Thursday 12 July 2007

‘sorry’, he said, ‘for
not ringing. it’s family.’
then a pause. ‘love you.’


I love getting post. Today it was ‘Poetry Wales’ with an audio cassette of Anglo-Welsh poetry, and my subscription copy of ‘Anon’, a marvellous poetry magazine which judges its submissions anonymously so that work is not accepted for publication on the basis of fame or notoriety.
I can highly recommend this magazine. The poetry is of a very high standard and is interspersed with articles of relevance to the Poetry community (if indeed, there is such a beast).
My favourite poem from the last issue was called The Kipper and The Corpse (I regret that I do not recall the name of the poet) and was a tribute to the episode of ‘Fawlty Towers’ where Basil found one of the guests dead, and spent the rest of the episode attempting to hide the fact from his other paying customers.
It gave me faith that Poetry is indeed universal and can address any subject, a concept which was never conveyed to us when we sat through English Literature lessons, baffled by Chaucer and Wordsworth whose work, excellent though it now seems in retrospect, did not inspire us to express our own lives through poetry in a contemporary manner.
I seem to have come over all pretentious, so I’ll move swiftly on and express my continuing disappointment with this year’s Big Brother.
I am, it has to be said, a cynical sort of bloke, and when Big Brother announced that this week was Fake Week, I began to smell a rat. It appears there will be no eviction this week. The housemates think there will be an eviction, but the evictee (either the odious Charley, or her gormless and nasally monotonic friend, Nicky) will be evicted, interviewed, and returned to the House.
For me, this is just another ploy on the part of Big Brother to keep Charley in the House, after having fixed the nominations last week to ensure she escaped the public vote.
After eight years, Big Brother has evolved into something other than it was when it began.
The first series, which featured contestants who could at least conjure up a vocabulary, and were more than two years out of puberty, was compulsive viewing. We were glued to the daily updates and the dramas which arose naturally out of the sheer boredom of the experience. That was exciting.
Now, everything seems stage-managed, and the contestants chosen for their stupidity or freak value. Yes, Brian is very sweet, but shouldn’t we be ashamed that someone born and raised in this country can reach the age of twenty and not know who Shakespeare is?
I see no hope for this series, but would like Channel 4 or Endemol to appoint new producers for the next series. Why not have a Mensa Members’ House, or two teenagers and twelve ASBO pensioners? Everyone over 40?
I can guarantee that any of those options would be far more entertaining than this year’s relentless machine-gun gob name-dropping, ranting and arguing over toast and bananas.