I’m fine now, really. The nightmares are receding, the rash is responding to aromatherapy and I’ve cut back the shrink to once a day. It was a near thing just before Easter, however, watching all that shite on the telly and not having a gun. My Uncle Frank would have known what to do; he was the one who shot the telly to demonstrate the principle of implosion to his kids, but I think really it was because he was fed up with I Love Lucy.
My old dad used to shout and thump the floor with his walking stick, which doubled as a remote control after he and Mum got the new telly with push-button controls instead of those circular dials. It channelled his energies into something more creative, because he got quite nifty with it: even though the stick’s black rubber base was wider than the buttons, he used to sort of angle the edge of it and push. Worked a treat, but when Mum got her own walking stick I regret to say that there were occasional spats, involving much combative poking and prodding of the set, which was starting to lose all the chrome edging from the buttons. Dad used to object to sex on the screen, being a good old-fashioned Puritan. Also rock music and poncy religious commentators who weren’t Catholics. When his favourite wildlife documentaries started to get all jiggy he was devastated, seeing his beloved animals turned into porn stars. ‘I turned on that one about zebras’, he said, ‘and I was bloody disgusted. Can’t the buggers give the poor beasts a bit of privacy?’ Mum would oppose him on general principle, and sometimes we had to distract them with tea and buns.
I felt I was channelling Dad when I watched that damned silly Henry VIII thing on the ABC, with Henry as an East-Ender bovver boy. And although I’m not what anyone would call a historian or an authentic Early Music Fascist, the use of Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ as the end credits rolled was about as meaningful as using ‘Like A Virgin.’ Given its total lack of historical cred, it was a surprise and a relief to find no hobbits had been added, but that’s about all I can say in favour of it. Where was David Starkey when we needed him?
The same goes for those unspeakably crude and silly cod-documentaries Who