There’s an old gag that’s been used in pantomimes for years – possibly as far back as the days of Joseph Grimaldi. And because it always gets a laugh, I bet it’ll be around for as long as pantos are. Here it is.
STRAIGHT MAN: How do you manage to do so many stupid things in one day?
COMIC: I get up early!
See, it made you smile, too!
One day recently I encountered several stupid and annoying things that people accept as the norm, purely because they’ve become used to them.
I’ll just share a couple with you . . .
First off, I was watching a breakfast TV journalist giving a report about some Royal matter that was, frankly, so trivial I can’t remember what it was. At ten past six in the morning she was standing outside a seemingly-lifeless Buckingham Palace. As no lights were on upstairs or downstairs, perhaps whatever members of the Royals currently reside there were still fast asleep or had scarpered to Sandringham.
My point is, sending the journalist and a camera crew down to Buck House at the crack of dawn to give her two-minute report to ‘the team back in the studio’, which she’d then repeat at hourly intervals, served no useful purpose.
She might as well have been in the studio and for the handful of viewers who didn’t know what Buck House looks like or had forgotten, the graphics department could have stuck a giant photo of the Royal residence behind her.
These pointless ‘on the spot’ reports from places like Downing Street or The Foreign Office, when it’s still dark and no one’s entering or leaving the premises, have become so normalised, nobody questions the stupidity of them.
Then, I saw a few minutes of a programme that’s apparently been running for some time. Watching “Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon” made me genuinely wonder just how bad a state your life would have to be in to request help from someone who came third on ‘The X Factor’ 17 years ago.
After that, my day didn’t get any better.