It’s a Sunday, my last Sunday in the jail to be precise, and I return from my visit to find my cellmate sitting on his bunk watching the Coronation Street omnibus. ‘You do realise that watching this shit has been scientifically proven to age you prematurely, causing grey hairs and blue rinses?’ I chastise. He shrugs, barely glancing away from the box that holds his undivided attention. I leave him, rapt, and wonder off in search of something, anything that takes me away from the grim spectacle of old people decaying on screen. I hate my cellmate’s TV viewing habits. I hate them because it’s like living with an old woman and I hate them because when the adverts come on, for car insurance and mortgages and other migraine-inducing commodities, he continues to stare at the screen blankly, too retarded to change the channel and too hypnotised by the warm glow to contemplate doing anything else.
Like his six predecessors, my cellmate can’t operate without television. If he’d landed in jail before TVs were fitted in all the cells, he wouldn't have lasted a week. The screws would have found him one morning with a dressing gown cord wrapped around his neck and a note saying ‘Please play the EastEnders theme at my funeral.’ Having been shacked up with me for a few weeks now, the boy is slowly starting to learn that adverts are evil and must not be tolerated. I had always considered this to be axiomatic, but it would appear that not everyone thinks as rationally as me. When his vacuous ad-gazing becomes too insufferable, I commandeer the all-important buttons and put on Kerrang! Radio to annoy him, knowing that he will feel obliged to stare at the screen nonetheless like a glaiket cunt. I woke up from having a nap the other day to discover him watching a programme on TMF called 20 Cutest Celebrity Babies. ‘Are you seriously watching this?’ I asked incredulously. ‘Man, even my girlfriend wouldn’t watch this shit.’ ‘Yeah, but look…’ shrugged my cellmate, displaying the programming guide on the screen. ‘This isn’t supposed to be on just now. It should be Top 20 Celebrity Weddings.’ ‘Oh well, that makes it alright then’ I replied sarcastically. ‘I wouldn’t watch this if I wasn’t in jail’ he added apologetically. ‘You know, it’s funny you should say that, cos I hear a lot of guys in here say exactly the same thing about smack; ‘Aw, I wouldnae touch it if I wisnae in here. It’s just a jail drug, ya ken?’’ My cellmate had no comeback to this and so I left him, embarrassed, to gawp at all the cute ickle celebrity babies while I went back to sleep. When I awoke later, the programme had changed but the synopsis was much the same. This time he was watching some smug, middleclass American sit-com on the ABC1 channel, the sort of dross that ABC1 relentlessly churns out on its dedicated smug, middleclass American sit-com assembly line. Disconcertingly, the episode looked vaguely familiar, although it could just have been that they’d run out of cheap jokes and begun recycling them. ‘Haven’t you seen this one before?’ I enquired. ‘Yeah, it was on during the week, but there’s nothing else on right now’ my cellmate replied. This was too much to take. ‘What? There’s 200 channels to choose from and yet you’re reduced to watching sit-com repeats because ‘there’s nothing else on’? Would you watch kiddie porn if there was ‘nothing else on’?’
I’ve never understood how people can let themselves be dictated to by television, especially television as brain-rotting as that favoured by the insane and the incarcerated. Perhaps if they’d done something more productive with their lives in the first place, instead of monging out in front of the TV taking drugs of the prescription and proscription variety, they wouldn’t have wound up in their current institutions. I mean, programmes such as Emmerdale, Deal Or No Deal and Dog Borstal (all favourites of my pad-mate) aren’t designed to be watched interactively in the same way that one might watch a stripper taking her clothes off. They’re purely passive; autopilot broadcasting designed to let people who can’t afford drugs give their brain the nite off. It’s the sort of programming that carers prop nursing home fossils in front of while they nip out for a fag or possibly even a piss-up. They return a few hours later and the senile fuckers are still sat there, the same globs of drool hanging off their wispy chins and the same dumbed-down programming showing on repeat. I don’t mind if people want to sterilise themselves by sitting in front of the TV for so long their balls shrivel up. It’s not as if they were gonna use them anyway; that would require turning the telly off and possibly even leaving the house to find a partner. But I do mind being subjected to other people’s soul-destroying viewing habits. If I wanted to kill my remaining brain cells, I’d book in for a frontal lobotomy or maybe just drop some acid and go base-jumping without a chute. Unfortunately, in prison I can’t leave the room when my cellmate’s tasteless television is repulsing me. Only my exceptional sangfroid has prevented me from flipping out and cutting him a Columbian necktie with a razor blade.
