Post 396. MOSTLY TOO MUCH TELEVISION.

BUT IN A MORE DISCERNING WAY.

GOGGLEBOX (Channel 4).
I have again concluded that I could never have been a participant on Gogglebox. 
That said, I do like many of those we see watching it, no matter how inexplicable I may find their positive responses to the abundance of trash they are required to watch. Whatever their recompense, most of them are value for it. My invective-laden outlook would immediately rule me out.
Never mind Aristotle's 'Give me the child until he is 7 and I will show you the man,' this man's 7 year old recollections include Noddy and Big Ears, Mr. Plod the Policeman, the Ovaltineys (and their bloody awful theme tune), Gracie Fields singing Little Old Lady and Flanagan & Allen singing Underneath the Arches. There was also an Australian crooner called Brian Lawrance who my mother quite liked and my father insisted was 'a sissy' (quite why I do not know as, to the best of my knowledge, he never ever met the man): but my father could sometimes be very English.
In our house there were little tin seats at either end of a fender box where small children could sit and be taught how to toast crumpets over an open fire. There was a deal of boring adults-only conversation about family and work and the politics of the day, and there was the mantra 'children should be seen and not heard,' and there was all the palaver about King Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson.
Of more importance to our family in 1936, my father gained second prize in an All England Amateur Bass Singer competition held at one of those Palaces in London (Crystal or Alexandra): I believe he sang a piece from Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (probably Onaway Awake Beloved) and was told by the judge that he forfeited first prize because he held his rolled up sheet of music in his hand and Hiawatha wouldn't have done that.
My father, afterwards, was his usual phlegmatic self.
“I doubt Hiawatha would have worn a monkey jacket and a bow tie, either,” he said. “But they'll have needed a reason not to split the first prize.”
I know I keep saying it was a different world, but it really was.
The small boy who was taken to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 (totally unaware that the dwarfs should have been called 'persons of limited size') was a long, long way away from the old man who has recently watched and enjoyed Ian Rankin talking about Muriel Spark (Sky), Katie Derham (the most elegantly feminine wearer of trainers in the entire world) discussing The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra with Moritz Gnann and the BBC Orchestra of Wales (BBC FOUR), and finally, because nothing can follow it, absolutely any subject presented by delightful Dame Mary Beard (pictured – with apologies for the impudence) on whatever channel she may have appeared.

And I think she would agree with my
THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH:
Only an ignorant yob boos another country's national anthem.