How Thick Are Ye?

The great thing about television is that now, in 2017, pretty much any idea is marketable. So much so that there are now programmes about watching people get married, watching people having babies, watching people having opinions and watching people watching television. Personally I am looking forward to the programme where you get to watch people watching people watching people watch television, mainly because it might cause the universe to implode. Either that or Alan Partridge’s suggestion of ‘Monkey Tennis’.

My suggestion for broadcasting is called ‘How Thick Are Ye?’. It’s a very simple concept; we take a nice middle class family living somewhere down South who do not know any better: sensible adults, adorable children etc.. They earn a generous wage per month yet seem to spend an awful lot of it in the supermarkets. For whatever reason, they buy far too much food and then throw most of it away.

Our experts would travel to whatever godforsaken county these imbeciles live in to watch them spend £300.00 on a weekly shop and then despair that they have nothing to eat. After ten minutes of pointing out to the viewers just how wrong they are, they then jump out at the family just for kicks. The experts then spend the rest of the programme berating the family for being so stupid and telling them to stop shopping at Waitrose and try somewhere more reasonable such as Tesco or Aldi.

The family are rated on a scale of one to ten as to how thick they are. If they’re found to be less than five, they wake up the next morning to find themselves tied up and all of their worldly possessions have been thrown in a skip, covered in manure and crushed in a junkyard. The now frightened onlookers cradle their children, desperate to change their ways and look at the world in a different light. The experts untie the prisoners and let them return to their empty residence.

It would be a light-hearted one hour programme, perfect for the Wednesday night schedule on BBC1. A life-changing journey for all. I was considering Chris’ favourite Gary Wilmot and Dale Winton for the roles as experts. They’re decent enough to pull of a premise such as this.

Picture of the Week

My phone is gradually filling up with all the chaff of modern life so taking any new photos is completely off the cards. Sometimes, however, you see an image that needs to be captured. A picture just so vivid and beautiful that you cannot put into words how it makes you feel.

This photo, taken recently, is one of those pictures:

Breathe that sucker in.

It is not just a tree in a phone box. It is not just a futile attempt to avoid the responsibility of having to get rid of the last remains of Christmas, or some teenagers’ attempts at a funny “joke”. No, this is art in every sense of the word and I am making arrangements for this to be moved into the Laing Art Gallery as soon as possible.

Big Frank’s Global Domination – Cycle Hire

So what do you do in your free time? Do you play the piano or drop pianos on old ladies for fun? Do you read magazines or use magazines to funnel small rodents into old people’s homes?

If you do, then you should be judged for appalling behaviour. That is not on and I will be using a magazine or an old person to tap you on the nose for good measure.

What I like to do in my free time is to learn about the numerous business ventures that Chris’ dad, Big Frank, has delved into during his retirement. Given that he already has a full-time family to run, including two not very small buckets of chiles, you would think that this would monopolise all of his time. Not so. My investigations have first led me to Coventry where Big Frank runs a cycle hire facility. It is a little unusual that there is no official website for this but I can confirm that they operate at two country parks, Kingsbury Water Park and Ryton Pools County Park, and open at 10:00am at weekends.

Kingsbury Water Park is 600 acres in size with many paths for traffic free cycling. If you want to go further, you can join the Fazeley to Birmingham canal or try the North Warwickshire Cycle way.

Ryton Pools Country Park is situated some 30 miles from Birmingham between Leamington Spa and Ryton-on-Dunsmore. Its smaller than KWP but it does have the start and finish of a lovely 16 mile cross-country run. With gravel paths, the park is perfect for KMX karting.

This information was not at all lifted from another website.

Whilst I am very thankful for his efforts in hiring out cycles to families in the West Midlands area, I am concerned about the exposure and think that with a little nudge he should venture forth with a website to promote the business more.

The sky’s the limit when it comes to Big Frank.

Dear Beans… Indelible Inconclusive Inclusions

Dear Beans,

No matter how hard I try, no matter what ideas I come up with, all of them are disparate in nature. There is no logical flow or group by which they can populate. Each and every single one of them is a Robinson Crusoe living on their own island away from the others, occasionally waving at them with a disinterested look in their eyes.

Could it be that these formulations in my brain that splurge out onto the website are just like me? Are they all selfish and only care about themselves? Shouldn’t these posts be more empathic?

Perhaps it is more to do with being popular. None of my posts are popular, and so when a Chris post comes floating past the island on a makeshift party boat, with Jacuzzis and champagne flowing from illuminated elephant nostrils balanced on a solid gold davenport, they cannot help but look on with fear and loathing (and a little Las Vegas).

What can I do to emulate this success? How can I get in with the “cool kids”? Please help me.

Yours sincerely

Ian

Remembering is Fun – May 2014 Edition

Hashtag. Hashtag. Like. Dislike. FaceTime Instagram Mcdougall.

