemed to dispense with the quirk and development and went straight for the jugular. Don't get me wrong, as US supernatural shows go it's actually worth a try, especially if you think of it as an extension, a foreign cousin, to the original, which just happens to have similar things happen to this trio as happened to our original heroes. The SyFy Channel has, in many ways, dispensed with the being human side of the story in favour of typical angst ridden monster stuff. Witwer isn't a patch on Aiden Turner, Huntington is a different type of guy to Russell Tovey, even if they have almost the same back story and Rath is basically as up and down as Critchlow, but with less humour and more sulking.

Another thing is that you could believe that Mitchell and George were friends; there was a chemistry there - the werewolf acting as the vampire's moral compass. In the US version you get the impression that the vampire is sometimes a hair's breadth away from ripping the werewolf's head off and shitting down his neck and both characters seem to put up with rather than love their ghost.

The main problem with the US version is it likes to focus on the vampires and we're all getting a bit fed up with werewolves, vampires and the supernatural and it does them all in a US stylee while BBC3 does it in a mixture of British sitcom and 80s grit, therefore for that series to rise above others with similar characters it really has to try and be different; instead it's Being Lazy.

However, the initial disparity between the series is disappearing and not because the UK version is becoming more like it's younger sister, because the interesting parts of the show are now being outweighed by a Life on Mars kind of comedy villain (who - spoiler warning - is the adult version of the baby in the current story).

The Guardian claimed that Being Human does the balance of humour and horror extremely well, yet there has been too much humour in the UK version of late and Sunday night's episode felt like Rentaghost and while it had an interesting denouement, I couldn't help but feel that they ripped off some dodgy American programme's half-baked script.

The thing that pisses me off most about the current UK series is that I went out on a limb last week and told two lapsed viewers to give it another chance; saying that I believed it was finding its feet and returning to being an interesting series again. Then James Lance guest starred and by the 25 minute mark I was counting down time.

I think the wider picture is that even in this country the supernatural is becoming a bit overdone and unoriginal and it has to be something special to work. I hear rumours that Dark Shadows is being remade (again) and that there are a couple more barrel-scraping series planned; but the rumour around the US is that fantasy is going to try and move into that market and SF TV series - intelligent SF - could be the big thing for new shows in 2013.

I defended Being Human a lot and elements of it are still quite brilliant, but suddenly the new look feels a little contrived; with less than a handful of episodes left there seems to be more subplots being introduced than a 1990s X-Men comic (and non-comics fans, trust me, that's a lot) with no obvious conclusions in sight.

Beyond the Fringe

Scratch what I've said previously. It's still vastly improved, but I have no idea at all what they're playing at unless we're starting to get Twin Peaks sized red herrings.

Teens Too Far

I really like Skins. It has been, at times, a real breath of fresh air, and it manages to stay fresh because of its cast changing policy. The problem with series 5 and now 6 is that unlike previous series the dislikeable characters far outweigh the likeable ones.

In the past, there was almost a clear line between the good and the disenfranchised and the juxtaposition worked alarmingly well - kids make friends regardless of their social class or societal standing. However, the (not so) new crew have taken all of the focus; this series has barely been about that invisible barrier between adolescent and adult; between parent and child and more about just how fucked up each character is compared to another.

The current bunch of 4 girls and 4 boys has been diluted a little, with a swing back to the first two series with more recurring peripheral characters, but not one of them is a normal sixth-form college kid; every single one of them either is in a dysfunctional family or is having some kind of mental crisis - every single character! The thing that made the first bunch so good was that essentially they were non-fucked up kids with fucked up parents, who were fucking them up by osmosis. Yes, characters had problems, dilemmas and were into drink and drugs in a humongous way; but even Nicholas Hoult's narcissistic Tony was essentially just a teenager. A lot of the show hovered ambiguously over Effey, Tony's younger sister who was basically a walking disaster and would replace her brother as the main character in the second generation.

