BEACHCOMBER

103 YEARS OLD AND STILL HAVING BAD DREAMS...

I RECENTLY had a misguided idea to spend a restful evening watching television. The first programme to catch my eye was Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, but much as I enjoy seeing Gordon Ramsay’s culinary expertise, I thought his nightmares might give me bad dreams, so I blipped further down the schedule and found Nightmare Tenants, Slum Landlords.

Could it be, I wondered, that these tenants were the restaurateurs who were renting their premises from slum landlords and causing Gordon’s nightmares?

That idea was confirmed when I spotted The Neighbourhood Nightmare, which is a film about a woman who falls disastrously in love with a handsome neighbour. I guessed that this was probably because he was trying to run a slummy restaurant in the vicinity but was a very poor cook.

I then spotted Virtual Nightmare, which was about a science fiction future. It told me the nightmare scenario was going to persist for some time so I decided to see what films were on.

The first one I noticed was Assassins in which Sylvester Stallone is going about his business as a contract killer when Antonio Banderas slays the man he is trying to assassinate. This, I thought, showed poor judgment on the part of Mr Stallone’s employers, who could have saved themselves his fee if they had known that the victim was going to be shot by someone else.

That feeling of incompetence was confirmed by Assassin X, about an assassin who refuses to kill a woman he just met. An assassin should not choose who he kills. If they are commissioned to do the job, they should just get on with it.

Indeed, the very next film I came across was Double Team, about a CIA agent who had been interned for failing to assassinate an international terrorist.

I then discovered Hanna, about a teenage girl trained by her father to be the perfect assassin. Educating one’s child in that manner may seem dubious, but in view of the obvious unreliability of assassins, one can understand his motives.

I turned the TV off and wrote a proposal for a show that could take the place of all the above. In Gourmet Nightmare Assassin the hero sneaks into restaurants late at night to kill incompetent chefs. Only the bad chefs will then have nightmares.