Wednesday, 2 March 2016

Culchur

I have post viral fatigue syndrome, so I'm either asleep 16 hours a day or awake for 24 hours at a time.

I've got into the habit of recording anything off the telly that might keep me entertained in my waking hours: old episodes of The Walking Dead or whatever that post-mortem series is called. I've caught up with episodes of Frost, that thing about serial killers by Val McDermid with either Robson Green or the other one, and even something with James Nesbitt behaving badly as a renegade doctor - as usual. I've also watched all the Scandi-noir stuff. Quite soporific.

I'm not snobby about TV programmes since I've had the PVFS. I even watch something called A Place to Call Home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Place_to_Call_Home_(TV_series)

It's terrible. Truly terrible. Set in Australia in the 1950s. It's like an early version of Peyton Place. For those of you under 50, Peyton Place was a truly terrible soap set in the USA in the 60s, in which every possible human dilemma was played out. So in A Place To Call Home we have murder disguised as an accident, homosexuality offered up as a crime and thus subject to blackmail, a child being passed off as the offspring of people who are not his parents, the bitch from hell who wants to be the grande dame of the estate, a woman married to a guy who has been tortured by the Nazis and is likely to pop his clogs at any time and she's pregnant by another man, and all this in the setting of vast inherited wealth.



I'm hooked now. I know it's dreck. So bad it's embarrassing. It even has the token poor people: the village gossip, the visiting artist and the dirt poor farmer with pearls of wisdom dripping from his gob. 

I love it. I don't want stuff that will make me a better person. I can do that for myself, thanks. This is much better. I look forward to the appearance in the series of a native Australian. Maybe that child whose parents we don't know about will turn out to be an 'Abo'...

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