Pointless lovers

Being full time parents is bad for one thing.
Sitting on the couch.
Obviously the sitting on the couch phase will pass once baby starts crawling, walking, running, jumping and climbing but at the moment parenting involves a lot of sitting around, bouncing things on knees and watching tv.
In fact tv, as is probably often the case for many parents all over the world, is a saviour. Whilst it is more than wonderful to look down into the big blue eyes of your grateful baby as it sucks on it’s fifth bottle of milk of the day it sometimes, just sometimes, gets a little tiring and you need something else to look at through the sleep deprived blurred vision.
As discussed in a previous blog, my current watch is Vince Gilligan’s excellent ‘Breaking Bad’ which, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t watch with baby Sophie in the same room as it is an 18 certificate. Even though Sophie is not yet aware of the British Board of Film Classification’s rules and regulations, and hopefully the BBFC is not aware of her sitting watching, I’m still a little hesitant to have it on in the same room, even with her disapproving mother out the house.
Hoping that she won’t pay much attention though I still sneak the occasional episode whilst feeding Sophie, (I’m now on season 3!) and then deliberately turn her deckchair so that it faces away from the television in the time following her feed during which she smiles, giggles and wriggles. Usually Sophie goes for a few naps following a good feed, between wriggles, and during the covertly viewed episodes and as long as her first words aren’t methamphetamine or crystal I think we’ll be alright.
In my defence Ka watches her own fair share of inappropriate material whilst I’m out at work. This Morning and Loose Women is just the start. I had last Thursday off and had just poured myself a nice morning cup of tea in the kitchen. Ambling into the living room to see Sophie in her deck chair I immediately stopped in my tracks only to find a bespectacled man on the large television in the corner going over, in great detail, a man’s naked groin area. The man pawed and groped the dangling areas as he spoke to the camera to which I immediately spun Sophie’s deckchair around, away from the tv, before wiping up the coffee table from where I’d spat out a mouthful of tea. As it turned out the bespectacled man was This Morning’s Doctor Chris Steele going over the dangers and warning signs of testicular cancer, and while this is, of course, a very good and just cause to have a bollock naked man on morning television they perhaps should give you a bit of warning if there’s a baby about, not to mention a perfectly good cup of tea.
You wouldn’t get any of that on Breaking Bad, I told a confused looking Sophie, who was blinking, her wee mittened hands wiping at the few spots of tea that had reached her chubby cheeks from across the other end of the room.
After This Morning, Loose Women then comes on. A programme steeped in inappropriate behaviour, full of sexist, lecherous, gaggling women before an audience of easily entertained minions who laugh at the slightest inkling of a funny comment.
Other daytime highlights include the afternoon Channel 5 movie, an American budget television film usually based around some glamorous female experiencing some dreadful accident and having to live with the consequences or some attractive female being framed for a crime she didn’t commit, perhaps murdering her latest lover, and then staying out of jail just long enough to enable her to investigate and seek out the real culprit. Angela Lansbury would have had it solved in 40 minutes, not the hour and a half it takes these glamour pussies on Channel 5.
Ka's also got herself half addicted to another show called Tipping Point. This is a game show, of sorts, presented by every housewives favourite smiling lamppost, Ben Shepard, in which contestants compete to win as many discs as possible on a giant 2p machine. Ka assured me it was good, at the beginning of the first episode I seen. Within five minutes I’d turned the channel to see if Pointless had started yet.
Yes, Pointless!
Is anyone else out there addicted to Pointless? It’s not quite daytime television as such, it’s on before the news, at around five in the evening, but I see it as a great excuse to keep Ka away from the aussie soaps on Channel 5 (yes, those dire afternoon movies do in fact end, at some point) and the other awful itv quiz, The Chase, hosted by the bloke that used to be in Coronation Street. There’s even Pointless Celebrity specials on Saturday evenings now. The popularity of the quiz show has become sky high in the past few years. Both sets of Mum and Dads used to rave about it whenever Ka and myself popped round to visit and we wouldn’t have the faintest idea what they were going on about. Grace would mistakenly text Ka from work, a message meant for Dougie asking how he got on with the latest Pointless question.
Betty and Lindsay watch it on the iPlayer every night making sure it’s recorded everyday. Unbelievably it’s been on since late 2009 and episodes are now being repeated on the Challenge tv channel, unfortunately replacing The Crystal Maze and Blockbuster reruns.
It would seem that the nation have become Pointless lovers.
The two hosts even presented a Bafta the other night?! Judi Dench and George Clooney clapped when they walked on stage?! George Clooney watches Pointless?! Amazing.
Alexander Armstrong and the other big Frankenstein dude must be in that studio for months at a time, standing, or in the Frankenstein man's case, sitting, there listening to all those people struggling to come up with the most obscure, correct, answers possible. The enormously tall Richard Osman (the Frankenstein man), sits at his desk, pen in hand, behind his computer, and rhymes off exactly how pointless all the contestants’ answers are. He’s either amazingly intelligent or just a very fast googler.
Disappointingly, like ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’, which I haven’t watched in years, I’ve never seen a Pointless winner. Well, with the exception of last Saturday’s Celebrity edition when that annoying cricketer with the constantly screwed up eyes and big chin hit the jackpot with his teammate after having to come up with ‘International’ Brit award winners.
Not exactly a hard question. I could have won £2,500 for that. You don’t wouldn’t need to be an egghead to get a few decent pointless answers there.
Eggheads now there’s another one. Boring as hell but strangely compelling. A bunch of regular boring folk, facing off against a bunch of ,apparently, celebrity clever folk. In fact that smug woman who won ‘Who Want to be a Millionaire’ is on that show. Yes, in that case, I did see someone win ‘Millionaire’. Then there was that Army major who cheated. His wife was coughing in the audience or something wasn’t she?
I’d had enough. I need to get out more.
Either that or just get Breaking Bad back on. Or American Horror Story… or Person of Interest… or Ripper Street. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to watch any of them when Sophie is about either.