With only days to go until I get out, I’m trying to reign in my homicidal urges, for my sake and, grudgingly I suppose, for his. But if push does come to shove and shove gives way to shank, so be it. He brought it upon himself and I will prove as much in the subsequent murder trial in which I will submit a defence of incrimination, citing Noel Edmonds, the ABC1 channel and the cast of Coronation Street as the real culprits. And after being forced to watch the offensive programmes in question, the mind-numbed, brain-rotted, dumbed-down jury will be inclined to agree with me. Even in their lobotomised state they cannot fail to acquit, for it’s a no-brainer: bad television makes for bad people. If my cellmate was still alive and you were able to catch his attention during an ad break, he’d be the first to agree.
Like his six predecessors, my cellmate can’t operate without television. If he’d landed in jail before TVs were fitted in all the cells, he wouldn't have lasted a week. The screws would have found him one morning with a dressing gown cord wrapped around his neck and a note saying ‘Please play the EastEnders theme at my funeral.’ Having been shacked up with me for a few weeks now, the boy is slowly starting to learn that adverts are evil and must not be tolerated. I had always considered this to be axiomatic, but it would appear that not everyone thinks as rationally as me. When his vacuous ad-gazing becomes too insufferable, I commandeer the all-important buttons and put on Kerrang! Radio to annoy him, knowing that he will feel obliged to stare at the screen nonetheless like a glaiket cunt. I woke up from having a nap the other day to discover him watching a programme on TMF called 20 Cutest Celebrity Babies. ‘Are you seriously watching this?’ I asked incredulously. ‘Man, even my girlfriend wouldn’t watch this shit.’ ‘Yeah, but look…’ shrugged my cellmate, displaying the programming guide on the screen. ‘This isn’t supposed to be on just now. It should be Top 20 Celebrity Weddings.’ ‘Oh well, that makes it alright then’ I replied sarcastically. ‘I wouldn’t watch this if I wasn’t in jail’ he added apologetically. ‘You know, it’s funny you should say that, cos I hear a lot of guys in here say exactly the same thing about smack; ‘Aw, I wouldnae touch it if I wisnae in here. It’s just a jail drug, ya ken?’’ My cellmate had no comeback to this and so I left him, embarrassed, to gawp at all the cute ickle celebrity babies while I went back to sleep. When I awoke later, the programme had changed but the synopsis was much the same. This time he was watching some smug, middleclass American sit-com on the ABC1 channel, the sort of dross that ABC1 relentlessly churns out on its dedicated smug, middleclass American sit-com assembly line. Disconcertingly, the episode looked vaguely familiar, although it could just have been that they’d run out of cheap jokes and begun recycling them. ‘Haven’t you seen this one before?’ I enquired. ‘Yeah, it was on during the week, but there’s nothing else on right now’ my cellmate replied. This was too much to take. ‘What? There’s 200 channels to choose from and yet you’re reduced to watching sit-com repeats because ‘there’s nothing else on’? Would you watch kiddie porn if there was ‘nothing else on’?’
I’ve never understood how people can let themselves be dictated to by television, especially television as brain-rotting as that favoured by the insane and the incarcerated. Perhaps if they’d done something more productive with their lives in the first place, instead of monging out in front of the TV taking drugs of the prescription and proscription variety, they wouldn’t have wound up in their current institutions. I mean, programmes such as Emmerdale, Deal Or No Deal and Dog Borstal (all favourites of my pad-mate) aren’t designed to be watched interactively in the same way that one might watch a stripper taking her clothes off. They’re purely passive; autopilot broadcasting designed to let people who can’t afford drugs give their brain the nite off. It’s the sort of programming that carers prop nursing home fossils in front of while they nip out for a fag or possibly even a piss-up. They return a few hours later and the senile fuckers are still sat there, the same globs of drool hanging off their wispy chins and the same dumbed-down programming showing on repeat. I don’t mind if people want to sterilise themselves by sitting in front of the TV for so long their balls shrivel up. It’s not as if they were gonna use them anyway; that would require turning the telly off and possibly even leaving the house to find a partner. But I do mind being subjected to other people’s soul-destroying viewing habits. If I wanted to kill my remaining brain cells, I’d book in for a frontal lobotomy or maybe just drop some acid and go base-jumping without a chute. Unfortunately, in prison I can’t leave the room when my cellmate’s tasteless television is repulsing me. Only my exceptional sangfroid has prevented me from flipping out and cutting him a Columbian necktie with a razor blade.
With only days to go until I get out, I’m trying to reign in my homicidal urges, for my sake and, grudgingly I suppose, for his. But if push does come to shove and shove gives way to shank, so be it. He brought it upon himself and I will prove as much in the subsequent murder trial in which I will submit a defence of incrimination, citing Noel Edmonds, the ABC1 channel and the cast of Coronation Street as the real culprits. And after being forced to watch the offensive programmes in question, the mind-numbed, brain-rotted, dumbed-down jury will be inclined to agree with me. Even in their lobotomised state they cannot fail to acquit, for it’s a no-brainer: bad television makes for bad people. If my cellmate was still alive and you were able to catch his attention during an ad break, he’d be the first to agree.
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