TELEVISION

All right, so there's this news program here called, uh, something. I forget. I'll remember later.

At any rate, it's really funny. What they do is they have two panels of funny people, and the host shows them some kind of photo or news footage, and they have to guess what top news item of the week is being shown, and they discuss it a bit. It's hilarious.

Well, so this last week, the host was arrested for, uh, snorting coke off a a prostitute's something or other. People here being British and all, I have ascertained that it was snorted off of something of hers, but nobody will come out and tell me what. So I can't tell you either. Maybe that's how this whole thing starts--maybe nobody knows what it was because even the prostitute couldn't say.

Maybe the host wasn't arrested. I'm not sure. Somehow it made the tabloids, whatever the case is. Evidently she didn't make him pay for the sex, and she went on about how it lasted for hours and hours and how he's the best lover she's ever had.

So the ensuing events *would not happen* in the United States.

Why not?

Because the host didn't quit his job, the network didn't take him off the air. Last night the entire country tuned into his television program to see what he, and the funny regular and guest panel members, would do.

It was *hilarious*. They took the piss out of him the whole evening. He'd show them a photo of something, and they'd say, "Oh, that's a photo of Blair responding to allegations that the Labor Party took money from tabloids--you know all about tabloids, don't you?" or whatever. It was so funny. They're all clearly good friends, and it was done in very good humor as well as being absolutely ruthless in that friendly good-humored kind of way. I don't know how else to explain that.

One of the guys had actually had the front page of the tabloid silkscreened onto a t-shirt, and this is what he wore onto the program. He was wearing a sweat jacket over it, and waited until just the perfect opportunity, and then he unzipped it. It was priceless.

Incidentally, Black Adder was on television right after that.

There is this strange phenomenon when it comes to television, that I don't understand, but it's infallible. Whenever there's a program that you like and have seen but have never watched religiously, but watch when by random chance you turn on the TV and it's on--it's always the same episode.

I'm serious about this. I like the Simpsons. I do. But the only two television programs I have ever watched on a quasi-religious basis, for a period of time, have been the X-Files (no longer) and Buffy. But every time I am flipping on the television and the Simpsons is on, it's one of the same handful of episodes.

Ditto for Black Adder. I love Black Adder, but have only seen it maybe fifteen times, and of these fifteen times, probably 12 of them were the same two or three episodes.

It's bizarre.

Anyway, I have nothing exciting to say. I won't hear back from the BBC until Wednesday or Thursday of next week, and similarly most things in my life are just in a holding pattern at the moment.

But I am really, really happy.