Say what you see with friends

Quiet as a mouse. Land in jail. Frog in the throat. Scared stiff. Cool cat. The walls have ears.
Colin, Jillian, Ka and myself fought over the remote playing Catchphrase on Saturday night.
As Mr. chips illustrated catchphrases on the television before us we had to go for the remote, before anyone else got to it, as soon as we had a guess, pressing the remote button assigned to our team and yelling the answer.
Strictly speaking, we probably didn't have to yell, the volume of your voice was not really a game requirement of the completely uninteractive DVD, but, as the competition got fiercer, the voices got louder. We reckoned we were safe from upsetting any neighbours though as we'd seen the Singing Postman leave earlier in the day with a bag full of booze and food, probably off to a singing barbeque somewhere. Anyway, as we played, the fake Roy Walker continued to give us the scores, which forever see sawed between the two teams of couples.
That was the most disappointing aspect of the game for me. No Roy Walker. Instead we got some bloke, that kind of sounded like he might have had some kind of vague irish accent at some point in his life. Presumably the irish part. It wasn't even a good impersonation. I had been quite looking forward to hearing the big, irish “Riiiiigggghhht!”, or even the occasional, “It's good, but it's not the one”.
With a couple of plates full of chicken fajitas and with a good few beers, the four of us had great fun on our games flavoured Saturday night in.
Following Catchphrase, I dug the Friends Scene It out from the flat's TARDIS cupboard. The Scene It games require you to circle a board answering questions on the featured movie or tv show, the questions usually accompanied by clips on the accompanying DVD. The picture frame, Jillian, the coffee cup, Colin, the skyscraper, myself and Joey's easy chair, Ka all headed out around the board on the spin of the dice. Ka's easy chair seemed to take things a little too easy though as I'm not sure she left the starting square and, like the other two, have seen every episode of the easy watching American comedy. Jillian won in the end, just beating Colin, who showed an extreme geek knowledge of the show, naming episodes, coming up with the obscure guest star character names and even naming a season just by watching the opening sequence.
I did manage to get at least one question right.
The question was a 'which episode?' and as the other three shouted, “The one when he asked her to marry her”, “The one when he popped her the question”, “The one with the ring!” and other such ridiculous answers.
I relaxed, took my time and then shouted, “The one with the Proposal!”.
I got it right. I wasn't smug about it though. I saved my victory dance for later when I started singing Aloe Blacc.
“I need a dollar, dollar, dollar is what I need, hey hey”.
Or a quid.
That's all a strip of raffle tickets for Friday night's prizes is. A mere quid.
Any more takers? (Ah, you thought I'd forgotten didn't you?!)

Quiz show hosts and lumpy custard

35 years is a long time. Imagine being married for 35 years? Amazing. That's my Mum and Dad, as of last Monday.
35 years married and still together. Even more astounding is that Grace and Dougie, Ka's Mum and Dad, are hitting the big 3-8 this year. All these years and yet both couples still get confused over some of the most basic facts about their lives together. Facts such as the first thing they do when they get out of bed in the morning, their most romantic holiday destination and the mother in law's birthday.
Following the game Tricia hosted on the previous Sunday, I, in my eternal wisdom, thought it would be a great idea to have a Mr & Mrs game following dinner on Friday night. We were in dire need of a soundproof booth as the two Mums and Dads battled it out whilst I did my Nicholas Parsons, asking the questions, like the family quizzes of old (not diving about in suspenders, I might add, which was the last time I seen Nicholas Parsons, playing the narrator in The Rocky Horror Show).
Things got off to a slightly confusing start as I started asking the questions incorrectly, leading the Mums and Dads to think that the two answers they had to give for each question was their answer and what they think their partner would answer about them, rather than simply answering their answer and what they reckon their other half's personal answer would be (if you get what I mean?). I bet Derek Batey never had these kind of problems.
Derek Batey, as I found out by visiting a Mr & Mrs website, was the original presenter of the quiz show on tv, not Parsons. According to the website he once tried to calm an Irish couple before appearing on the show:

Batey: Did you have a good trip over from Ireland?

