Watching TV with Girlfriend | Deep Blue Sea

So this should have been safe watching for guys where there’s nothing to cause you too much discomfort other than bodies being torn apart or drowned. But Girlfriend complains that I shouldn’t have started watching it without her. “I like the beginning.” she says. This means we go back and watch up to the part where the giant shark decides it’s not sedated now and bites Stellan Skarsgård’s arm off because it has figured out this will mean a helicopter will come and crash into the ocean lab and make it sink so the giant sharks will be set free after getting to eat everyone. So it bites his arm off. Girlfriend laughs saying “I like that bit!” and we replay the arm getting bitten off. Then we watch something else after that. So we didn’t finish the movie.

Giant shark likes kebab. Who knew?Giant shark likes kebab. Who knew?

 

Watching TV with Girlfriend | Big Brother

Yes this show is still running in Australia. This time they have decided to heighten the personality clashes by deliberately joining subjects with mis-matched psychology profiles into duos. They let them choose between a good or bad match but don’t tell them which is which so when half of them are in a bad match Big Brother can say it’s their own fault. That is some Orwellian shit, Big Brother. And now they are bribing two of them with cash to agree to inflict a whole week of a diet shakes on everyone in the house. You don’t want to play hardball Big Brother, you want to play Rollerball.

Watching TV with Girlfriend | The Bachelor | Laurina’s Dirty Street Pie Date

There’ll be no avoiding this one. This is the series that, due to some miracle accident of chemistry, has come from behind like a doped race horse, out of the back end of who-gives-a-fuck to the country’s number one psychodrama. Like most of these shows they extract the pure psycho with a giant syringe by locking the subjects inside a pressure cooker for weeks on end with no phones, no TV, no contact with anyone but the other hand-picked narcissists, diagnosable personality disorders or people who are nice but voted most likely to crack under pressure like the San Andreas fault. The shining neutron star of this series is Laurina. They had her pegged as a stuck-up poodle from the start and have been pushing her buttons ever since. They do this first by throwing her out of a plane – a genius move since they’re not allowed to actually do funny pinchy-grabby things to her face or draw on it or dress her up to look like Maleficent, so they let wind and terminal velocity do the work and get lots of close-ups. And now Bachelor is taking her on a date to the lowest rent corner of the harbour as the other girls have used up all the boats and waterside restaurants and nice islands. After a cheap date in a deserted bowling alley they will go to the famous hot-dog wagon Harry’s Cafe de Wheels which is on the harbour’s south side between the parked naval vessels and the public housing. I know from going here myself you can take your hot dog to the water and see cute families of rats swimming back and forth.

Now about Bachelor. He is looking for love in all the right places, and when he started running low on places they brought in a new busload of girls for him to string along with his flipbook of platitudes, like he is some kind of Stepford Husband with his repeating robot cues and responses. And we know he is also running out of places on Sydney harbour to take his dates on, as Laurina can well attest. The theme of the show seems to be that in preparation for marriage and settling down a man should embark on a 3 month season of philandering. But at least it’s honest in-your-face philandering. Come to think of it, we’re only assuming marriage in Bachelor-world is monagamous and not some kind of harem scene. Have we checked that he is truly not a Mormon or some kind of Arabian prince?

And now Osher, the hairstyle formerly known as Andrew G. He was Cleo magazine’s 2003 Bachelor of the Year. It must be a come down to be this new guy’s valet and bearer of bad tidings. I shouldn’t make fun of Osher’s hair because too many others are doing it.

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Watching TV with Girlfriend | Embarrassing Bodies | Episode Unknown

Oh not again. I cannot watch this shit. Girlfriend says “Oh look at his peeny” which looks like a mistake at the sausage factory. I say “dont make me look at that!” And as I write they tell me I’m only an ad break away from an intimate interaction some guy’s problem anus. He is keeping it under his kilt. “Nothing in the nether regions we shy away from” they boast.

Do you know it’s free to see a doctor in the UK? So why do these people want their more gross than normal private parts on global television? Do they not have jobs or families? Okay so maybe the ninja-powered cosmetic surgery is expensive and they get it for free, says Girlfriend, but still this is like exhibitionism from some kind of martian hell. Girlfriend says “The poor things!” like it’s not gross but she’s sort of giggling at the same time. I remind her the first thing she said when the program started was “gross!”. Now the guy with the retracted penis is having surgery. “Don’t look.” she says but I compulsively do.

Watching TV with Girlfriend | Sex and the City | The Vibrator Episode.

“My gott! What is she wearing?”

That’s not my girlfriend talking. That’s me! Carrie, or Sarah Jessica, seems to be having some recurring anxiety dream where she finds herself naked except for her Manolo Blahniks in an overpriced charity jumble sale. But being the ever-effervescent Carrie she assembles ensembles from the most unlikely ingredients and rocks her special interpretation of them super hard. She is no doubt a fearless woman to be reckoned with.

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Certainly Carrie Bradshaw and her friends seem to us in the post-apoplectic landscape of third-wave feminism* like the Big Bang for women’s television and thanks to Carrie it may be many decades before men can dream of reclaiming the night as far as the remote control is concerned. Sex and the City is the Big Daddy of TV shows you sooner or later will be forced to watch with your girlfriend. It’s not a terrible show by any means as long as you have no problem with four women picking up and dropping men like Christmas puppies in between lunches, A-list parties and going to work if they’re in the mood. They sure make it look like you can make it in New York if you can make it anywhere. Carrie earns a living by writing personal stuff about her friends, talking out loud as she types. Does Samantha know Carrie is telling everyone about her adventures in a fire station and shopping for vibrators? And does she know newspapers in New York will publish this stuff about her? We can’t blame Carrie I guess. It seems you can get pretty rich doing this in the Big Apple. But someone should tell Samantha**. Or would that be the end of the show?

*My good neighbour, Professor Bill, helped me with that one. He lectures in Philosophy at a university. He’s a bit like Dr. Phil only he doesn’t help people. He says don’t worry if no one understands it and I said okay. It’s surprising how much people don’t argue if they don’t understand you. I asked him if there was another way to say ‘post-apoplectic’ but he just said “detente!”, so I didn’t argue. Was that something to do with gnashing your teeth? He said “sort of”.   **Girlfriend said Samantha wouldn’t mind but then she stopped what I was starting to type about her in that case.