Apathy Sketchpad

No. No. I realise it sounded like “See you next week, Tracy,” but what I actually meant to say was “I won’t see you again because I am deliberately avoiding you.” You are not my friend. I see you more as a sort of natural sattelite, only a scary one that can reach me. Please come back to reality and get over it.

And yesterday, when I said “oh, that computer’s just bloody awkward,” I think I phrased it badly. What I was trying to say was that the computer is fne and you have filled it with crap. Frankly, I wouldn’t be able to run while I was doing all those things.

And when I said “Well, I agree with that,” I missed out a bit. You were talking too much, and that was the one thing you said that I agree with. Your arguments are all wrong. You live in a fantasy world and I’m too afraid of you to mention this at the time.

And no, for the love of God you cannot phone a bloody friend! You are not a guest on Who Wants To be A Millionaire?. I am not Chris Tarrant. You are not sitting in the Famous Chair, and I am not asking you for a final answer (which is another joke you like to make and I want to shoot you for). I don’t know if you noticed when I asked you the terribly taxing question, but I didn’t give you four options. You didn’t go 50:50 and the computer didn’t take away two wrong answers and leave you with the right answer and the one remaining wrong answer. There is no studio audience, there are no scanning blue studio lights, and there are no cameras. Clearly nobody could think this question was worth £16,000. This leaves the possibility that you are making what you consider a clever joke. This is worrying, because the programme hasn’t been fresh or original in at least three years. People have been asking to phone their friends since about an hour after the first show went out, and most of them now face the rather large technical block that they haven’t actually got any friends because they kept asking if they could phone them all the bloody time. It is my sad duty to inform you that if you still attempt to make this joke, you have probably alienated most of your friends. Stop now.

It’s worse than that, though. Tonight I heard someone make this joke on BBC Four. BBC Four! This is their so-called intellectual* channel, and their doing Who Wants To be A Millionaire? jokes. Of course, it doesnt matter much, since it was on Mind Games, but I still feel I should object.

Mind Games, for those of you who do not watch minority digital channels at 2AM, is a quiz show consisting almost exclusively of cheap puzzles. Some of them you’ll have seen before. Others are just easy. Others still are actually unsolvable, or just plain rediculous. To cap it all, the show is rigged. Each quesion is worth two points, and the scoring system is very complex:

1. Ask a question to team captain Kathy Sykes.
2. Allow her to say enough to give away the full answer.
3. “Alright, you haven’t got it, I’m passing it over.”
4. Allow opposing captain, Michael Rosen, to repeat what Kathy said.
5. Award him two points.
6. Ask a question to team captain Michael Rosen.
7. Prompt him until he is herded into the answer.
8. Award him two points.
9. Repeat.

Of course, some questions cannot be passed over, because they are set by the other team, so they clearly already know the answer. These questions are still rigged. This is what happened on tonight’s show:

Question one, to Michael’s team: A sign was made to show the new year, for use in the celebration thereof. It was shown upside-down, but nobody noticed. What year was it made?

Rosen immediately shouted ‘1961′, which is wrong. The sign read ‘1961′ so it must have been made in 1960. (This man is a regular team captain on a lateral thinking programme on BBC Four and for the whole show he was persistantly outwitted by the bloke from Top Gear.) He was awarded one point out of the two.

Question two, to Kathy’s team: A piece of string is hanging up behind a screen. How long is it?

After about a minute of vain guesswork, it emerged that they were allowed to actually touch the string, which had been placed at the opposite side of the studio from them. The ‘correct’ solution wsa to swing the string with a pen on the end and use known pendulum equations to deduce its length. I hope you have all spotted that a swinging string always points to its end and it is therefore very easy to work out the length. Well done. You have outwitted the entire panel of Mind Games.