Watching the Wheels

The rain is falling in London town, the wind is blowing, the air is cold and all of this is perfect pathetic fallacy for my state of mind.

The television industry is in a death spiral, I am told. Certainly it seems likely that there will be no work winging its way to me now until the commissioning editors get their 59p budgets at the start of April to make the three new programmes which will be made in 2009.

At the start of last week, I was very positive, mainly because I was on holiday in Slovenia and it was lovely (albeit bloody freezing), and partly because last week was my first week of freedom from my previous series. But I have now begun to feel a sneaking despair. The cause for this despair is best illustrated by my top 5 activities for this week:

1) Guitar Hero 3
Hours of playing this wretched game and I still can't do a song on Hard. To add to frustration, I can't get 100% on Knights of Cydonia on Easy. None of this makes sense if you haven't experienced the fury of shaking the guitar like a fiend to get star power, only to drop a note with a soul-shattering clang.

2) Twitter-izing self by force: looking to Fry and Webb for example
Have attempted to get into Twitter, which I'm still of the opinion that it is largely a waste of time (this could be because I'm not doing or thinking anything which rises above the level of Crashingly Dull). I still find myself pondering "why?" Do I care that Stephen Fry has just gone to bed in Bali? Well, no, not really. Of course, my own Twittering would be: "Watching Ballykissangel on ITV3 - James Nesbitt is the evil husband who steals Assumpta from Father Peter!" I didn't actually tweet that, but I swear to God it was the most interesting thing I learned all week. Compared to that, Stephen Fry's adventures are far more interesting, as was Robert Webb's entertainingly outraged reaction to Zoe Williams' article in the Guardian. Zoe Williams has been in a death match with Lucy Mangan for years on the paper vying for position of most vacuous and soporific columnist, though Zoe has the edge on unfocused rage and uncomprehensible leaps of logic. This particular column, notable for having no real point, as well as making no real points in pursuit of whatever original aim she lost along the way, seemed to have the thesis that David Mitchell is in some way destroying Radio 4 but hosting a moderately entertaining quiz "The Unbelievable Truth" which doesn't have a rigid enough scoring system to satisfy Ms Williams. The fact any quiz on Radio 4 apart from Brain of Britain that has any scoring system at all surprised me. Her argument, such as it was, spun off into total obscurity because part of Mitchell's offence was That Mitchell and Webb Sound was quite funny. Anyway, Robert Webb really went for her and it was not only justified but amusing. I have no idea if he regrets it now, but even if he doesn't I felt it was a salient warning to myself, a Twitter naif and a gobby cow, that discretion is even more key on Twitter than on Facebook. I've had a couple of near-disasters on Facebook that would go nuclear on Twitter. Not! That! I! Have! Anything! To! Say!

3) Searching for free stuff in London, failing
Being unemployed in bad weather is no fun. Parks are a no go. Art galleries and museums are only entertaining for so long. My equally unemployed friend and I spent hours sitting in Cafe Nero at Seven Dials with one coffee each. You cannot sit anywhere inside where you can talk for free. Apart from maybe a station. Or your flat, though frankly I am going to start going crazy if I spend much longer then. It's got to the point I go to my mother's house just in order to stare at a different four walls.

4) Mentally cleaning
I was almost bored enough to clean the flat. Almost, but not quite. Monkey seems to have taken the cue to go back to a "Mad Men"-esque frame of mind where he suddenly no longer seems to feel the need to do basic things like picking up pasta he's dropped on the floor. "You're here all day," grumps my knight in shining armour when this is pointed out. It's annoying, because he's right.

5) Watching television to remind self of outside world
Thank God for ITV3 (Ballykissangel, Heartbeat), ITV4 (The Professionals, The Sweeney). But most worryingly, the fact Lewis and Primeval have come back is amongst the most exciting things to have happened to me all week. Why am I such a fan of ITV suddenly? I have no answers. But it has got to the point that I'm considering a career in the police force. Looks kind of interesting. More interesting than lying on the sofa thinking about jobs I don't have anyway.