Ah January!
January. For the self-employed it’s a time of tax bills and matching the rest of the country in the fine art of how to live entirely on credit. For the rest of the country it should be a time of telly watching. It’s still abysmally dark in the mornings and from quite early in the afternoon. What else for it but to whack up the heating while we’ve still got gas and turn on the TV?
Except that I have been singularly uninspired by anything on TV for the past few days. On Saturday night I found myself watching The Full Monty (again) on Film4. I now realise why I’ve remained so credit worthy while the rest of the nation has been slowly flattened by its mountain of debt. I haven’t bought enough DVD boxed sets.
The Full Monty does, though, offer a moral for our times. It may have been released in 1997 but its dole-queue storyline grew out of the last recession in 1992. A slump in the economy has had a direct impact on popular culture in the past, from band UB40 (after the signing on form) to Only Fools and Horses which first aired in 1981.
Last night I did catch the last in Channel 4’s series, Country House Rescue, in which we found that no matter how posh or rich a family might be, they can still be really quite thick. Hence the lady of the house wrinkling her nose and pretending to read the mind of a statue, which was being carted off for restoration. When the ancestral figure was returned, the family poured champagne over its head. Like I said, totally thick.
