Inspiration Box

We took a little trip up to London on Tuesday to see my sister and her fiancée. I don't like the word 'fiancée'. Mostly because I'm too lazy to go digging around for the proper accents.

It's also a bit too formal. 'Boyfriend' has a warm, homely charm to it. 'Fiancée' doesn't. I might as well be talking about my sister and her 'chaise longue', or my sister and her 'Renault Megane'. It's alienating.

While we were up there in beautiful Stoke Newington, we went to go and see the recording of a TV show: Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle. I've written more than enough about Mr Lee in this blog, but I'll just say it was great.

It's airing on BBC2 in a couple of months, so I'll be sure to signpost it then. I'll also look out for shots of me in the background. I tried to look as anonymous as possible, so I wore a huge feather boa, magic gloves, and hovered eight feet above the stage, vomiting. I don't know if I made it on camera.

It was basically just like a stand-up show (although when it airs it will have filmed bits too), and it was good to see so much new material. I'm wondering how well it will do on TV. It's not really like anything else, which I suppose is good for people like me, but bad for people that like things with Nicholas Lyndhurst in.

It's funny that there isn't more straight stand-up on TV. There are loads of live comedy DVDs, so presumably there's a market. But television always wants to take talented comedians and squeeze them into a sitcom or a sketch-show. Not that the shows are always bad, of course. It's just strange that stand-up, which is quite a specialised and unique art-form, isn't given more exposure by major channels.

It's presumably pretty cheap to make (especially when compared to a sketch show), and there are so many comics out there. I suppose there's Live at the Apollo. But that's about it.

Maybe they're afraid that people have too short an attention span to just sit there, looking at someone talking. After all, it's just ideas. Not even ideas that are visually represented, but naked ideas. It requires imagination, and TV executives hate imagination. It's their white whale. If imagination is allowed to prosper, people won't be as easily satisfied. They might even turn off the television!

It's difficult to sell things to people with imagination, because they can imagine not buying them.

The annoying thing is: there's nothing intrinsically wrong with the form of television. It's only an idiot box if we put idiots onto it. And we do. But if there was more room for imagination and experimentation, it could be the inspiration box.

It's funny that books are seen as the domain of the learned, and television is seen as the domain of the moron. They're both just a means of communication. No-one claims that the fax machine is more stupid than the smoke signal. (It is, but let's not get off the point).

Of course (as Mr Lee pointed out the other night), there's a lot of stupidity in books too. You'd think the large amount of celebrity 'autobiographies' would shatter the lofty image of the book.

If people are going to call the TV the idiot box, I'm going to do the same for the book.

From now on, I'm going to consider the book to be 'the idiot flaps'.

"What are you doing?" I'll ask, knowingly.

"Why, I'm reading a bit of Joyce, of course!"

"Why don't you put down those idiot flaps! Go outside and get some fresh air! If you keep reading those idiot flaps, your eyes'll go bad!"

And then I'll run off, laughing, perhaps staggering into a hedge, and then I'll be gone.

This argument has veered all over the place. Sorry. I think what I'm trying to say is: don't judge the idiot flaps by their cover. Judge them by the idiot.

Can we all agree that that last thought was very profound, and just move on?

Thank you.