Drama!

I have always been a lover of 70's/80's drama.  I find modern day television utterly abhorrent.  Reality TV does not appeal and I find myself going back to the 70's and 80's as a source of entertainment. Here are some of the shows that I have been watching over the last couple of months.

'Hattie' - one-off drama about Hattie Jacques, everyone's favourite matron from the 'Carry On' films.  This focuses upon Jacques' affair with her driver, John Schofield and her marriage (at the same time) to Dad's Army actor, John Le Mesurier.  I had no idea (until I had viewed this drama) that both Jacques and Le Mesurier embarked upon extra-marital affairs during their time together.  Hattie moved her young man into the master bedroom, and Le Mesurier moved into the spare room.  They both kept up the facade for the public of a happy marriage.  At the end of the marriage, Le Mesurier agreed that he would take the blame as the unfaithful party in their divorce case.  This was a gripping drama, and made me think lots about the normal, day-to-day things that went on in the lives of these celebrities.  Of course, there was no happy ending.  Schofield left Jacques for a younger model after several years, and Le Mesurier married again, but he and Jacques still remained friends until her death.  Weird chain of events, I think.

'Sun, Sex & Suspicious Parents' - this is pure 'car crash' TV from BBC Three.  The basic gist is that it follows a group of young 'uns on their first foreign holiday without mum and dad.  What the kids don't know is that the parents are also in the same resort, watching everything that they get up to.  It's messy, make no mistake.  Why are the young people of today obsessed with drinking 'shots' and drinking until they soil themselves out of every orifice?  Utter madness.  I think that I only watch it so that I can feel superior.  I never went abroad as a teenager with my mates.  I never wanted to.  I think that I am most definitely in the minority on this one.  Most of the kids on this show make me wonder why they were not flushed out as foetuses.  Seriously.

'The Good Life' - this was a birthday present.  To my shame, I had never watched this series, although I was totally aware of it.  I have to confess to being more on the side of the snobbish Leadbitters, rather than the 'holier-than-thou' Goods.  Felicity Kendal's Barbara deserved so much more than welly-wearing Richard Briers' Tom.  I really rather wanted her to say, 'Fuck your self-sufficiency, I haven't had any new clothes in months and I'm off...goodbye'.  Of course, she didn't.  Fool.

Lifeguard sleeping, girl drowning **

No real reason for the title of this entry.  I just rather liked it. Sums up the general incompetence of people in life, I think.
Life has been good since leaving the hell hole that was the ***.  I have finished all assignments for my qualification.  This will, hopefully, see me completely change career and do something that I want for a change.

Health issues haven't been terribly good recently, and it seems likely that I will need to start taking medication which I will 'self-inject' on a daily basis.  I think that, when this happens, I should perhaps wave goodbye to my love affair with wine of all varieties.  Sad, but true.

I have had such a wrangle with myself lately, in terms of not feeling as though I have any real direction or purpose, in a work sense.  My personal life is fantastic, couldn't be better.  But my professional life is at a grinding halt at the moment.  I am doing some voluntary work, to gain experience in the career that I want to have for the rest of my working life.  This is good, and makes me feel that I have done completely the right thing.  I am filled with regret that I delayed this, and did not do it sooner.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  What is sad is that it often comes too late.

Anyway, in other news, my dad's sixty-odd year old mechanic friend continues to talk to me about his lack of a sex life.  I assume that this is because he wants to come across as some trendy bloke that wants to recapture his youth.  However, this will not happen whilst he openly admits to me that he 'masturbates, but nothing comes out'.  I suggested that he go to the doctor about this, or stop participating in this past-time.  I quite simply shudder at the thought of him 'whacking away' of an evening.  Having said that, he does service my car for free, so I guess that a bit of 'way too much information' chit-chat has to be endured.  Does this make me a bad person?

I have given up on Facebook and Twitter after years of checking on the status updates of people with whom I have little in common.  I was becoming a bit obsessed with checking Facebook daily, only to find that the people that I have as 'friends' are not really so.  What do I actually have in common with most of them?  Some I have not spoken to since school, and even then, they didn't actually speak to me.  Why, suddenly, when we reach mid-life, do these people think that you have any similarities?  Quite bizarre.  I feel much better for freeing myself from the daily checking of updates and tweets.  To be honest, I still don't really understand how Twitter works.  I thought that I had deactivated my account, and on Saturday, received an email to advise that an 'ex' of mine was following me on Twitter.  I found this incredible, as I was on there under an 'alias' with no picture.  So, I hastily deactivated my account.  I think that, as I get older, I don't want people to know much about me.  I would rather be anonymous.  Ah, but what of my blog?  Well, this is about as anonymous as one can get online, I think.

** Morrissey album track, taken from 'Vauxhall & I' (1994)