Author: damienowens

There were so many hilarious moments – and candidates – in the recent Irish Presidential campaign that it’s hard to pick just one comedy highlight. But, gun to my head, I’d have to go with this astounding broadcast from Gay Mitchell. The first ten or so times I watched it, I genuinely thought it was a joke. It looks like someone gave the production gig to their fourteen year-old nephew who had a new MacBook and an afternoon off. The reader will have his or her own favourite moments but just for grins, I’ve added mine below.

25 seconds: Gay is almost run over. Look how the car’s weight shifts as its driver impatiently taps the brakes. There might as well be a Thinks Cloud over it saying ‘GET OFF THE FUCKING ROAD’.

30 seconds: Gay has an unrealistic meeting with a youth. And you just know that’s how the director referred to the lad – ‘Bring on the youth! Push it towards Gay!’

34 seconds: Gay seems to be talking to himself in the mirror. To put it at its mildest, this does not inspire confidence.

40 seconds: Gay loses focus entirely. It’s hard to shake the feeling that they meant to cut this bit out but forgot.

46 seconds: Gay wanders through a field, talking to himself like an unfortunate. OK, you can see what they were going for here. He’s a man with a vision! He’s in touch with our pastoral heritage! Etc.! But it really, really doesn’t work. He doesn’t look like a visionary, he looks like he’s slipped away from his carer.

1 minute 12 seconds: Gay sinks slowly out of the frame. Apparently, no one involved in this clip’s production looked at that and said, ‘Wait a minute – is SINKING really the visual metaphor we want?’ Amazing.

1 minute 30 seconds: Gay stares at nothing while Enda Kenny spoofs on about what a great guy he is. This is perhaps the highlight of highlights. He looks like he’s just been teleported there from somewhere else and is eagerly anticipating the moment when someone will take him aside and explain what the hell is going on.

You know Bosco, the popular children’s entertainer and all-round cultural icon of yesterweek? Well, I don’t. Couldn’t tell you the first thing about him (it is a him, isn’t it?). Likewise Wanderly Wagon. Ditto Forty Coats. Not a clue, me. But this isn’t one of those embarrassing cases where a couple of uptight trendy parents sniffed and preened and decided that their children would be much better off if they came home from school and relaxed in front of a nice Proust. It’s just that the house in Monaghan where I grew up (after a fashion) is located in some sort of televisual blind spot. We could pick up the British channels that wafted over the border from the North but RTE, for some reason, failed to penetrate. The reception wasn’t so much snowy as avalanchey. If you sat six inches from the screen and squinted, you could occasionally make out something that looked like a face but could just as easily have been a clock. It didn’t bother me back then but I must say that I feel a certain loss today, now that fifty percent of my generation’s conversations are about the TV programmes of our vanished youth. When talk turns to Bosco, for example, I feel like a foreign language student who was doing fine for a while before everyone got drunk and started talking faster. I catch an occasional phrase that makes sense but spend most of my time smiling politely and sneaking peeks at my watch. Oh well. I don’t suppose I missed out on very much. Bosco, who was some sort of puppet by all accounts, sounds like a pain in the hoop. And I’ll have always have Rainbow. They can’t take that away from me.

What the hell happened to digital watches? In my carefree boyhood (ah, more years ago now than I care to etc) digital watches were the dog’s knees, to kids and adults alike. They seemed to represent a tremendous leap forward in the world of personal time-telling. Some of them had a light, for God’s sake. A light! In a watch! We used to show them off to each other at school, prefacing the performance with ‘Say it’s the middle of the night, right, and you’re on a mission …’ But this technological tour de force was as nothing compared to the innovations that followed. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a watch with a calculator in it. Or more correctly, on it. I shook my head in silent awe, hearing the music from 2001 and wondering what could possibly be next. Even leaving aside these exciting add-ons, the simple phenomenon of timing things was magical. All right, you could time things with an analogue watch – ‘the crappy hands type’, as we called them – but it was no fun. A digital stop-watch made it compelling entertainment. We timed everything back then. These kids today never time a damn thing. But the real strength of the digital watch was the whiff of adventure that surrounded it. Those disjointed numbers spoke of villain’s time bombs and space ship control panels and The Future … Where did it all go wrong? If you’re going to wear a digital watch today, you might as well go the whole hog and start travelling about by space hopper. The Q-Branch marvel of my youth is a naff relic, worn only by toddlers, sport fanatics and the deeply ironic. Digital watches have run afoul of time itself. Wow, man. I’m, like, blowing my own mind here.

If I see or hear one more advertisement in which people pretend to be talking about sex but it turns out, hilariously, that they’re talking about something else, I do believe I’m going to lose the thin sliver of reason left to me and have some sort of public blow-out, possibly involving fluorescent painted nudity and certainly involving screaming. The problem seems to be the verb ‘to do’. Now to you and me, it’s just a useful little linguistic tool, a trusted friend who’s always there to help us out when we need to describe some action. We’d be lost without it, in fact, and I don’t propose that we strike it from the language entirely (although I was feeling that way for a while this afternoon). To the advertising industry, however, the verb ‘to do’ is a bullet waiting for a gun. And the gun, it turns out, is the multi-talented pronoun ‘it’. If you have the creative courage and vision to put verb and pronoun together, you get – ah, you’re way ahead of me – you get ‘do it’. Which, if you look carefully, is a synonym for shagging. Hence, ‘I’m doing it with my boss,’ ‘Have you ever done it in public?’, and so on. Only they’re not really talking about sex! Seriously, they’re not! They’re talking about topping up their mobile phone or something! I know, I know. It’s difficult to keep a straight face. The ad men would tell you that this sort of thing is a clever play on people’s ambivalence about sexual matters. It isn’t. It’s a very stupid play on people’s patience and good will. There. I feel better now.

