Sunday 31 January 2010

Cheque, please!

After some recent rejections and failures on the writer front (I'm an aspiring script writer) I've decided to cut loose and live a little by way of shaking off that pesky writer's block. So last night I put on my glad rags and hit the town for a mate's birthday. And, as everyone knows, a birthday party is second only to a houseparty when it comes to copping off with friends-of-friends.

I got chatting to a lovely guy, who of course was already endorsed as not-a-psycho by our mutual friend, and inevitably as the drinks and compliments flowed I did my usual trick of launching myself at him under the pretense of "can you help me carry the drinks back from the bar?" My friends cheered and pointed (although thankfully left their cameras in their bags this time) and gave me their seal of approval. Until one of them uttered the fateful words: "Doesn't he look like you ex?"

Is there are a faster way of turning a girl off than being told that you have just pulled the doppelganger of the bloke you were pretty sure you were over? It's fair to say I lost interest after that. But that's not the worst turn-off I've ever had:

There was the guy who spilt his drink - and then licked it up off the table.

One guy told me I reminded him of his sister shortly before making a pass at me.

One time, mid-snog, the bloke said "I knew I was going to have you as soon as I saw you" - suffice to say, he 'had' nothing more after that.

There was the bloke who had a poster of Beaches on his bedroom wall.

And, worst of all, anyone who says that their favourite programme is 'I'm a Celebrity'.


Best turn-on? The guy who, when I asked him what he liked to read, squirmingly admitted "Batman." A man after my own heart.

Sunday 24 January 2010

Musical TV Moments

Raise your hand if you thought Glee would be a twee High School Musical cash-in. Yep, me too. Raise your hand if you watched it anyway. So did I. Now finally, how happy were you when they threw in their first filthy joke? Who would have thought that what the viewing population was crying out for was an all-singing-all-dancing feel-good teen show with blow job gags?

But it got me thinking about all the great musical moments in television over the years that prove that, maybe, someone should really have thought of doing Glee a long time ago.

So here’s my count down of my top 10 musical moments on TV. The only criteria is that the music must have featured within the action, not just on the soundtrack.

10. Skins – Wild World
Skins series one ended in a classic cliffhanger, with everything coming to a head in the last five minutes and Tony getting hit by a truck for good measure. Then, as you’re preparing for the credits to roll, the actors instead turn to camera and start singing along to Cat Steven’s Wild World – including Tony, bleeding on the curb. A classic example of Skins doing what it does best: steering clear of convention.

9. Six Feet Under – Claire hates office work
In series five of Six Feet Under, artist Claire found herself trapped in a creatively-sapping admin job that, worst of all, required her to wear tights. She dealt with it by climbing onto her desk and lamenting panty hose via song: ‘You Ride Up My Thighs’ to the tune of ‘You Light Up My Life’. It’s a fantasy sequence, of course. But who hasn’t wished they could liven up the office with some song and dance?

8. Scrubs – Guy Love
Scrubs has always loved a good musical interlude so it was inevitable that they would do a musical episode. And it was surprisingly good, with showstoppers including the poo song (explaining why doctors always ask for a stool sample), but the highlight was JD and Turk putting their enduring bromance to music.

7. Gavin and Stacey – American Boy
James Cordon and Ruth Jones obviously love a singsong, and they put some sort of musical moment into every episode, but the most impressive has to be Smithy and sister Rudy performing the rap from American Boy, complete with dance moves and harmonising.

6. Friends – Copacabana
As series two draws to a close, Rachel realises that there isn’t a single thing she can do to make Barry’s wedding even more humiliating for her. So she gets on stage and sings Barry Manilow’s Copacabana. There’s something gloriously triumphant about it.

5. Glee – Push It
This was the moment that you realised that Glee was not what you thought it was. The goodie-two-shoes of the glee club decides that sex sells, so she gets the club to perform Salt ‘n Pepper’s Push It at the school assembly. Jaw-droppingly inappropriate and absolutely hilarious. Altogether now: “Holla!”

4. Buffy – It Got the Mustard Out!
Once More With Feeling was the Buffy episode that began the fad for musical episodes in TV, and Glee has even acknowledged its debt to Joss Whedon by handing him the director reins for an upcoming episode. The best bit about Buffy’s extravaganza was the everyday things being put into song – like a man celebrating the good work of his dry cleaners, and a woman arguing with a traffic warden (“This isn’t right, it isn’t fair/There was no parking anywhere”).

3. The Simpsons – See My Vest
Far and away the greatest of The Simpsons’ songs, as Monty Burns indulges his love of all things fur: “Like my loafers/Former gofers/Either that, or skin my chauffeurs.” All to the cheerful tune of Be My Guest. Even Bart is left nodding his head and humming along afterwards.

2. This Life – ‘Love is in the Air’
What a way to end a series. The gang are all at Miles’ wedding reception, and in great TV fashion it’s all going horribly wrong. Rachel has revealed Milly’s affair, Egg is sobbing in a toilet and as Love is in the Air reaches its chorus Milly storms across the dance floor and punches the scheming Rachel in the face. In the words of late-arrival Warren: “Outstanding”.

1. Queer As Folk – It’s Raining Men
What began as a series about gay men having a laugh gradually became an affecting tale of unrequited love between best friends. Vince and Stuart loved each other, bickered, tried to stay apart for their own good, but in the end they couldn’t resist. So instead they made a run for the podium and danced joyously to It’s Raining Men. Who wasn’t grinning for a full 24 hours after seeing that?

Thursday 7 January 2010

TV: Keeping Me Sane Since 1999

I like TV. Some might say too much. But depending on my mood, TV has various functions in my life. There's the social function, where I will watch The X Factor at a mates house, gossip all the way through it and only pay attention to heckle talentless pretty boys. There's the bonding function, as seen in the whole separate language my Dad and I have, derived from the world of our favourite TV. There's the time-filling function, valuable for staving off boredom or being temped to do something useful, like housework. And, of course, it's an addiction. I just have to tune in and find out what happens next, even with something like Heroes, which, let's face it, is basically pants these days.

But for me TV fulfills another function - it keeps me sane. When I have a problem that just can't be fixed no matter how much I think about it, I turn to box sets. Classic escapism. Okay, this probably isn't to be recommended when you have a problem that actually can be fixed. I once spent two weeks watching Battlestar Galactica in a Scarlett O'Hara-esque attempt to think about my problems at a later date, only to solve them all in five minutes flat when I turned my attention to them. Still, time spent following the fleet is never time wasted.

But whenever things are getting on top of me, there's nothing like TV to switch my brain to calm mode. When my cat was run over the day before my GCSEs started (oh, many years ago), Numfar's Dance of Shame on Angel cleared my head and let me focus on revision again. And this week, with my Grandma in hospital and 20 foot of snow and a broken trainline between me and her, I resorted to Doctor Who. Gran is now on the mend, and I felt much better for a week of being lulled to sleep with dreams of the lovely David Tennant rather than nightmares about death and mortality.

So, have I found a savvy way of coping with life, or am I just avoiding the issue? Maybe I'm just a cold fish and other people can't forget family illnesses with one buzz of a sonic screwdriver. Am I alone in utilising this coping method? It's cheaper than therapy, if nothing else. Although at uni, repressed exam fears and an overdose of Carnivale led to nightmares of being chased by Clancy Brown. Maybe I need to be limited to two doses of escapism a day.