Buzzards

I wrote this on Friday when I was drunk and half-watching Withnail and I.

Another day in paradise. I've spent my day off today channel hopping and listening to music. Just to push the boat out, I even ate convenience food, and didn't bother getting dressed until gone 4pm, just to compound all the necessary slacker stereotypes into the dust. But through co-opting my terrible existence through a consecutive series of clichéd behind-closed-doors portraits of wasterdom, I've learned some valuable lessons. Namely.

The Jonas Brothers are brilliant. Every ten minutes when you press The Hits of TMF because you've reached the inevitable ad break elsewhere, you turn to the crummy music channels like you turn to the bottle if you're an alcoholic, or your Radiohead CDs if you're a bellend. Through this process, I've realized how boring R+B videos are these days now that they've tried to lose the misogynistic bullshit and pretended to be intergalactic space-rappers with tweed hats, and also realised how awesome The Jonas Brothers are. Basically a punked-up version of Hanson whose videos are overchoreographed to the extend you wonder if you're subliminally being told to raise your eyebrows and poke penlids in your ear as part of the routine, The Jonas Brothers are a humdinger of go-nowhere power chords and wholesome pop-punk that's so invariably cheesy. Think three prepubescent Simon Amstells imitating Busted covering the the incidental music from Punked. It doesn't get much better than this.

Jeremy Kyle is much, much more than a stereotypically bad show for the unemployed and inebriated. It's fascinating. Today’s episode, or one of today’s episodes as it appears to be on all day on ITV2, was an intervention special. Rather than a highly-personal intervention, like they should be, in which close family and friends gather the junkie drugged up alcoholic doofus in a darkened corner and batter him with sobbing and snotting until he renounces his sins, the Jeremy Kyle Intervention becomes an absolute circus of horrors as the events unfold. Basically, an alcoholic was literally propped up in a chair, and then one by one, and increasingly irrelevant gaggle of drama-students in waiting offered ascendingly bizarre reasons why the sozzled fuckwit should cut the cider. They started, naturally, with the close family and then a parade of AA lifetime members and toothless morons gave their bit, and then we got to watch some footage of a previous edition of Jeremy Kyle in which a desperately hammered alcoholic tried to mumble a sentence, only to be berated by Jeremy and it emerged he died anyway. The subject of the intervention, who was so embezzled in drink that I couldn't tell if he was actually Scottish or so pissed he couldn't avoid lapsing in an accent he didn't have, was even less impressed than I was. Then they did one on Joyriding, in which a wideboy toerag with sufficiently low enough brain cells to fit on a pin head was fed half an hours worth of car crash tales with the intention of getting him to stop joyriding. After he said "well um, like, yeah, well, yeah, one of my best mates died joyriding, but it only made me wanna do it more, like" I gave up, as should have Jeremy.