Bank Holiday Monday

Just as our finances started to improve with distance from the wedding, one of our wedding presents needed expensive hip surgery*, I was persuaded to splash out on some swanky new glasses (and a year's worth of contact lenses. I know. But he told me what nice eyes I have....) and I passed an entrance test for a graduate course that I hadn't expect to pass and then had to cough up a grand in tuition... AND THEN we spent the few dollars I had left over from my wages paid on Friday on some tasty German beers to celebrate Bank Holiday Sunday.... So yes, I did indeed spent my Bank Holiday Monday slightly hungover, mostly broke and on the sofa watching a Later With Jools Holland marathon on a channel I'd barely ever made it to before, somewhere up in the 80s.

From time to time, between reflections on what a remarkably terrible interviewer Holland is (he makes me cringe - I almost expect him to forget the name of the person he's talking to) how old the lead singer from James looked, or whether Paul Weller or Spiritualized were being deliberately made to look old by the presence of some young whipper snappers like the Fratellis, I wondered about the BBC. I think I've discussed my mixed feelings about the beeb before, but I just can't figure it out -- their general strategy seems to be to try and sell whatever they can sell to the cable channels, and then they put what's left on BBC America, along with some cheap crap they picked up from ITV (although Footballers Wives is one of my favourite guilty pleasures). I know this, because the quality of what is on BBC America is so dire (their U.S. charter appears to dictate that at least 75 percent of their airtime must be devoted to You Are What You Eat and some or other Gordon Ramsay vehicle). So how on earth did they manage to sell Jools Holland, even though it was to an arty channel I known for showing hours of Julliard rehearsals and not a whole lot else? I do love a bit of Jools, but I hardly think it's the best of the beeb - low quality production, painful-to-watch two-minute interviews and a hodge-podge mix of old farts with guitars and embryonic popsters wearing cast off eighties fashions. Clearly, though, some exec over here thought it would go down a treat, and who's to argue. I watched it.

I just don't understand the telly here - it was so much simpler when I had four channels and none of them had anything I wanted to watch on.