Apathy Sketchpad

Unless you’ve been living in a glass box above the Thames for the last month, you can’t help but have noticed the new film out, namely Calendar Girls. About this time last year, the news, particularly the local news, was full to bursting with the terribly dull news that a group of women had taken their clothes off and posed for a calendar. It’s been done before, of course, and with better looking women, but this one seemed to get all the media attention. This was a very bad thing, although noone realised how bad at the time. We thought it was just annoying, but we assumed that a news story about a calendar would die down after a couple of weeks when nothing vaguely interesting happened. And true to form it did, but then Round Two began. Round Two was perhaps marginally more interesting than Round One had been, but only marginally. In Round Two, the focus shifted to a film that was being made about the calendar. This was more newsworthy, because while many video games, stories, books, and TV series had been translated to the silver screen, this was the first time a calendar had ever made the transition successfully. After a while of silence, Round Three began. Round Three was probably the least interesting phase of the whole pointless operation, and now the focus had shifted to the release and premier of the film.

This sort of news annoys me. It’s like the launch of the Euro: Everybody knew exactly what was going to happen, when it would happen, and where, and therefore the huge banner headline afforded to it by The Times seemed wholly pointless and seemed to imply that the changeover had caught everybody completely off-guard. I for one do not need a newspaper to tell me what entirely predictable and inevitable event has happened, I just need a calendar, and I certainly don’t need a newspaper to tell me about the calendar.

But I suppose all of this beats the alternative, since as I have mentioned the alternative is to live in a glass box above the Thames for a month. This, of course, is the other tedious and pointless story in the news lately, and I actually feel a little dirty contributing to its coverage like this, but anyway…

I am not going to try to answer the moral issues here, I am not going to debate whether or not he’s really going to do it, and I am certainly not going to try to offer any medical insight. I just want to say that it’s a stupid idea. I want to point out that Sky One, thanks to the alleged wonders of digital television have a camera on his box twenty four hours a day, and that this is even more stupid because thanks to his ridiculous obsession with pointless feats of endurance he is temporarily the only person in the country who is physically incapable of doing anything even slightly interesting. It’s like Big Brother without the contestants (or the house). I think I’ll turn off the interactive service, thankyou, and watch the adverts.

The adverts, though, are getting worse. I’m thinking specifically here of Tesco’s new billboard campaign. It started out just being bad. That I could cope with; most adverts are. Now it appears thay have abandoned any attempt to make any kind of sense on any level at all. The one’s I mean are the ones with a picture of a child dressed up, usually recognisably, as a celebrity, and a slogan which just barely connects to it. For example, there’s one with a kid dressed as Craig David, and the slogan reads “low prices on bread rolls, even when he’s a pop idol”. I suppose I should mention, in their defence, that the kid is using two bread rolls in his less than elaborate Craig David disguise, but that doesn’t change the basic facts, which are that being a pop idol has nothing to do with the price of bread, Craig David has nothing to do with Pop Idol (or bread), and nobody’s going to recognise him immediately because he has mercifully refrained from releasing and music for a long time and he was never that distinctive in the first place, especially without the beard.