Effey and James Cook were the 'nutters' of seasons 3 & 4; there were other characters who had much to be ashamed about; but a lot of what happened was realistic as it related to peer pressure, the tragic mistakes teenagers can make and being confused. It, in many ways, was the perfect complement to the first generation. However the new crew have nothing in common with the previous groups and the continuity is maintained via the staff at the college, of which Professor Blood (Chris Addison - hamming it up badly). All of the characters, with the exception of Grace, who was almost too good to be believed, but also emotionally scarred by her incredibly protective parents, seem to have fundamental mental problems. They radiate considerably less empathy than previous groups and each character has had part of their personalities highlighted that are extremely unpalatable. The new group, whether you like the characters or not, are victims with some kind of dysfunctional metal trait and it doesn't ring true.

One of the other things about Skins I loved was that it was very much wishful thinking TV written by no one less than Thirty Something. It was, at times, like a bunch of 40 year olds given the chance to be teenagers again with hindsight. The new group feel as though they're being written by younger script writers. I'm happy that some issues have been addressed, but feel as though the need to shock has transplanted the need to entertain. The characters are almost interchangeable; few of them seem to have unique voices and they all seem intent on whinging a lot which turns the dialogue into a bit of a drone at times.

There's not long to go with this lot. This series has been full of continuity errors not seen before; inconsistencies of scripting and a drop in acting standards and the fact that Dakota Blue Richards looks like she's had DD implants put in since the last series is a little off-putting. There are a couple of characters that you can't help but like, but that's nothing to do with the story.

Egg of the Bored Dead

I suppose you could be thankful that US TV hasn't embraced zombies with the same fervour as vampires, because, as I've said before, zombies should be the lamest monsters in fiction and if you apply basic common sense to a situation you can pretty much survive a walking dead apocalypse, provided you stay away from the most likely scary parts of the world - major cities and towns and spend a lot of time up in areas where the temperature is freezing.

That said, The Walking Dead would be a pretty dull series if it was just about being practical in the face of flesh eating corpses. As it is, it's just pretty dull.

Cast your mind back to those first two episodes; they made George Romero seem like a 2nd rate after thought; they were genuinely creepy and the programme just oozed with menace. Then we got to know the survivors a little better and as soon as that happened every little bit of tension disappeared and the zombies suddenly became almost an afterthought.

I am completely gobsmacked at how this show has seemingly jumped the shark when it wasn't necessary and into a new theme where the most that happens in plot development is nothing. AMC were uninterested in spending money on the series despite the fabulous ratings it got and the second season has been static - on a farm - in a place where the zombies are almost an afterthought. It has become a human survival drama without any drama and is full of absolutely despicable and horrid characters.

I'm watching it now because it can only get better.

Low Gear

I'm of the same mind as Roger about Top Gear and he's only been watching it a couple of years. It is unashamedly one of my guilty pleasures and yet the last few series have been as interesting as studying Jeremy Clarkson's anus hair. It seems to have lost its edge; the madness has gone and been replaced with clever and clever doesn't work anywhere near as much.

It is still massive, but one wonders if now that Hammond and May have bright careers elsewhere, whether we might see the end of the series for a few years before the inevitable 'modern' update with idiots like Vernon Kay, Holly Willoughby and Jimmy Carr present it. Clarkson would undoubtedly produce it.

2012 - 9

The Definition of Bonus

1. A payment or gift added to what is usual or expected, in particular.

2. An amount of money added to wages on a seasonal basis, esp. as a reward for good performance.

Lloyds Bank (40% owned by the taxpayer) made a £3.5billion loss, mainly due to having to pay compensation for miss-selling Payment Protection Insurance. However, the employees of the bank are being paid from a Bonus Fund the sum total of £385million - which, if it was fairly distributed would amount to £4000 per employee.

What I can't understand and I'm sure you will agree, is if the bank lost a massive lot of money why are any bonuses being paid at all? I mean, the definition says it's a reward for good performance. Obviously, had the bank made money we would have been complaining about an even more obscene amount of money being paid to employees (of which the humble teller will get a couple of hundred quid - if they're lucky - and the executives will pocket anything up to 7 figures).

Am I the only person that finds this offensive?

BWAW - SF

'Nuff said, really.

