Sorry, Alexander, but I don’t think I quite get the point
WATCHING the early evening TV programme Pointless Celebrities I am struck how unintentionally satirical that phrase is.
Most of the celebrities I have never heard of and the questions are much easier than in the non-celebrity version (which I much prefer).
Question master Alexander Armstrong doesn’t show off quite as much either. Often, the ‘ordinary’ contestants are made to feel inferior as Armstrong, seemingly from the top of his head, produces all the answers they couldn’t get when asked by the ‘anchor’ of the day – Richard Osman when he’s got the time, otherwise it’s some other ‘celeb’ that I’ve usually never heard of.
We hear clapping and laughter from a studio audience but this is probably a sleight of hand. We never see them and I strongly suspect noone is there. Armstrong tends to engage the same line of chat with all contestants and has been doing this routine for so long I think he may do it in his sleep.
As a tonsorially challenged individual, I find myself fascinated by his growing bald patch, still virtually invisible from the front, but the size of the moon once we get a swivel of the head.
Thank you for those who got in touch about this column reaching the three hundred mark.
I don’t quite feel three hundred, though I do confess the bones creak more these days and the two arthritic knees can often be heard crying in pain.
I am looking into the possibility of replacement knees (which sounds like a phrase plucked from The Goon Show – for those diminishing numbers still able to recall that wondrous creation) though no doubt the NHS waiting list for said operation is two centuries, which it seems to be for everything more ambitious than a box of anti-depressants (now swallowed down daily by the entire country).
People tell me I could go private, but as a person borne roughly the same time as the NHS I am a fierce advocate of the same, even if this government is doing its best to bleed it dry and allow the hovering vultures to swoop down and pick clean the bones. I’ve probably mixed up two metaphors there, for which my apologies.
‘What’s a metaphor?’ asked a character in one of my plays. Came the reply, ‘I have no idea. What IS it for?’ End of distraction.
Plus which even I wanted to consider that option – and I don’t – I couldn’t afford it (all donations in plain brown envelopes please). The NHS was born around the same time as myself and I’m quite fond of it. My mum was a sister at Nottingham City Hospital and my brother and I would traipse along there in the school holidays and gobble down the canteen dinners.
At one stage Mrs. Mort was running a geriatric ward and would take we two round the beds, asking us to hold the hands of some of the frail elderly women. Such moments were probably one of the few actual nonmedical tactile contacts these women had.
I remember the occasions vividly. The hands were as thin and as brittle as dried twigs, veins standing out like roots from some ancient tree. A chill of fear ran through me, an abhorrence of old age and senility, a fear that has never left me, though now I realise – with some alarm – that the women were probably a similar age to your correspondent in 2024.
And am I thus seen by the youth of today? Happy thoughts!
By the way, if I ever get another holiday, I am thinking of taking it in Rwanda. It is the most talked about place in the world! You can’t pick up a newspaper, listen or watch a news programme or chat show without someone mentioning Rwanda. Planes keep lining up on runways to fly to Rwanda. OK, these planes rarely take off, but it’s the principle that counts.
But the thing is, just as our powers-that-be are discussing how to send people to Rwanda, loads of Rwandans are coming here – or at least trying to. The two groups might even meet somewhere in the middle.
■ Planet Corona – the First One Hundred Columns, IRON Press, £8.00
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