All of these things make sense to a lot of people. What these people fail to remember though is that remembering, above all, is fun. They’re too busy trying to WhatsApp a soup bowl to Pinterest to remind themselves that all of it is nonsense and unless they start doing things that they can remember, they will never experience the fun that is remembering is fun.

You can’t remember tapping a slide trap on Tinder or going live on Facebook when Charlie chundered into a sieve. These aren’t the kinds of stories you can recount to your grandkids when you’re eighty-five. Where’s the joy? Where’s the laughter? Who is the fun?

Take for instance the following photo:

This was taken almost three years ago when a certain someone turned thirty. But that was merely something going on in the background that nobody really took any notice of. The main event was the filming of what is commonly known as ‘Essex Highway’. As Chris decided to mention David Bowie earlier on this month, I remembered how remembering was fun and that something involving Mr Bowie had occurred once which was fun.

This was before filming had started. Kevin, a keen perfectionist, had spent three hours getting his hair just right. At the point where he uttered such a bilious scream, and we rushed to expect him having trapped his hand in the plughole, only to find out he had just finished styling his hair and it was the smoothest it had ever been. The hair, donated by Crystal Park zoo, smelled of custard creams and answered to the name Alistair. Kevin would high five it after every successful shot.

Alistair would take most of the directing and producing credits for ‘Essex Highway’ and started a successful catering business once filming was over.

Kevin bought a wind farm and fathered seven children.

Stepping Up The Beans – Kevindo Menendez Style

New year. New style. New everything.

That’s the Kevindo Menendez way. When you’ve worked in the bean industry as long as Mr Menendez you know when it’s best to stick to your guns and when to branch out into new territory. While his competitors will be falling back on traditional recipes and boring, predictable flavours in 2017, he looks to the future with a flashy star in his eye and an idea that will break your heart.

Milky beans! All the goodness of milk mixed together with beans for a cockle-warmingly good time. You will get your daily portion of dairy and fibre from one single tin of ‘Kevindo Menendez’s Milky Beans’.

Even though his established, award-winning bean labels went for a more cartoony and playful look, Milky Beans takes that approach and dunks it in a tin of geese. Nothing says glim glam gloop like the Menendez one hundred billion dollar smile. Take a look at those pearly whites!

No more queuing for hours to buy six pints of milk. No more waiting by cows for that perfect moment to strike. No more mixing tomatoes in with your cereal in the hope that it “works”. Milky beans have got your back.

They’re…. reasonable!

Making Christmas

Christmas is a time for miracles. It is also the time for blatant commercialism and funny hats. That said, which it just was, it is also the time for ingenuity and improvisation.

This year Audrey asked for a copy of ‘The Lady in the Van’ on DVD for Christmas, the film based upon the book by Alan Bennett. It was a bit of poor choice really because the film is being shown on terrestrial television for free on Christmas Eve. Nevertheless, prior to being in receipt of this important piece of information, I still went ahead and purchased a copy. Neither I nor Reuben have ever read or seen ‘The Lady in the Van’ and so we decided, based upon the front cover of the DVD, that we would guess what the story was and write and illustrate our own version as an additional present.

It is called ‘T’Lady in T’Van’.

The end result was, quite simply, amazing. I cannot for obvious reasons include a copy here for fear of spoilers for the intended victim, I mean recipient.

What I can include though is a piece of concept art that Reuben came up with during the development process. He decided that the story should involve 80’s martial arts hero and general good egg Chuck Norris and thus drew a picture of him. This was then improved by adding three dimensional eyes.

Special doesn’t even come close.

Newsboost – The Unexpected Return of Perry Chuffin

The world is reeling from the shocking and unexpected return of one of the most successful crooners of the 1980’s.

Award-winning one man laundromat Perry Chuffin is rumoured to not only be touring across the world in 2017 but also that not one but three new albums are expected by this time next year. The details are sketchy, and mainly come from a tall woman in a very quiet room about three miles away. Most importantly though if this is correct then it will mean an end to the self-imposed exile that Chuffin brought upon himself just after the turn of the century.

Chuffing retired in 2003 after almost three decades in the business, citing exhaustion and a general lack of distrust for the general public. He has rarely been seen outside of his multi-million dollar mansion, located on the cusp of Morley, West Yorkshire, except on occasional trips to the local Spar for lightbulbs and sandwich bags.

Chuffin’s manager, Drippy Peptide, has refused to comment at present although a full statement is expected to be issued by his management team after the Christmas period. Even though he has missed the lucrative festive market, the demand for a follow-up record to his quadruple platinum selling album ‘Hold Your Horses’ released in 2002 is so high that fans have pre-ordered this before it has even gone on the open market.

More news will follow as we hear it.

Pouring
Beans

Author: Ian “Toasty” McIver