Underpass

I come home at lunchtimes at the moment. I only get 45 minutes and 14 of those minutes are taken with driving to and from home and walking the distance from the car park to the signing back in list. That leaves me with about 30 minutes at home; seeing to the dogs, having a coffee and eating my lunch. It never seems like 30 minutes and probably it isn't because of my fear that I will overrun my break and leave someone in the lurch (and get in trouble).

I've been doing this for about the last four weeks and it breaks up my day and to be completely honest, this preamble seems a bit like scraping the bottom of the barrel for a story, especially if I say that I haven't really had so much as an interesting second on the journeys. Except, not exactly...

My sometime route home takes me up past the eyesore called the Weston Favell Shopping Centre - a thoroughly Seventies structure that has undergone a poorly executed facelift in recent years and seems to have it's own rules as far as cars and driving is concerned; but that's unimportant, except to say that to drive away from it, to get on the A43 Northbound - the way I sometimes go home - you have to go under an underpass that has been there since the mid 1970s when the centre and the corresponding dual carriageway (said A43) was built. It is an access/slip road, goes nowhere but onto the A43 and it isn't designed for pedestrians; there isn't even a path on either side.

On Wednesday, I pulled onto this bit of road and headed down the slope to the bottom of the underpass, before turning back upwards again to join the main road. This bottom part has, over the years, been flooded, had part of the wall fall out and because it is almost a hairpin bend has seen its fair share of accidents - mainly from idiot drivers going too fast. On this particular day there was something sitting in the middle of the road. I only caught a brief look at it and had I not been travelling in excess of 30 mph I might have seen it more clearly; but the, ahem, bottom line was that I definitely thought it was something a bit odd. So at 4.30, when I went home, I went the same route to see if I could see it again. Now I have to stress this wasn't a pressing issue, I just remembered it when I got back in the car.

This time, the shadows and dark obscured my vision just as badly as not getting a good look at it. But the following day, driving home at lunch, there was at least four cars in front of me and going through the underpass was much slower progress and this time I saw it again and my suspicions were confirmed. It was a massive red tinged shit. One that looked like it came from a human arse rather than a small horse or extremely big dog with IBS. It was also, as I said, red and it was standing curled and proud in the middle of the left hand lane.

Now, the thing is, like I said, this isn't a pedestrian walk way, nor is it an obvious dog walking (or even carnivorous horse riding) zone; in fact, because of the nature of the road it is probably a very stupid thing to do - walk on it, let alone let your dog or yourself take a dump there. So by the time I got home, I'd convinced myself that it must be something else and the angle just made it look like a massive 4lb turd.

Drove home tonight and someone had splatted it. It doesn't look like a big proud turd now; it looks like a cow pat after the cow had eaten several vindaloos with a couple of bottles of blood to wash it down.

This has been a pretty shitty story... I make no apologies.

Union Rules

Last Saturday, accompanied by my good friend One El, I went to my first rugby union match as a spectator. It was a brisk day which started with me picking up One, his stepson and grandson, in a torrential downpour. It looked grim, but the weatherman said it would be gone by 3pm and a little before Northampton Saints took the field to play Sale Sharks, the sun came out and we were sitting directly in its line, so while we all needed shades and sun visors, the general ambiance in the stand was improved by some warm late February sun on our faces.

I've seen a lot of rugby, but never this way, and it was good to go and see my adopted team win 24-17. It sounds like a reasonably high scoring game, but it was dominated by kicks, apart from one, rather well played Sale try; but only well played because the Saints defence was at sixes and sevens. The man of the match was Stephen Myler, the Saints back who kicked 21 of the side's 24 points and when you consider his side only really got into Sale's final 22 once in the entire match, it gives even the most uneducated a rough idea that the game was actually quite dull. It was a bruising encounter, played a lot in the middle of the park and featured a lacklustre performance from the team who eventually won.

On the face of it, Sale played the better rugby, but both teams were full of unforced errors and my team capitalised on those to better results. It was anything but a great advert for the game, but I had a really good time. It's strange being in such a passive but committed crowd; the worst insults were directed at their own players for failing to live up to expectations and it really does have a friendly relaxing feel about it rather than the underlying tension you get at a football match. I got the impression that if the Saints had lost, the people would have left less happy, but quite capable of writing it off and getting on with the rest of their lives until the next match. The ironic thing, for me, was that the referee had a stinker; even I saw that, but there was little inquest about it; people were not calling for his crucifixion in the middle of the pitch.

