After many attempts to become rich and famous, I’ve finally formulated a foolproof plan. I’m going to go outside and bang my head against a wall again and again until my IQ drops to about 60, and then I’ll just wait. After about 20 minutes, someone will put me on TV.
I’m sure this is how things work, these days. I am not, as anyone who has ever met me could probably deduce straight off, a Big Brother fan. The only conceivable point of this series that I can see is that it makes idiots famous. Perhaps – and this is strictly conjecture – there’s a government plot to generate renewable energy by hooking up power lines to George Orwell’s grave and then creating this program based loosely his masterwork to make him spin like a turbine. Either way, I don’t care.
I do, however, read celebrity magazines. My mother buys them, and I flick through them if there are interesting pictures of Michael Jackson’s latest deformity. Case in point, I was reading “Now” just, well, now, and this is where the Big Brother connection comes in.
I’m probably the last person to know, but apparently the woman who won the last series of Big Brother was given a presenting job where she said things such as (I wish I was making this up) “Am I the only person who’s never heard of this ‘Clint Eastwood’ ?!” People who are famous, it seems, have some form of lobotomy clause in their contract. Consider Jordan. Or, indeed, Jodie Marsh. Or anyone on Top of the Pops. Or contestants from Fame Academy. The list is endless!
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a little bitter. I, for one, and I daresay you, for another, will probably never be asked to present anything in my life. I do, however, know who Clint Eastwood is. I’ve even seen “Firefox”, and that was bloody awful.
While we’re here, I’m also never going to be on Big Brother. Not because I’m not “good” enough, but just because even I have better things to do than parade around in front of the nation in a house full of wankers. I will also never watch the show. If I wanted to watch boring people sitting in a house and getting on each others’ nerves, I have a family.
Tracing the tide of on-air stupidity back to it’s origins, I think it’s all the fault of kids TV. Some time ago, I became aware that all the presenters on kids TV were there because they weren’t smart enough to talk to grown-ups. This is a vicious circle, because if, like most families, you rely on the TV to raise your kids, you’ll be exposing them to dangerous levels of stupidity. I can clearly remember one of the two interchangeable presenters from Nickelodeon (Moonia and Yiolanda, if we’re going to point fingers) thinking that Bristol was in the Midlands, while I corrected the TV in vain, at the tender age of nine.
So, what’s to be done with the seemingly endless tide of people who are well known and stupid? I propose a cull. We’ll start with Jade Goody, and put her head on a stick on London bridge as an example to others. Then, if anyone is caught polluting the airways with their inane and witless drivel, we’ll put them all in a big house and make them live with each other as punishment, and film it for our own amusement.
…oh.
Well… I still say the Jade Goody thing would be a step in the right direction.