A lot of my pals recently went to see that Famous and Fearless show, where celebrities (Three out of ten I recognised, so by ‘celebrity’ show standards it was a veritable smorgasbord of stellar names) try various daft sports and stunts. No-one, literally no-one watched it on TV; they all went to see it live. The reasoning was ‘it looked shit on TV, but the live one’s got to be better, right?’
Well, no. The TV version is pretty much the same deal, except there’s better camera angles, no waiting in line, no fat fuck directly in your line of vision and you can change channel whenever it gets too boring. Which is often.
I’m not saying everything’s better on TV. I’m nearly constantly bummed out over not getting to see Jets to Brazil before they disbanded, which is fair play because I genuinely love Jets to Brazil’s brand of pure audio Branston. Who can honestly say they give a flying fuck about a crappy stunt show where the most you can hope for is Jenny Frost getting in a car wreck and having to present the next series of Snog, Marry, Avoid? as a quadriplegic?
It’s a testimony to my loathing of any word the characters of Harry Potter utter that ‘snog’ just got called out by my spellchecker in 2011.
Anyway, back to today’s topic, TV. Rather, the dire state of current programming. Nearly everything seems to be in that queasy hinterland where it’s shit, but not shit enough to be entertaining. With this in mind, I’ve come up with a few new shows that people would appreciate more and/or would get me hauled in front of an international court and tried for war crimes.
1)Every Time I Dine. A reality/food/rockumentary crossover that follows Every Time I Die as they barbecue their way through various uncompromising locations (The Canadian backwoods, the Great Australian Desert, Glasgow). Yes, I pretty much only did it for the title. For added shits and giggles, they must first catch and kill whatever they’re eating, Ray Mears style. Gasp as the boys are forced to murder a hobo because they ran out of chicken! Not only would this show be the best thing MTV (Or Viva. Or I don’t give a shit what you call yourself) has ever screened, but it would clear up the age-old question—Andy Williams versus a fully grown grizzly bear, who’s harder? My money’s on Williams.
2)Avoid! Avoid! Avoid! A Snog, Marry, Avoid? spin-off. Instead of making-over (You will never, under any circumstance, catch me saying ‘make-under’. I just will not do it) slags and gothy freaks, they just get sat in a chair with a camera on their face while the public’s opinion of them is repeated in a dull monotone by a computer. At the end of the show, they’re led outside. Silence is maintained throughout the credits until a single gunshot rings out.
3)Geronimo. A show in which people jump from increasingly tall heights to win a cash prize. Last one alive is the winner, who is then thrown off so the network doesn’t have to pay. The cash then rolls over, making a greater incentive for next week’s lemmings. The fact that I imagine this one doing the best out of all my ideas says a lot about the state of the nation.
4)Your Sketch Shows are Bad and You Should Feel Bad. A Silent, thirty-second clip of me beating Matt Lucas and David Walliams with a golf club. Pure visual Branston.
5)Graduates. A hilarious mock-documentary, which plays like a hybrid of Spaced and The Office. The main character is Jimmy, who lives with a couple of other young professionals in a flat. He works in a generic office environment where it’s never actually made clear what he does. The action is fifty percent him with his young-guns-go-for-it pals doing young professional leisure activities, and fifty percent people in his office treating him like he’s a mental case. At the end of the series, he kills himself and it becomes apparent that he had no young professional flatmates and was, in fact, schizophrenic.
So, that’s how I’d improve television for the average pleb. While most of them are reality TV shows, I should point out that you could make TV better by lowering the quality until it’s so shitty and bleak it’s funny. That’s the stage we’re at. Although, it must be said that some of my shows would be excellent for getting rid of the kind of people who enjoy and/or go on reality TV, so maybe viewing figures would suffer. Culling the nation’s cunts would be worth it, though.
Holding out for a reality/snuff/genocide crossover,
Nick
Showing posts with label misanthropy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misanthropy. Show all posts
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Sunday, 9 January 2011
What Your To-Do List Says About You
This edition of Woe was meant to be something whimsical and silly in which I propose bleak-yet-comedic TV shows that would never (and probably should never) be made, but would improve the state of current programming immensely. However, I’ve been feeling a bit home truth-y, so I decided to instead address something many people are familiar with; the numb, crushing horror of the to-do list.
To-do lists come in many sizes, and can range from being of little or no consequence to completely fucking crucial. The best ones take place over a relatively short period of time (more on that later), and are generally comprised of tasks the to-do list writer should, erm, do.
The real point of a to-do list is to prioritise chores the list writer would rather be bludgeoned to death with their own severed legs than do. That is to say, if there’s anything on the to-do list that doesn’t have to be done, the author of the to-do list has problems.
For example, say the creator of the list writes a snarky blog in their spare time. If the blogger’s to-do list looks like this;
1)Get milk
2)Do washing up
3)Update blog
4)Wash car
That person shouldn’t be blogging, because they view it as a chore. Similarly, if you include ‘work on novel’ in your to-do list, it’s unlikely that the novel will ever be finished. And if it gets finished, it will suck.
As I said earlier, the best to-do lists are over a short period of time. The classic ‘things to do today’ is a personal favourite, but a day can be a bit short. If you’re the type who loses sleep over a list of tasks you failed to complete on time (despite the tasks set and time allocated matters to you and you alone), it’s probably better to go for the more roomy ‘things to do this week’, then add some sub-lists if something can only be done on Tuesday. Tuesday is a good day to do things in town, because Tuesday means the Meatball Marinara is the Sub of the Day.