The only unsavoury things about the day were the horrible smells from the food village - a heady mix of hot vinegar, cooked dodgy meats and cheap tomato sauce and the horde of Sale fans at the end of the match who climbed over the advertising hoardings, armed with cutlasses, blunderbusses and shrunken heads on strings, like beads, attacked a group of pensioners on a day trip. The day was saved when Bernie the club mascot, with a bullet belt and an AK47 dropped them all before they could get over the halfway line; he was then surrounded by at least 14 scantily clad supermodels waving lubricant at him... I didn't see any of this, of course, I was too busy trying to avoid the unpleasant smells.

Stuff

I am still currently listening to the new Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters album called Underrated Silence. I am also listening to M83 by M83, Ghoststory by School of Seven Bells; some assorted Pearl Jam and Le Voyage Dans La Lune by Air.

I am still not reading anything in particular.

My car passed its first MOT test.

The weather was gorgeous on Thursday.

I have to go shopping.

2012 - 8

Lumpy Pee

Yeah, I know. I said I wasn't going to talk about my health as much; but this one is worth telling, even if it is a touch gross...

My week has essentially been how I wanted it. I spent an even amount of time between things I needed to do and things I wanted to do and Thursday was going to be a busy day, one which would result in me pondering the slight irony of the situation.

We had the new plumber, George, coming to fix some new taps. I got up at 8am; not particularly a great time when you're on holiday, but it meant I could, with some judicious planning, possibly do all the things I wanted to do. I did my morning ablutions, had my breakfast and George turned up at 8.45. He set about doing his job, interspersed with conversation. As he was coming to the end of the job he turned to me and said, "You feeling okay? You look a bit green."

The thing was, I wasn't feeling very good at all. I needed to go to the toilet quite badly and I started to feel very very sick - as in vomit sick. George disappeared, I sprinted for the toilet and made it just in time. No vomit, just something that resembled the title of this vignette. I sat on the bog and shivered a massive, soul rattling shiver and was doubled up with a stomach spasm. I had the shits.

The thing was, I was due to go for a pint with One El to discuss our rugby arrangements for today and I was also supposed to be meeting my old work colleague Tony. I had this ideas that perhaps we could merge the two together, but Tony's plans put paid to that idea; but by 10.30am I was thinking that I was going to have to cry off and that wasn't an option really - I'd missed meeting with Tony three times since November and I like the guy; I was going to meet him regardless of the bottom problem.

Two more visits to the loo and by midday I was feeling like I'd cleared myself out and didn't feel so... electric. I parked up and walked into town, feeling dodgy but working on the principle that the company, conversation and a half decent pint would put it to the back of my mind. I met with Tony at the Moon on the Square in Northampton, explained to him briefly that I was suffering from an upset tummy and our session might be a little curtailed. Tony got through his pint and I'd barely touched mine, but gamely drank half a pint so he could top it up.

The beer tasted horrible and left an unpleasant after taste. We continued to talk and at 1.50 I started to feel really bad again. I could feel sweat breaking out on my forehead and Tony looked at me with concern. I started to say that perhaps we should call it a day, but I didn't get past 'day' when an eruption from my stomach splashed all over the floor in front of me. ½ a pint, a bowl of porridge, half a cup of coffee and whatever was left in there came hurtling out faster than Superman changing his underpants.

Tony helped me back to my car, where I sat and shivered for ten minutes until I called the wife to tell her what had happened. I got home a little before 2.30; spent another 20 minutes doubled up in agony on the bog before curling up on the sofa and sleeping for best part of the next four hours. We sat and watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I kept dozing through most of it and I crawled into bed by midnight and slept until 5.20am when my bowels needed emptying again. By yesterday afternoon and a trip to Sainsbury's, I was feeling myself again and this morning the only thing I'm bringing up is the residue of the blasted cold I've had for what seems like the last five years.

