This evening, I have been mostly watching old episodes of the Room 101 programme through the internet site YouTube. My favourite has been Spike Milligan’s, although it has worked me into a frenzy of curated internet web-blog sharing so early on that there’s still time for him to ruin it all by railing against one of my dearest passions – anchovies, perhaps.
That is part one; parts two and three should be watched afterwards in succession.
It has ruined my plan for the evening, which was to position myself into a position of understanding exactly why some solvents are more effective than others for polar molecules such as atenolol, but it is no real disaster. The online movie clip is surely worth one half of anyone’s hour.
Meanwhile, on the national alternative entertainment and informative channel BBC Two, a man is listing some things that happened between the years 1970 and 1979. It is often his disembodied voice, which I somehow hate with the fury of ten thousand burning suns, but upon bursting out of the bath I discover that it is also his big face-like face, poking out to just beyond the blurriness of a blurry room, contorting itself to produce the sounds, with his truncated yet jaunty eyebrows growing out of the top of it. Even his surname conjures nightmarish Proustish nightmares concerned with ruined crinkle-cut crisps by the seaside.
And up and down the country, people must be watching, listening. Good for them. I don’t know if you caught any of the trailers – they were quite creative and things, I suppose.
You might point out that I am surely not being forced to watch this under any kind of duress, so have no right to complain. But I tell you, really I am. And what makes the thing all so much worse is that nobody will believe me, just as you aren’t now. Woe unto me, oh, woe unto me.