Square-eyed and slack-jawed.

I don't particularly watch TV. A more accurate way of putting that would be that I don't watch TV programmes; nobody sits down and just watches the actual television, that would be weird. Of course if staring mindlessly at a relatively large and expensive electrical appliance for long periods of time is your thing, more power to you. Semantic contrivances aside, I'm no big fan of the idiot box.

Obviously I enjoy movies, although if you read half these posts you might not believe that for a second. I think partially it's an attention span thing. It will come as little to no surprise that I get hit in the head a lot; having played American Football for a decade, Rugby for a number of years before that and generally just being a bit thicker-skulled and less concerned about my own health and safety than your average human being, you start to alter your parameters for what counts as 'life changing neurological damage'. I'm not one of these nutjobs who goes on Spanish game shows to forehead-smash as many watermelons as they can in under a minute to win a lifetime supply of biscuits or whatever, but still. I like things that get to the point, rather than spend 8 seasons of 22 hour long episodes just to come to a finale that some feckless shut-in on the the Internet guessed 15 minutes into the pilot.

Game of Thrones for example. Everybody and their dog loves Game of Thrones it would seem and they are, by and large, aghast at the prospect that someone may not have watched it. "Oh my God!" they'll say. "How can you not watch G.O.T.?" they'll ask, in as patronising a tone as they can muster, while they shoot slightly worried glances around the room in case the fan boy police catch them conversing with an infidel. "You have to watch it!" Well, no actually, I don't, but thanks for your input. Believe me when I tell you I made an attempt, but after 4 episodes of what I perceived as Lord of the Rings' weirdly serious cousin who spent his childhood stuck in a basement watching a combination of cheap Dungeons and Dragons porn and execution videos on the Internet, I just couldn't bring myself to watch any more. I lasted longer than It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia which I switched off after 7 minutes and 32 seconds because it induced a cringe of such magnitude, local wildlife was displaced by the shock wave. Apparently it's one of the funniest shows going at the minute though. Go figure.

The thing with Game of Thrones is that I had no patience for it. It's written on the back of the box set; if you play the Game of Thrones you win, or you die. So when people started moaning that their favourite characters were being bumped off in droves, it just demonstrated they hadn't grasped the central tenet of the show. Everyone is going to die and in fairly grotesque fashion a lot of the time so perhaps untwist your panties and move on with your life. It may well be fantastically made and written stuff, but there's got to be 100 plus hours of it already and frankly I haven't got the time. Give me a thirty minute cartoon and I'll binge watch that all day every day: Rick and Morty, Archer (or basically anything by Adam Reed), Bob’s Burgers or Fangbone (which I smashed in an all dayer and the creator Michael Rex liked my tweet about). I spent weeks working my way through 60 odd episodes of Ultimate Muscle, which was awesome and terrible in equal measure, in 30 minute blasts. Either that or limit the run; Stranger Things was absolutely perfect in those terms. 8 episodes and done. Story arc left open, sure but complete enough. Walking Dead could learn from that, although I have a feeling the show runners would still manage to make 45 minutes feel like a week.

The other problem with TV is the proliferation of what I call Dickhead Television. This is anything either entirely populated by or seemingly expressly written for dickheads. Made in Chelsea for example is the pre-scripted-but-shot-like-it's-actually-happening quest to watch rich twats act like pre-school children spending Mummy and Daddy's money and frolicking around London's well-to-do areas scoffing into their G&Ts and being utter cocks to one another. The Only Way is Essex is the exact same schtick except with a procession of possibly the stupidest people to ever find their way on to mainstream TV. Take your pick on the so called talent shows like the Voice or Britain's Got Talent or what have you; where attention seeking plebs with a sob story vie for the opportunity to be as obsolete as they were before the show on the basis they can not maul a randomly selected cover version of a popular song too badly with the aid of Autotune and a further raft of very expensive studio equipment. Bear in mind that if you engage with those so-called talent shows you are an active participant in heaping rancid piles of misery onto vulnerable people, which is fine if they deserve it; some of the people they get on, just to watch them fail miserable so they can film Simon Cowell being trademark rude and rolling his eyes for the sake of a cheap pop, are probably somewhere on the spectrum and have been led to believe they have a chance at success throughout the three distinct auditions they "pass" before they even smell the rancid money-hungry putrescence of the judges booth. I'm a horrible person with many terrible qualities and a propensity for being a smart arse, but even I wouldn’t put these people through that. 

Geordie Shore, Love Island, Big Brother Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Real Housewives of whichever city gave the production a tax break; a whole host of so-called entertainment whereby idiots live in a confined space and act like idiots for the glorious enjoyment of yet more idiots. You want to watch random people rub their genitals together under a 32 tog duvet strategically designed to hide everything from the cameras but their feet? There's a special corner of the Internet just for you buddy, go nuts. You want to watch grown human beings punch each other’s’ faces into ground meat, then watch the UFC for all your legalised violence needs. If you have so little going on that you simply have to watch a series of carefully selected individuals who are pre-disposed to clash viciously based purely on their lifestyle choices then you're part of the problem. Dickheads on all side of the equation.

All of this leads me back to why I love movies so much. Give me a couple of hours’ worth of story in one hit that gets to a point via the odd explosion and I'm a happy bunny; drag a story out over the space of months and I'll just lose what little interest I had. Aside from anything, I know more or less what's happened over the last 7 seasons of G.O.T. just through memes on Facebook and sorry folks but the whole Hodor portmanteau wasn't as clever as everybody thinks. Still more clever than Joey Essex though, who makes a brick look like some sort of prodigious genius.