However, the wife has come down with a cold - itself as rare as rocking horse shit - and that probably means I'll get it as well...

Deaf Head

I've embraced the fact that my hearing is a bit faulty; because it allows me to chuckle at the things I thought I heard and that gives life a slightly surreal aspect.

This morning while emptying the dishwasher, Saturday Kitchen is on in the background showing a clip from an old Rick Stein show. I wasn't paying any attention to it at all until I heard Stein say, "Just squeeze it until it craps." This, as you might understand, intrigued me, so I walked into the lounge, saw that Stein had a prawn in his hand and had obviously said 'squeeze it until it cracks'.

Or did he?

Sporting Chance

Today I go to see my first ever rugby match. Northampton v Sale. It might rain.

Divided Loyalties?

Tomorrow, in the FA Cup 5th round, the team I have supported all my life play the team from the place of my birth. Tottenham vs Stevenage. The match is being played in my home town and expectations will be high because they beat Newcastle last year. The focus will also be on Harry Rednapp, because he's had very few real upsets since he's been in charge of Spurs and this has potential banana skin all over it, especially given Spurs' propensity for taking lesser opponents to lightly.

To say I haven't followed Stevenage over the years would be a lie. They have, deep down, always been my 2nd club, despite leanings towards both Northampton and Rushden and Diamonds. If I follow my own rules of supporting, I should not support Spurs, but the team they face; but my family was always generally Spurs supporters, so that's probably why I support them.

Whatever the score is tomorrow, I can be proud of one; hopefully I can be proud of both.

Out of Time

I've resisted switching over to Timeline. I can't say I've resisted the urge, because there hasn't been one. It looks awful and appears to be about as far away from the original concept of Facebook as is possible without inventing an entirely new concept.

I also appreciate that I'm way outside the demographic that will switch and that eventually it will be switched for me and when that happens I shall have great fun inventing a completely fictitious and downright offensive timeline.

The thing is and I've said this before, but maybe not here, what Facebook needs is to use some of that information it has about us and offer everyone over a certain age the option of trying to be hip and trendy or using the interface in the way that attracted them in the first place. As someone who falls into that list, if I was ever going to be tempted to spend any money anywhere on the net, frivolously, then it's likely to be in an environment I like and trust. Not something that just confuses me.

That said, the BBC has beefed up its Sports web pages or maybe that should be custardised. Not only is a putrid yellow colour, but half of it doesn't work properly and the other half is really difficult to navigate around. It looks literally like a brought up dog's dinner.

What I really liked about the Sportsday and Live Football updates was the basic feel to them; a bit like a cross between a videprinter and ticker tape, now it's all big type; fancy graphics and pointless headlines. It's awful.

And as an extension to a review I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the new-look Guardian. The jury is now in and I don't like it at all. It now feels flimsy, the sports coverage is less, G2 is pompous and pretentious and if I can persuade the wife I'm going to look at an alternative... Problem is there is only one alternative and I know she hates that paper.

Amplified

I really like the band Amplifier. I have become a dedicated follower and have seen them when I can. But, I allowed my fondness for the band to overshadow my new found desire to be shed up collectors' mentality. I bought the special edition of their last album The Octopus despite it not fitting on any of my shelves. It now lies down with the other couple of dozen ridiculously shaped CD packages I've collected over the years.

Now the band are releasing The Octopus 2.0 which is a repackage of the original in an even more pointless package, with lots of extras, a bonus CD, blah blah blah. It costs a lot of money, is limited top 750 and for a split second I was tempted. But why? I have access to everything on the album apart from the extra comicbook artwork, which didn't really electrify me. I should have just bought the jewel case version in the first place, at least it would have fitted on the CD shelves next to the other Amplifier albums.

The other problem with fancy packaged CDs is that after a while, they get lost on shelves and you never play them as often. Lost Cities by Doves is the least played album I have of their - yes, it's a bit naff, but I might have played it more if it had been on the shelf.

The Dream of Retiring When You Are Young

It was always our dream for many years to buy a place on the west coast of Scotland and retire; but then the reality of it started to sink in as we got older.

