Da Po'leese. (aka Monkey Tennis)

Early Monday morning I abandoned Stella to the mercy of Rosie, and embarked upon a transition year outdoor pursuits trip to Donegal. No, I haven't landed a teaching job, I just provide cheap, grateful labour to the secondary school I last taught in. Not many teachers want to go on these sort of trips, but I'll take anything right now. I went on much the same trip last year, only to Killary Harbour. But there'll be divil a cute-faced German girl sniffing around this time. I'm engaged these days, and the women can smell it off you sooner than you'd get a chance to even drop the casualest reference to a fiancée into a sentence. Which is handy, because I don't get to wear the early warning system that the ladies so usefully sport on their left ring finger. I kinda wanted to have an engagement ring too, but was told that would be both lame and gay. It would be. And Rosie's jeweller sister is refusing to make our wedding bands until pretty close to the day itself because she reckons I would immediately start trying to wear mine. The perceptive bitch.

But this all academic right now, my friends, because what I wish to alert you all too is something the ginger foghorn of a kid sitting two rows back from me was anxious to be back home in time for on Friday night. It's Traffic Blues, Ireland's very own answer to Police, Camera, Action! and Road Wars. But there's little in the way of drugs, shooting and helicopter chases. Instead, you've got Garda Gerry ordering a Nigerian woman to pick her chewing gum up off the ground while he breathlessly, needlessly recounts the story to the camera over a dramatic soundtrack that just screams "check the fuck out of how intense this shit is!" Or another occasion where the boys in blue board an empty schoolbus, leaving the driver trembling in their wake as they admonish him with "Five of those seatbelts are broken, would you maybe get them fixed sometime, like?"

The only shocking thing about this show is how RTÉ managed to dream this up before TV3.

Update: A quick check on Youtube shows me that this yoke's been running for nearly a year now. Why the fuck did no-one tell me? I thought I was going to blow your minds with this shit! Clearly I'm way too cool to be sitting in watching telly of a Friday evening.

Learn to be real

OK, while I'm in the mood for short wee posts with no particular merit to them, check this out.

Just ask yourself these questions:



"Are You Ready For Reality TV?
Every week thousands of people audition for Reality TV shows, the competition is fierce and the odds of making it past the first round of submissions are slim.
Do you know what it takes to get noticed?
And if you are fortunate enough to be called in, will you be able handle the pressure of this once in a lifetime opportunity?"

If you think the answer to any of these questions might just be 'no', then get yourself over to the New York Reality TV School right away and learn how to turn yourself into the kind of personality who will succeed on reality TV and make it through 'casting'.

Surely 'reality TV' and 'casting' in the same sentence ought to be a massive oxymoron.

I think I might leave the world now.

Give up on TV for the summer

About an hour and a half before this monstrosity swings into action for another year, I'm launching a quick pre-emptive strike on the most horrible cultural phenomenon to evolve during my lifetime: Big Brother.
I remember watching some of the first ever series in 2000 (I think it was then) and finding it interesting in a kind of socio-scientific way. I wondered how long people would really tolerate looking at a load of strangers sitting around a house doing very little, but it was mildly entertaining in a voyeuristic kind of way. The people who featured in that series could not have predicted how successful the show would become and the fame, wanted or unwanted, that it would bring to their lives.
Now, the show is a fast-track to celebrity status, thankfully short and sweet for most of them. It attracts massively deluded folks who believe that their "like, totally fackin' mental" personalities will endear them to the British public. mostly it leaves them derided, but still able to make a quick few grand out of it, even if they are voted off early. I wonder where most of these people end up if they fail to make a living from TV presenting, column-writing or "getting their baps out for the lads" in Nuts and Zoo. Are there support groups for these people?
So, before this series' line-up is unveiled to those waiting with baited breath, a quick guess at how the contestants will roughly be made up:
At least two gay guys, preferably one of them a cross-dresser. (I have absolutely no problem with this, I just feel that gay people are probably the most exploited group on this show.)

A couple of kerrrr-razy chicks, one from Essex and one or two more with regional accents that could make your ears bleed.

At least one lager-lout, football hooligan type, likely to come to blows with another guy in there.

Two people who hail from Scotland, Wales, Ireland or N. Ireland. This guarantees good viewing figures and plenty of those money-making phone votes coming in from all those patriotic Celts.

Someone with a good university education and slightly upper-class accent. This person will be cast as the posh snob and their contribution will be edited thus, regardless of what they do. If its a guy then lager-lout will talk behing his back about how he's "gonna fackin' nut 'im" but will fail to do so for fear that the upper-class twit may have played rugby.

There will be fights, there will be live stripping, there will hopefully be someone saying fuck or bugger on the eviction show. There will be tears, hard-luck stories (someone is always doing it for a sick relative), 'love' stories, and often the scenario of two mainstream channels simultaneously showing the same person, asleep, for hours on end.

I will not watch it but somehow I will be aware of these things, and will most likely know the names of at least 4 contestants by this time next week. I will hate myself for it and will desperately try to fill my time with books, walks and maybe even work.

Probably not though, I'm a teacher.