A nightshift draws to a close
It’s now 6am and I am at work at the end of a nightshift. 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 will you are suffering from sleep deprivation and that is the nightshift. 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’.