The midges, the remoteness, the weather, the long nights, the lack of warmth, very few real ale pubs all soon outweighed the good life, excellent roads and healthy living and that idea changed into having enough money to buy somewhere in remotest Dorset - maybe a nice lottery win would help us buy a shed. We still want to retire to the seaside and we'd both like to be able to do it so we're fit enough to enjoy it.

I pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my old age is either going to be riddled with arthritis or chest ailments, but the wife is still a young, attractive and relatively fit 46 year old, so she should get benefits if our dream actually happens.

The problem with retirement is that for the average person it's just not about getting out there and enjoying things; it's about survival, especially as things do go wrong as you get older. I'd retire tomorrow if I could afford it and there was a coastline, some dogs and fine weather to keep me happy!

Back to School Boogie

Was a song by Jon Anderson and Vangelis back in the late 1970s. It is as awful as it sounds; but in this context it is correct. Another 6 weeks span now and Easter and I shall be ticking a column every time one of my colleagues mentions the number of weeks before the next holiday. I have a horrible feeling that I might be just as guilty as the rest by the time the end of March comes around...

2012 - 7

Too Much Time on My Hands

Sitting, doing very little but enjoying the fact that for a week I can do nothing if I so choose, I started to have some strange ideas. Like the sitcom called The Paul Stevens Show, which could be about anything whatsoever, but does not have anyone in it called Paul Stevens, not even by association. I just liked the idea of a show that's title has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

How about Jesus Loves You - a sitcom about the return of the messiah as a 21st century Lothario and sex addict? I mean, if you want to really upset people, he lives in a flat with his multicultural friends David - a Jew, Mohamed - a Muslim and Baldy - a Buddhist. They would also have an insidious landlord, probably an atheist and a neighbour who is a extreme porn actress. What's not to work?

Ignorant Racism

When I was growing up in Canada in the 1960s, my mum and I would, during the spring months, go searching for frogs and toads. I was fascinated by these creatures (and I'm pretty sure my mum had a soft spot for them, considering she would hang over the edges of ponds, with her arms sank to their elbows, searching under banks for all shapes and size of amphibious creatures.

We had a basement - a kind of utility cellar - in most of our houses, but when we lived on Caledon Mountain, we had a basement that was as big as the house I live in now and at the far end was a twin sink - 2 concrete sinks - which my mum used mainly for doing the washing. This was where we would store our catch; sometimes as many as 30 assorted frogs and toads, in a sink, with rocks and enough water to keep them happy. I even had a favourite - a bull frog (a big bugger) called Charlie.

I also used to grow my own frogs. In March or April when the first spawn appeared, I would come home with buckets of the stuff with the intention of having my own frog army. Now you and I have probably known the product of these eggs as tadpoles, but in Canada, especially in the days when casual racism, sexism and non-pc was the norm, tadpoles were called... polywogs.

Oh dear.

I have a relative who, bless his heart, is quite old now, heading towards his 90th year. He has always referred to black people as 'darkies' and there isn't the faintest whiff of intended racism there. And Fishwife works with a black guy who he refers to as 'coloured' all the time! I even pointed out to him that black people find the term really derogatory and his reply was to say that his mate didn't mind. I even pushed it and said, 'has it ever occurred to you that he might feel awkward about telling you not to say it?" It was like I asked him an easy question in Aramaic.

I remember having a conversation about racism with an Indian friend many years ago. Sanjay was a thoroughly westernised Ugandan Asian with parents from Gujarat. He had embraced western and white life so much, the only thing that made him different was the colour of his skin. Being of Indian origin, he grew up calling Pakistanis Pakis, had no problem calling Chinese people chinks and often referred to himself, ironically, as a wog. It was this he based a lot of his argument around...

This was probably the early 90s and PC was not yet the burgeoning presence it is today and he said that racism was largely dead in this country and he meant it. He felt that most of the Asians, Africans, West Indians and Chinese had lived here long enough to have naturalised children, who were gradually embracing western culture more and more and were themselves to blame for the culture of casual racism that remained. Remember this was less than a generation from Love Thy Neighbour where the expressions 'sambo' 'chalky' were rife and were accepted for many years. This was also a generation that had Jim Davidson! Sanjay believed that other races ability to adapt and not be offended by slurs, which in many cases were not meant in any derogatory fashion, was the key to moving on. He believed in a multicultural society and truly believed that by the time he was an old man racism would be reduced to isolated incidents; because every one would grow to tolerate ignorance and ignore it.

