Too Much TV

What happens when you end up spending Friday night confined to the house with your girlfriend sitting on Margate breakwater waiting for the nice RAC man to come and extract the keys from the boot of the car?

If you’re me it seems you spend too much time watching/listening to satirical news quizzes.

Obviously.

Interestingly both Radio 4’s The News Quiz and Have I Got News For You threw up the same story, one I hadn’t noticed before, of the man in Sedgley who went to went to vote in his council elections last Friday and was most irate to be told that he couldn’t vote in the London Mayoral election. So disgruntled was his that the Boris and Ken show was only open to residents of the capital that he even went as far as to accuse the staff at the polling station of trying to rig the election.

Okay, so he’s clearly pretty stupid, but I can kind of (almost) understand why you’d get so confused. There was a huge amount of coverage on the national news and the national press - more so, certainly, than if this had been the battle to be mayor of York.

Is there even a mayor of York?

It did, however, also serve to remind of this (and as I’ve spent all day writing today it’s the only anecdote I can think to tell):

In 2004 I was pressed into a train on the way home from work. It was an October evening, you know the sort of thing - when the sky’s just starting to turn dark and there’s a hint of nip in the air. Every so often on the trains you find yourself in an unexpectedly silent carriage. No mobile phones going off. No one listening to their iPod blissfully unaware that it’s cranked up so loud everyone knows they’re tapping their feet to S Club 7. Consequently I overheard these two women talking.

I wasn’t listening in.

Honest.

They were in their mid-twenties, quite smartly dressed, probably worked in the city and both had broad south London accents.

(I was going to write the whole exchange below in a south London accent, but can’t be bothered. Try and read it in one. It goes a little like this: saaarrfff Laaannden. Okay? Good.)

Woman 1: I just don’t know what to do.
Woman 2: What about?
Woman 1: I mean, it’s getting really close now.
Woman 2: What?
Woman 1: Who’re you going to vote for?
Woman 2: Oh, that again. I haven’t decided yet.
Woman 1: No. And it’s so important to make the right decision.
Woman 2: Mmm.
Woman 1: I mean, Kerry seems like a nice man. Decent. He wants to bring the troops home. He seems more human.
Woman 2: Yeah.
Woman 1: But then Bush says ‘you don’t change horses in mid-stream’ and I think he might be right. You know? He’s got experience now, yeah?
Woman 2: Too true. Still. Neither of them seem in touch with real people. People here. Like us.

(Or words to that effect anyway.)

I don’t know. Perhaps it was an extended gag between the two of them about America’s apparent dominance of the UK.

But I doubt it.

They seemed genuinely concerned over who they should vote for in the US Presidential elections and equally annoyed that no candidate represented Londoners. I can only presume they thought they should be voting because of the amount of coverage over here. Presumably they’ve spent the past six months trying to find out to register their support for either Obama or Clinton every couple of weeks.