TELLY

Don’t get me wrong … I am enjoying the ‘telly’ at the moment but I am kind of marvelling at the extremity of it all and dare I say, the pretence…

Take the new series of Grand Designs for example … well you used to get nice, middle-class couples doing up the odd barn conversion or Victorian house and making it all look marvellous with some massive windows and a bit of high-tech here and there…

But, last week, honestly, there was this annoyingly smug couple standing next to what I thought was a twig and a little pile of dust gazing knowingly at each other saying “Well as soon as we saw it, we knew. We just had to have it. We’re trying to keep all the original features of course...” the twig-and-dust pile presumably ‘incorporated’ somewhere in the eventual beautiful mansion… oh what’s this I’ve found a bit of dirt under one of my fingernails… might make it into a garden shed…

and the terribly PC couples that are ‘only’ using organic materials …well, that is apart from the 9 million tons of concrete they’ve had to use to underpin the bloody wreck to stop it falling over …and the timescales …. ridiculously extended deadlines … babies growing up and going to university and decades flying past while they are still waiting for the windows to arrive….

And don’t get me started on Nigella... What IS that woman ON?! Who in the middle of the night makes themselves a snack of pancakes with pureed raspberries with vanilla pods… the crew actually filmed her creeping down the stairs and getting the blender out….

I know she’s sexy and all... With her big boobies bulging out of those tight little pink and red jumpers, the supernanny skirt and the token rebelliousness of that little denim jacket... but doesn’t the smugness and the disconnection from the real world get on yer nerves?

Her ‘Express’ meals that show you that you can have a dinner party for 8 after work without stressing... glad she told me... she rustles up a ‘Cockoreisling Casserole’... oooh errr missus and a Jumbleby Crumble… TALK PROPERLY!... I was sucked in by the casserole but then she naffed me off by going into the detail of how to make crumble by rubbing ones thumb and forefinger together... well how else... between your knee and your shoulder blade or between the car bumper and next doors fence… I was making crumbles for my mum when I was 7 years old so I found that bit a tad patronising…

In all her programmes she has a habit of giving you an ingredient and then in a lower tone giving you the reduced working class version... the teaspoon of vanilla sugar... or lowered voice out of the side of her mouth, just use the bottle... would that be the sticky one that’s been at the back of the cupboard since the 3rd year?…. A dash of wasabi... or if you don’t have that maybe a mashed up caterpillar would do … Some finely chopped fennel or maybe the fluff out of ones bellybutton would suffice…

There IS one person on the telly though that is definitely NOT pretending... I won’t hear a word against him… he sleeps inside camel carcasses, slays deadly snakes with his ‘bare’ hands and makes drinks from bat poo, mmm ()...

He came to the studio where I work to do a voiceover - I didn’t know whether to pick him up from reception or if he would just climb up the side of the building. I offered him a cup of tea with a witchety grub in it of course, and saw him gazing hungrily at a spider that ran past … no, seriously, there was a half hour break in the proceedings and I kid you not, he asked if there was any ‘greenery’ around and we all went a bit pathetic so he just took off for a run… with his shirt off…. For at least 45 minutes to a part of town that none of us have ever found before. Bear Grylls IS the real thing.