However, he was concerned. He felt that too many white people were growing angry about their perceived treatment of other cultures. He said to me, 'the thing that will bugger up race relations in the years to come will be white pinko liberals.' He went on to say that it is easy for people who have no concept of a reality to oppose what they see as an injustice. He also said that his late father, who lived here for 20 years and never learned more than a dozen words of English, used to say that the 'abuse' he got from kids and ignorant idiots was no worse than the kind of thing you would hear on the streets of Mumbai (or Bombay as it was then). Sanjay said his father, who worked for many years in the Indian equivalent of the Merchant Navy before moving to Uganda, claimed that every country in the world is racist and that the UK had dug a big hole for itself with the introduction of the Race Relations Board.

It's easy to say this, but when I was at school we had a number of Muslims; probably many more than most schools at the time and none of the girls were ever covered up; none of the boys ever showed anything but respect and not the hint of misogyny that seems to pervade the young Muslims now prominent on TV and the 'net. I wonder if things would have been different had Sanjay's idea of turning a blind eye to casual racism had remained and grown and eventually either died out or become as inoffensive as the word twit?

I remember talking to a Pole, who had grown up in Ireland, a few years ago; he said that everyone hates everyone else, really, but we have to share the planet and ignorance is often far better than wars. Actually, he was a really fascinating young man, I should tell you about him sometime.

Speaking of Wars

If you trawl through some of the blogs out there you will see there are as many arseholes as opinions, which at least confirms the old adage. I do something that probably has a neologism, but for me if, on a week like this, I find myself with an hour to spare and I don't fancy Bejewelled Blitz or Scrabble, I often click on a friend's blog, then randomly pick one of his links, have a scan or a read depending on the content and then look for another link, and then another, so I eventually get as far away from my initial friend as I can - a bit like the reverse of 6 degrees to Kevin Bacon or whatever that thing is called.

Often I find stuff as boring and banal as my own, occasionally I find things that I struggle to fathom; in that I'm not sure if it's for real or not. On Monday night, the wife was in bed by 10pm and after checking the TV schedules, I saw that the Family Guy episodes on BBC3 and FX were ones I'd already seen and I didn't fancy watching one of the 300 unseen episodes of stuff I've got on disc; so I went on line and did a bit of random blog reading. No, I'm not going to tell you I found some of the most amazing blogs I've ever seen, because I didn't. But as I got closer and closer to the heart of the USA, I noticed a lot of them had a similar theme running through them - they all seem to think that we're heading for a Third World War!

If you look at history for parallels you'll certainly find some, especially if you're a conspiracy theorist; but I have to say that the usual way of clearing up economic messes is to destroy the planet and then rebuild it; it certainly clips a few off the population numbers and lots of things need rebuilding - but usually all the countries who do this borrow money from others and that's where all the problems start.

The scary thing is that it's probably already started if it's going to happen; the elements that is. All we need now is for someone to do something really stupid and all of our current woes will be irrelevant.

Woof

Want cheering up after that rather dreary snippet? How about this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2012/feb/14/underwater-dogs-pictures#/?picture=385913198&index=0 It's best viewed in yesterday's middle pages of The Guardian, as a photo montage, but these pictures, especially the black labrador, the Belgian tervuren and the border collie - if they don't make you chuckle then you have no funny bones!

Stuff

I am currently listening to the new Ulrich Schnauss & Mark Peters album called Underrated Silence.

I am not reading anything.

You know what I watch on TV.

We won £140 at the pub quiz last night - thanks to Roger's nimble fingers (hah!) and for me remembering Gallagher & Lyle.

The wife got absolutely hammered last night.

I'm going to the pub tomorrow.

I said on Saturday, the worst thing about this week is it will go too fast. Look, it's Wednesday already!