Irish contestant: Yes, thank you.

Batey: Did you arrive today or did you stay over last night?

Irish contestant: We came across yesterday.
Batey: Did you fly or take the ferry?

Irish contestant: I don't know - me mammy booked the tickets.

I'd always thought it had been Nicholas Parsons that hosted Mr and Mrs but apparently he only presented Sale of the Century (A Sleeper song?). Both of these shows were before my time, or just finishing a few years after I came into the world, so it's no wonder I can't tell one from the other. In fact, looking at these online pics, Derek Batey looks a lot like Nicholas Parsons. Same grins, same silver hair, same suits, same ties.
Could there have been a giant Quiz Show host factory somewhere, perhaps in Dagenham, in the seventies, churning out these cheese grinned, middle aged maestros?
A giant machine, not unlike a steampunk Bertha, sitting in the dark factory innards, a giant conveyer belt running from the machine's mouth like exit. A small army of silver haired, stripey tied, Quiz Show Hosts, straight and tall, only leaping into action after stepping down from the end of the conveyer belt, grinning with a tooth twinkling grin and immediately shouting "Come on down!".
Leslie Crowther, he was another one. The guy in the blazer and glasses who was the father of Thin Lizzy's girlfriend. He'd call audience members down on to the stage with that ecstatic call through his big square Deirdre lenses. What was that one..? The Price is Right! (I looked that one up too...)
And Bullseye of course. Now there was a quiz show. I'm not sure Jim Bowen was produced in the same factory though.
Bullseye reminds me of lumpy custard. It was always broadcast on a Sunday after the footie and we usually got custard with our Sunday pudding. That and Super Gran.
Gawd, Sundays were rubbish.
Together with Paladin the talking lamp I'm surprised I could bear to watch the telly at all. I hated most of those Glen Michael cartoons. You could tell, even at that age, they were all cheap rubbish. Like those cartoons your Mum or Gran used to buy you on VHS from the Poundshop or What Every Women Wants. Fantastic titles such as 'The Book of the Jungle', 'The Beauty Sleeping' or 'White Snow and the Seven Wee Men'.
Anyway, Friday nights Mr and Mrs game went well and played with great enjoyment considering there was no prize.
They certainly deserve a prize for 35 years of marriage. I wonder if Ka will put up with me for 35 years?
Maybe we'll have more of a chance if I stop spending my time writing about Nicholas Parsons, ancient quiz shows and complaining about lumpy custard.

Chock-a-Block man!

Ka and myself were back in the hospital again yesterday for Baby Reid's 20 week scan. 20 weeks already?!
Once again he/she was proving a little restless and not giving the ultrasound specialist much of a view at times, jumping from side to side inside Ka's bump. At one point his, or her, arms and hands were flicking around from side to side as if he was performing a prenatal version of the Blockbuster hand dance.
Ka's is still not feeling any of the internal movements and her bump is still fairly small but only now showing signs of increasing in size as the days go on. Marching, steadily, on towards the New Year. We didn't ask for the gender and we don't want to know. It's a surprise - like a birthday present, only a very costly and life changing one. In fact, I can't think of a more costly and life changing birthday present. Ka's engagement ring comes close but this small growing child could perhaps take the biscuit (as long as it's not the chocolate rocky - they're my favourite - they're chocablock man!)
Colin and Heather were round for dinner last Saturday night and we were discussing the life changing issues that come with children after showing them the ultrasound pics from the scan in week 13. As we spoke the ever important question of 'should you hit your child' sprang up? It dawned on me. The question of if we were going to hit our child or not during disciplinary measures had not even occured to me?! It's quite disconcerting how many of these questions that spring up out of nowhere have not actually occured to me.
As we enjoyed our dinner, including lots of fudge and lemon drizzle cake for pudding, Ka and myself ran some names by our guests for Baby Reid. Colin giving very definite, agreeable nods to some of the names and frowned with moans at others. Unfortunately going through names for babies is hard for the likes of Ka and Colin as both work with youngsters, the majority of which irritate them, to put it politely. One of Ka's favourite phrases is something along the lines of, "oh no, we'll can't call them that. They'll just remind me of 'name' at work and they're a little ***t!".
Not matter what we call Baby Reid, I'm going to try my best in raising him NOT to be a 'little s***!'. Nobody thinks they're own child is a 'little s***' anyway, it's only other people's kids that are.
Baby Reid will be perfect.
Except from the fact he can't sit at peace in his Mummy's tummy, sitting performing the hand jive in the womb. Hey, if it's a boy, we could call him Bob?!