Obviously, there are lots of reasons to hate X-Factor – the manufactured sentimentality, the cruel mocking of the mentally bewildered, the appalling taste in music, and so on (and on and on). But I have a particular reason of my own for finding it unwatchable. It’s this: if there had been such a thing as X-Factor when I was, say, nineteen and it had been for writers instead of singers, I can’t say with one hundred per cent certainty that I would not have applied. I would like to think that I would have seen through it, the way sensitive and tasteful young singers no doubt see through the  current debacle and stay put in their bedrooms when Louis and co. come to town – but I couldn’t swear to it. Maybe I would have been up there crying my lamps out and swearing that this was all I’d ever wanted since I was a child and begging some millionaire gobshite to please, please not take it away from me. I was, after all, an idiot when I was nineteen – and twenty, and twenty-one and, come to think of it, all the way up until a couple of weeks ago. So, yeah, I hate X-Factor. But it’s a There-but-for-the-grace-of-God type of hatred. That’s the good kind, right?

Not a week goes by without the publication of a report telling us that we’re all getting fatter (well, duh). And every time it happens, TV news crews take to the streets in search of a sample endomorph whom they can secretly film as he goes about his business, oblivious. ‘The report’s authors say we’ll all be thirty stone by this time next year,’ intones the voice-over, just as your man makes another forlorn effort to drag his chinos up over his gut before heading into McDonalds. They’re always very careful to film below the neck, I notice, presumably to spare the blushes of their victim. But I very much doubt that it makes any difference. It can’t be any fun, can it, to be struggling with a weight problem and then to find your arse spread all over the TV as an example of how bad things are getting for the whole species? And it’s not just the weight issue. A woman nips out of the office for a fag, fails to spot the news crew in its blind across the street, and next thing she knows she’s providing the background image for ‘The report’s authors say we’re all morons who will be dead by this time next year.’ What’s next? Secret filming of the poorly-dressed? The stupid? The selfish? There are only two surefire ways of avoiding such public humiliation. You can either be perfect in every way, which isn’t as easy as it sounds, or you can carry a big stick and go all Jackie Chan on anyone who comes near you with a TV camera. Just make sure it is TV camera, though, and not a tourist’s camcorder. That can be unpleasant for all concerned. Don’t ask me how I know this. I just know, all right?

I’ve been wearing clothes of one kind or another since the day I was born. You’d think I’d have got the hang of it by now. And yet I know as much about fashion as the average Kalahari bushman knows about networking computers. Indeed, said bushman would have your PCs talking happily to each other and might also have installed a communal printer long before I could even find a shirt and a pair of bags that didn’t make me look homeless. It’s a truism that some people look good no matter what they throw on while others could spend all day on Fifth Avenue with Bill Gates’s credit card and still go home looking like Bill Gates. But why should this be so? I mean – why? Is it to do with body shape? Facial features? Haircut? What? I demand to know. And don’t give me that line about some people having ‘style’. If it was true that some people are simply good at wearing clothes and some people aren’t, then it would make no difference if the two groups swapped duds. And it does. Brian Ferry in a shell suit is still Bryan Ferry, granted, but the shell suit’s still a shell suit and he won’t be topping any more polls if he keeps it on. A more likely explanation is that some people are good at choosing clothes. Here we seem to find a glimmer of hope. If being well-dressed is simply a matter of skill, then surely that skill can be acquired. Why not? If I can learn Italian from a tape, I can learn how to pick a jacket. Not that I have learned Italian from a tape, you understand, but the point stands. Where are the evening classes, the public lectures, the sun-tanned gurus? I want to open a folder one day and see the words ‘Module One: Trousers’. And the sooner the better. The needle of my personal fashionometer, after years of hovering almost permanently around ‘Scruffy’, has started making alarming jumps towards ‘Partially sighted’.

I had a brand new experience this week when I happened to catch the eye of a small cactus in my employ and realised that it needed to be repotted. Yes – repotted! Taken from its current pot and put into a bigger one! Because it’s doing so well! This is an extraordinary development. I’ve had dozens if not hundreds of house plants in my time and not one of them has lasted long enough to require relocation to a bigger gaff. The reason, no doubt, is that I have a tendency to plonk any new plant life on a shelf or window ledge and more or less leave it to its own devices. After a while – a few weeks, a month, two and a half years – I check on its progress and find it profoundly dead. At that point, I usually curse the thing for its lack of initiative (‘The tap’s only ten feet away, you know’) and bin it without further ceremony. I wouldn’t mind, but many of the fingers in my family are bright green. My late mother could make things grow by looking at them funny, whereas my previous best performance was the time I managed to cultivate some mold on a shower curtain. And that only survived because I didn’t have to consciously water it. Never mind. The slate has been wiped clean. I’m going shopping for a new cactus pot this very tomorrow. I’ll place it right next to the incumbent and, if I know anything about horticulture, my spiky friend will have grown into its spacious new house in no time at all.