Lists that last longer than that—culminating in the dreaded ‘things to do in my life’—are just naïve. If you want to plan anything in any detail, there’s no chance you’ll be able to last beyond a fortnight. How do you know what’s going to be going on next month? Will you need to get some bread this exact day next year?
I once found a lifelong to-do list belonging to a lad I knew in high school. This sixteen year-old boy had written—and ticked off—‘find true love’, which I think sums up the kind of people who make to-do lists for life pretty well.
There’s also the danger of getting into metaphysical and philosophical stuff if you make a to-do list for life. I can guarantee that, if you’ve ever made a to-do list with ‘discover meaning of life’ on it, you’ll realise the meaning of life is to suffer. How do I know this? Because you’ll uncover this list that you wrote as an optimistic child many years later, probably shortly after a bereavement, and realise how much of a crushing, brutally complete disappointment you are to your younger self.
But short-term listers aren’t free from making stupid mistakes, either. I’m not going to harp on about never knowing when you’ll get hit by a bus, but I’ll say this: Never, ever write in something cheerful, not even as a treat for cleaning your septic tank. Why? Because someone else might see your list. Imagine, dear reader, you came across this;
1)Change light bulbs in kitchen
2)Have a biscuit :)
3)Walk dog
Just sad, isn’t it? The poor fuck who wrote this list needs to make time in their lives to enjoy a biscuit. And they even drew a little smiley face to remind them it’s an enjoyable thing! Their head must be a bleak wasteland, populated only by overbearing parents and unfaithful ex-lovers.
It’s not a good idea to include anything too mundane either. Consider if someone found a to-do list in which you wrote ‘cut fingernails’. They’d think you’re the sort of person who needs to be reminded in list form that your fingernails are too long. In short, they’d file you under ‘stupid motherfucker’ for life.
Of course, you may not care what other people think about you. If that’s the case, why did you just read an article titled What Your To-Do List Says About You, you retard?
Now for a lovely biscuit :)
Nick
To-do lists come in many sizes, and can range from being of little or no consequence to completely fucking crucial. The best ones take place over a relatively short period of time (more on that later), and are generally comprised of tasks the to-do list writer should, erm, do.
The real point of a to-do list is to prioritise chores the list writer would rather be bludgeoned to death with their own severed legs than do. That is to say, if there’s anything on the to-do list that doesn’t have to be done, the author of the to-do list has problems.
For example, say the creator of the list writes a snarky blog in their spare time. If the blogger’s to-do list looks like this;
1)Get milk
2)Do washing up
3)Update blog
4)Wash car
That person shouldn’t be blogging, because they view it as a chore. Similarly, if you include ‘work on novel’ in your to-do list, it’s unlikely that the novel will ever be finished. And if it gets finished, it will suck.
As I said earlier, the best to-do lists are over a short period of time. The classic ‘things to do today’ is a personal favourite, but a day can be a bit short. If you’re the type who loses sleep over a list of tasks you failed to complete on time (despite the tasks set and time allocated matters to you and you alone), it’s probably better to go for the more roomy ‘things to do this week’, then add some sub-lists if something can only be done on Tuesday. Tuesday is a good day to do things in town, because Tuesday means the Meatball Marinara is the Sub of the Day.
Lists that last longer than that—culminating in the dreaded ‘things to do in my life’—are just naïve. If you want to plan anything in any detail, there’s no chance you’ll be able to last beyond a fortnight. How do you know what’s going to be going on next month? Will you need to get some bread this exact day next year?
I once found a lifelong to-do list belonging to a lad I knew in high school. This sixteen year-old boy had written—and ticked off—‘find true love’, which I think sums up the kind of people who make to-do lists for life pretty well.
There’s also the danger of getting into metaphysical and philosophical stuff if you make a to-do list for life. I can guarantee that, if you’ve ever made a to-do list with ‘discover meaning of life’ on it, you’ll realise the meaning of life is to suffer. How do I know this? Because you’ll uncover this list that you wrote as an optimistic child many years later, probably shortly after a bereavement, and realise how much of a crushing, brutally complete disappointment you are to your younger self.
But short-term listers aren’t free from making stupid mistakes, either. I’m not going to harp on about never knowing when you’ll get hit by a bus, but I’ll say this: Never, ever write in something cheerful, not even as a treat for cleaning your septic tank. Why? Because someone else might see your list. Imagine, dear reader, you came across this;
1)Change light bulbs in kitchen
2)Have a biscuit :)
3)Walk dog
Just sad, isn’t it? The poor fuck who wrote this list needs to make time in their lives to enjoy a biscuit. And they even drew a little smiley face to remind them it’s an enjoyable thing! Their head must be a bleak wasteland, populated only by overbearing parents and unfaithful ex-lovers.
It’s not a good idea to include anything too mundane either. Consider if someone found a to-do list in which you wrote ‘cut fingernails’. They’d think you’re the sort of person who needs to be reminded in list form that your fingernails are too long. In short, they’d file you under ‘stupid motherfucker’ for life.
Of course, you may not care what other people think about you. If that’s the case, why did you just read an article titled What Your To-Do List Says About You, you retard?
Now for a lovely biscuit :)
Nick
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