I was writing another piece for Broadcast magazine today.
It's the media industry journal that I wrote this piece for a few weeks ago. This time they wanted to write about the programme for this year's Edinburgh TV Festival, which didn't sound like too promising a subject. I have long suspected that the event is mainly an excuse for TV people to get away from their families on the bank holiday weekend and get drunk and try and get off with each other. A few enquiries amongst those who know pretty much confirmed this was the case.
But then whilst researching the subject (oh yes, I research, I am like a proper journalist, except with a small flicker of hope and love still burning in my heart) I found out that one of the guests at the event is Gunther Von Hagens, that weird bloke in the hat who performed that live autopsy on Channel 4 a few months ago. You might think TV people might be embarrassed about the shameless sensationalism of that televisual event, but no, they are proud enough not only to ask him along to speak, but to bring one of his trademark plasticated corspes with him, to hang in the ceiling of the conference centre. I wrote an amusing piece about how this dead person represented the viewers of TV, essentially commenting that it acted as a warning to people not to complain about the output of our broadcasters. You will have to read Broadcast either this week (or more likely next) to find out what I said. Or you could just wait til I put it up in the downloads section. I wonder how Kipper Williams will choose to illustrate the piece this time round. I can hardly bear the suspense.
Yet it's strange to think of all these TV people getting drunk and discussing how brilliant they and all their programmes are with an actual cadaver floating above them in the rafters. I believe these people give their permission to be turned into works of "art" upon their death (and am in no way suggesting that Gunther Von Hagens prowls graveyards looking for fresh corpses to dig up so that he can plasticate them and hang them from rooftops), but even so I wonder if they were told that they might be used in this way to publicise a TV exectuive beano.
I am considering coating myself in clingfilm and then subsituting my own living body for the dead one and lying very still. I will then be strung up above all the TV executives in the UK. Every now and again, when no-one is looking I could shout in a ghostly voice, "All your TV programmes are rubbish. Especially anything by that bloke from
Bo Selecta or Dom Joly!" No-one would know where the voice was coming from, but they would suspect they were being heckled from beyond the grave.
Then occasionally I would shout "You're all going to Hell", which would be funny and factual.
And occasionally I would do a wee on one of the more pompous delegates.
It's a good plan. I will get on my violin mobile to discuss the logistics of it with someone who might know if it's possible. I suspect the cling-film might kill me, but if I actually did become a corpse then my parody would be all the more effective.
