The journey here and there and back again.

Kids shows that unintentionally scared the bejesus out of me.

- ZZAP! Ok, its rather unfair to include this one as I did actually enjoy it. But there is something of its inherently creepy nature revealed in the opening credits- perhaps its the sinister overuse of sound effects, or women at least a decade past pubescence dressed as a St Trinian’s type minx (‘Daisy Dares You’) or even the fact that DISEMBODIED LIMBS PERFORM MAGIC TRICKS (note ‘The Handy Men’). I still find it all a little unnerving.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4afw0uzXpE

-Brum. I just didn’t seem to like inanimate objects that were able to move, communicate and act of their own volition. Brum couldn’t even speak (which to my mind makes him even scarier), but the cunning bastard still had the intelligence to give his hapless owner the slip each week to explore the world outside of his garage. Oh, and he has the sly eyes of a rapist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAfRzbC3nLc&feature=related

-Button Moon wasn’t intentionally or even really that scary, but I remember it instilling in me the bleakness of Thatcherite Britain. Not that I could conceive of this at the time, but even in the early nineties I could grasp the necessity of craftsmanship behind the creation of children’s television. You cant literally stick faces on kitchen implements, turn a Heinz bean can into a rocket and oh no wait

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f20BLJGHNXY&feature=related

-Grandpa. The first and only O.A.P. snuff cartoon that leaves your children staring into gaping existential abyss. Obviously too depressing even now to be uploaded onto youtube, Grandpa juxtaposed the adventures of grandfather and grandchild with heartbreaking inevitability of man shaking off his mortal coil. Think ‘The Snowman’, if the Snowman was your Grandfather and instead of melting at the end he just gets frail and dies.

 

Rant of the century.

They tell you all your life that university is the route to a well paid and rewarding job. So you pull your socks up at school to get the right grades, get yourself into sixth form, work your arse off for your a-levels, thank your lucky stars when you get a place at some low grade red brick university, not the best, but you’re not going to Oxford with a handful of B’s. You fuck around for three years, walk out with a 2.1 arts degree and fuck all to recommend you to real life. You cant get a job, because all of the graduate schemes are full of people who thought of what they were going to do with their lives before they’d even taken their GCSE’s and teaching courses wont let you on with no practical experience so you look around for some dead end job to pay your bills until you get your shit together. And what did that £20,000 degree get you? One line on your CV that will automatically make most employers with sense throw it straight in the bin without bothering to learn you have ‘great people skills’ and some summer experience working in a café, because they think you‘re going to piss off as soon as you‘ve found a better job. So you’re on the dole, and no one cares that you actually want to work because you cant afford to do anything that would make your existence bearable, because everyone is really trying to fuck over the system, so you fill in form upon form upon form to declare you’re not actually hiding a partner and a couple of kids in the measly one bedroom you rent in a four bed maisonette in the rough bit of town. And in the job centre the other job seekers eye you up like the middle class scrounger who’s pissed away all those things in life that come easily to those who were brought up to pronounce their ‘t’s and the man behind the counter doesn’t give a fuck that you’re desperate for a job, if you’ve applied for an agency it doesn’t count as looking for work and he’s going to have to put a hold on your payments. So you switch to roll ups because cigarettes are a luxury and you buy your wine from the corner shop in those ‘two for £5’ offers and even though it tastes like vinegar its strong enough to blur the long evenings you spend by yourself because you don’t have any friends around here and the ones you do have are in relationships so they don’t want to go out and seek oblivion on a weeknight when they have to work in the morning. And you get a letter from the university asking you never to forget you’re an alumni and to let them know how you’re getting on so they can enter the call centre job you eventually get into their graph to top up the number of graduates going on into private sector jobs within mere months of achieving their degree to show schoolchildren that it is worth spending an ever increasing amount on an ever decreasing amount of university time that translates into no real employable skills in an employers market.

“In the blue wardrobe of heaven are many unused clothes, too tight-fitting yet too beautiful to throw away. And in that wardrobe we hang our likenesses, yellow diaries yellowed with yesterday, thumb smeared with tomorrow. But the now, the present, like the hollow screech of ancient flamingos in search of shrimps, is still vibrantly shocking pink.”