PCP for the soul

If you love what you do, you'll never work a day in your life. Or something like that. It's a nice thought; if you love your job, you probably won't actually dread going to work, won't be ever so slightly miserable while you're there, and won't spend the rest of your waking hours trying to cheer yourself up. Unfortunately, for most people, there is a certain element of 'aw, do I have to?' involved, but hey; it gives us something to bitch about, between weekends.

Of course, there are worse things than going to work on a Monday morning. Like watching The Jeremy Kyle Show on a Monday morning. Or any morning. Or afternoon. For those of you outside the UK, it's a bit like Springer, but with uglier guests and a self-righteous host. It mostly goes like this; an unmitigated waste of skin sits down and tells the host, Jeremy Kyle, a man with the cold, dead eyes of a killer and 12-gauge nostrils, what an unmitigated waste of skin they are, he shouts at them, the audience cheers and applauds like a bunch of trained seals, and I wonder what wrong turn I took in life to bring me to the point where I'm sitting in front of that TV in the first place. At some point in the show's one hour run time, there will inevitably be a DNA test to establish the parentage of some unfortunate child. There's also bound to be a lie detector in there, somewhere. As much as I hate the show itself, I must admit I like when the lie detector says someone is lying and they continue to protest their innocence, because then, Kyle points out that polygraphs are generally accepted to be about 96% accurate. As if this means the test can't possibly be wrong. If it's spot on 96% of the time, that means it has to be wrong in 4% of cases, and if that doesn't sound like much, bear in mind it means a 25 to 1 chance that the lie detector is indeed wrong. I don't know about you, but I've backed horses with worse odds than that.

While there was a time when I would endure this crap, probably because the batteries in the remote were dead, I now avoid it at all costs. To give you an idea, here are ten things I would rather do than watch The Jeremy Kyle Show;

1. Stare at a crack in the ceiling for an hour. Actually, two hours.
2. Run through the lion enclosure at the zoo, wearing a suit made of raw bacon and loudly suggesting that all male lions have homosexual tendencies.
3. Memorise pi to 100 decimal places.
4. Stand on top of the Eiffel tower during a thunderstorm, dressed head to toe in wet aluminium foil, using a powerful, and very well earthed, PA system to tell French jokes to the people below.
5. Walk up to the biggest, toughest guy in a really rough bar and say; “Damn right, I was looking at your woman. Turns out you really can put lipstick on a pig”.
6. Attempt to rollerblade down an oiled fire escape, while carrying two large glasses of Rioja.
7. Board a plane, then, as it takes off, sniff the air and ask; “Does anyone else smell burning?”
8. Sit nice and close to a camp fire, wearing a waistcoat made from firecrackers.
9. Go to the final of the next rugby world cup, and spend the entire match facing the wrong way.
10. Jump out of a plane at 5000 feet, strapped to an anvil, with a wet paper parachute, over a glass recycling plant, while singing auld lang syne backwards and trying to put the pin back in a grenade. While drunk. And wearing oven gloves.

I have a couple of ideas that I think would really improve the show, but they've rejected them all on health and safety grounds. I don't get it; surely if you were to get the guests to sign waivers, you could install all the hidden trapdoors you wanted. Cowards.