The Word of Ward

It’s now 6am and I am at work. There is something wrong with the way my life is going. Working in TV as a freelancer is a bizarre way to make a living. Over the past 12 hours I have watched a lot of kids’ programmes and the vast majority have been a bit odd.

Take Pokemon for example. I think they are in a parallel dimension as there are strange creatures everywhere and no one is freaking out. The premise is that people can catch these bizarre creatures in magic balls and they then make these animals fight each other until they are unconscious – like surreal dogfighting without all the blood and tattoed men.

Another example of unquestioned oddness is called ‘Crazytown’. This seems to exist in a strange town in the middle of nowhere that is populated by a few rubbery puppets, a sport-obsessed voyeur who lives in an airship, a man with a unique face who lives underground, and a young girl who has apparently turned up from nowhere and has no family or people concerned with her whereabouts. Maybe it’s supposed to be an unrealistic purgatory or something. Each week the underground man puts on a cunning disguise, like a moustache or elaborate hat, and he places the town in peril. The sports fellow then saves the day using tennis balls or a golf club or ping pong balls or something stupid. Then they all burst into synchronised dancing to Euro-techno. Who thinks this shit up and how do they manage to get paid doing it?

Later we have: ‘Handy Manny’ – a man who lives in a semi-Mexican town who has tools that talk and move and do all the work while he gets all the credit. ‘My friends Tigger and Pooh’ – the Pooh bear tales essentially but with 3d graphics and a girl instead of Christopher Robin (who may or may not have been eaten by Tigger, it remains unclear).

For even younger kids there is of course, ‘Teletubbies’. Unless you have kids, you will likely know of its existence but won’t have seen it. I suggest you watch it just once. On drugs. They live in a hill with rabbits and a disembodied baby’s head in the sun. It’s not right. ‘In the night garden’ is similarly mind-altering but I have never actually watched it. As far as I can tell there are weird woodland creatures, a tiny kingdom for some reason, and the occasional UFO.

Now imagine all the above for 12 hours throughout the night and you are suffering from sleep deprivation. Of course, people who are parents have seen all these shows a thousand times and are immune to it. Maybe I’m just not sleep-deprived enough.

To cap it all off, the guy in the next room is watching a soft porn channel. ‘Emmanuele in space’ is the current offering. It’s as good as it sounds.

I can’t wait to get home and watch something normal, which makes sense, and has a coherent plot. I think I’ll watch ‘Lost’.

In my last entry I claimed that I was bored with everything being related to the credit crunch and the economy. I hoped something more interesting would happen. I then caught a cold and while flopping pathetically on the couch and lamenting my illness, my girlfriend (reading the paper) said that maybe I had swine flu. I had vaguely heard something about this upcoming epidemic but only in a mentioned-somewhere-by-someone kind of way.

Now, apparently we are all doomed. In Watchmen they have a clock that counts to doomsday and now, frighteningly similarly, WHO has raised its threat level from four to five. This is out of six! That’s the same as one minute to midnight on the doomsday clock. The papers are making it out to be The Plague II. It’s hardly been 28 days later so far. According to the papers there have only been 2 deaths outside of Mexico and while any death is sad and a tragedy for those involved, more people die each month in humorous bathroom related accidents.

Obviously, I hope more don’t die and the flu doesn’t sweep across the globe like veangeful deity that’s had enough, but I am starting to suspect that this may have been slightly hyped by the press. Hard though that may be to believe. I’m not alone in this. People can’t help remembering how SARS and the bird flu was going to decimate us a few years ago. Then there was the whole foot and mouth thing, which sucked if you were livestock but didn’t actually affect as many people as warranted by the panic instigated by the press. The only way I was affected was that, bizarrely, I was forbidden to bring Dutch cheese from Holland into Britain. Never quite worked out why.

Speaking of the Dutch, (brilliant segway there,) I read that the Dutch police have ordered a load of flying cars. They are rotor-based apparently but it is still pretty cool. Obviously hover cars would be better and jet-packs the ideal but I mustn’t grumble. It will help them catch people doing suspicious things in coffee shops. Like evil people who put tobacco in their spliffs. This is mental but true – you can still sit in an Amsterdam cafe and smoke a joint but you aren’t allowed to put tobacco in it. Imagine relaxing there happily stoned out of your mind, when a police car drops from the sky and a couple of coppers rush over and check that you are smoking pure weed. What if you were rebellious and had secretly put in a tiny bit of tobacco to help it burn better? It would freak you out. Still, at least you could smoke a ton more weed, drink a shitload of beer and then go and sleep with a hooker until you calmed down. As long as you don’t have any evil nicotine. It would keep your mind off the swine flu as well.