6697/19617
Last injection today, which is a shame because my wife has got pretty good at it. None of the bone aching (or "exploding", according to one correspondent) side effects from the jabs, but another afternoon of fatigue, which made me question my decision to attempt a Twitch of Fun tonight. I questioned it, but I still did it. I needed to talk to my ball. I did over an hour and again the performance lifted me out of the stupor that I started the recording in. It will be out as a podcast and on youtube on Friday.
My afternoons in bed over the last month, feeling too knackered to do anything worthwhile, have led me to watch a lot of afternoon quiz shows. Which I am obviously very happy about. Though the adverts that accompany them make it very clear that this is a pursuit of the more elderly viewer. I am cool with that. I am officially moving into that demographic and to be honest I think I've always had the heart of an old person anyway. I was always conscious of risk and wanted to be in bed early and preferred playing Scrabble to taking nose cocaines. One of the (more minor) reasons that I was upset that I might be about to die in my fifties is that I'd really been looking forward to finally having my age match my personality and spend all day doing puzzles and watching quiz shows (as well as outliving all my contemporaries so that I could rewrite comedy history in my favour).
This little month long vacation in the land of the old has been great therefore. One day I will think up my own best selling quiz format, but for now I will just watch all the successful ones and wonder if I'll ever rock up on the celebrity version (to be fair, I've done most of them now).
To give you an idea of how skewed towards the elderly quiz shows are, the sponsor of ITV afternoon quiz shows is a company called Willowbrook, who make reclining chairs. I am not yet at the stage where I am thinking that they look like an attractive product, but it can't be far away. But the Willowbrook ads are the only thing that spoil my afternoon viewing, due to the weird, unsettling and quite scary music that accompanies them. It actually makes me feel a little bit queasy to hear it, which is quite an achievement for music.
You can listen to it here (if you dare). There's just something slightly off about it. It's too slow, and it's somehow major and minor at same time, like a jingle from a dystopian future where evil has triumphed. It's (I'm guessing) meant to be gentle and reassuring, but it subverts expectation and is out by a demi-semi-tone, like the people in the ads are so happy with themselves they're on the edge of breakdown. I don't know who wrote it and I don't want to disparage them, but I think this tune comes from a place of dark, dark evil. History will prove me correct when the composer's cellar is found to be full of the skulls of old people. There is a rumour that anyone who listens to it will die in the next ten years. And due to the age of the people watching the channel at that time, it's hard to ascertain if that's just a coincidence.
It's a bold advertising stratagem form Ian Willowbrook. He haunts me and my dreams. The whole thing just makes me want to have a long and comfortable sit down. Oh well played Ian Willowbrook. Well played.
