Y'Muppet

Took the eleven year olds to The Muppets this evening. Only fault in the movie was that there were too many humans singing and dancing and acting like idiots. The Muppets themselves were superb - Miss Piggy, Kermit, Fozzy, Gonzo, Animal - all the gang. It was like meeting up with with old friends again and made me all nostalgic for the late 70s and early 80s. I could kill Viko Nikci though - his screenwriting workshop (brilliant - if you ever get a chance to do it) has flippin' ruined movies for me by making me observe each scene and seeing the way it is structured. The same thing happen with novels when I started writing fiction. It becomes like homework instead of just absorbing the images and words.

Meself and Jemser are like Waldorf and Statler at this hour of our lives - sitting on the couch criticising things on the TV - I can see us tottering into our dotage like that; and it's nice. I'm still allowed give out about him though - about stupid things like the fact he is a lazy male and whether drying clothes on radiators blocks heat and significant differences in standards of hygiene. He can give out about me opening windows when the heat is on and not putting the lids back on anything properly. I can grump away at him and he can grump back at me. And I'm glad we made it this afar, to still be good pals after twenty four years together. And all the rest of that lovey dovey stuff. The Muppets have made me all soft and 'aaaaaaahhhh'.

When I started writing my one regret was that I had left it so late in my life to start - all the hours I couldn't get back that I spent plonked in front of the TV watching a lot of rubbish. Not all of it was pap I suppose - the Muppets were clever as was Spitting Image, Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in The Crown, the Forsythe Saga, Upstairs Downstairs, adaptations of Austen, Hardy and Dickens - were all quality. But oh my lord - there was the awful Dallas and Dynasty and Falcon's Crest. And soaps. No wonder we all drank so much - you'd have to be half cut to sit through that lot on a winter's evening - Big Brother keeping us all anesthesised with flickering images of false lives.

Anyway once the babies came there was precious little time for television - or anything else outside of work and family. When I look at it now at a slight remove my reading tastes and habits changed completely over the twelve to fifteen year period that I was wrapped up in rearing the boys. I read mostly crime/horror novels and even then only for a half hour in bed at night - anything weightier I couldn't handle. I was convinced I lost half my cognitive function with the placenta after each birth, Nuala Ni Chonchuir calls it 'nappy brain'!

So there y'are a ramble through the television of my late teens, twenties and early thirties. Sad isn't it? Groucho Marx said 'I find television very educational. Every time someone turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.' And wasn't he right -a waste of time - makes me - and many of us out to be right Muppets.

Mehnommahnah...do do d'doodi...mehnommahnah..do dooby do.........