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The craziest thing has just happened. I went to my local pub for once - literally the pub nearest to my house - this isn’t the crazy thing. Now, my town is one of those small towns where everyone knows each other, and don’t take too kindly to outsiders, so it wasn’t terribly surprising when we saw the man who owns the music shop in there (he was the man who leant me my trumpet, incidentally) - what was surprising was what he said.
“Didn’t you win the Weakest Link?”, “Yeah”, I replied. “We’ve got another winner here!”, he said, introducing me to another Weakest Link winner. Which is a bit of a weird coincidence - what are the chances of that happening?
Apparently he was on in January last year, and took away nearly Ă‚ÂŁ3000, figuratively shitting all over my Ă‚ÂŁ1970. His programme was repeated recently, but I was disappointed to discover that there are no repeat fees.
It was a pretty amazing coincidence, although one thing about it did bother me. It means that I’ve lost my “Thing”. I’m no longer going to be the guy who won the Weakest Link, I’m just going to be the guy with no unique traits whatsoever. Which is slightly frustration, considering how much I’ve gone on and on about being on the Weakest Link. I now need to find something unique and noteworthy about myself, otherwise I risk falling into obscurity. No one remembers Buzz Aldrin, because of the other guy who was on the moon before him,Ă‚Â And Christopher Marlow is an obscure footnote in literary history, because Shakespeare hogged all of the limelight. What can I do to re-gain my lost fame?
Assuming I’m not the victim of an obscure (and late) April Fools joke, apparently Richard Dawkins is going to guest star in Doctor Who. All Russell T Davies needs to get now is Adam Hart Davis and the Misery of Others to cameo and all four of my favourite things will be united at last.
Apparently Davies, who is pictured in the article dressed as a middle-aged Neo at the weekend, is a big fan. Which makes me wonder just how Dawkins will be incorporated into the show.
I think it’d be pretty good if Dawkins would become the new companion - its not as if the Doctor has too many after all. He could provide a level-headed rationalist counter to the Doctor and the villains they encounter.
He’d be great fun - he could sneer at any credulous villains who speak of what they believe, and demolish their arguments academically.
I guess the only downside it would prevent the Doctor from so wrecklessly ignoring the laws of physics and using his sonic-screwdriver to get out of every situation, because Dawkins would tell him that there’s no way it could work, and there’s no evidence to suggest it could.
If you missed the rather oblique hints I’ve been posting over the past week, you may be surprised to learn that I was on the Weakest Link on Monday. And even more remarkably, I actually won.
It’s fairly probable that a couple of million people saw my glorious victory on the telly – on (almost) primetime BBC One. I’m not going to delude myself though. The grandeur, the celebrity, the immense wealth… are all factors I’m going to have to cope with in my new role as a prominent figure in the public consciousness.
Obviously, despite being a quiz show champion and presumably able to take my seat next to Judith Keppel and Kevin Ashman on the Eggheads team at my own discretion, I should probably resign myself to the fact that at best I’m going to be a rather low-rent celebrity now, rather than face the crushing disappointment later. I don’t want my pursuit of fame to lead me to milling around the town centre in the same brown shirt I wore on the programme, pen in hand ready to sign autographs, approaching people and saying “You are the Weakest Link, Goodbye”, in a desperate attempt to be recognised. I don’t want to slowly die a little inside every time someone looks at me and raises my hopes, only for them then to cross the road to avoid me.
This said, I fully intend to take my duties as a low-rent celebrity seriously. Without people like me, the trashier end of the gossip magazine market would crumble, and the general public would have nothing to read in waiting rooms the world over.
In fact, I’ve already started phoning up the gossip magazines and newspapers to report “wicked whispers” of myself, just so that I remain in the public eye. It can’t belong until “Psst… which Weak Link was spotted filling his car up with petrol last Tuesday?” or something equally inane appears inset in a box on the 3am Girls page.
My concern at this time though is prolonging my fame – I imagine its going to be pretty fleeting. I’m already bored of talking about the programme, so my legions of fans probably are too, so I’m going to have to try and reinvent myself. It’s going to be difficult, but as this is the entertainment industry we’re talking about, luckily a lack of talent isn’t actually a barrier to remaining famous. The fact I can namedrop Kerry Katona or Richard Blackwood and you know who I’m talking about illustrates this nicely.
So I’m thinking there are two routes I could go down. I could take up drugs and have myself referred to as “the troubled star, James O’Malley” whenever I’m mentioned, or slightly less self-destructively, acquire myself an equally low-rent celebrity girlfriend – say, a former Eggheads contestant, or someone who once appeared in the background of an outside broadcast on the regional news – that’s the sort of level of celebrity we’re talking about. Interest in me would be revived as the press would, for some reason, care about the ups and downs of our relationship, as if it somehow makes a difference to… well, anything.
Obviously after the difficult and highly public split I’ll have another short lived career revival as everyone wants to see what I do next.
I think this is starting to sound like a plan. Sure, there’s at least a case for bowing out of the public eye gracefully instead and not perpetuating our societal addiction to the cult of celebrity… but where’s the fun in that? If anyone needs me, I’ll be in Britain’s crowded shopping centres and precincts, waiting for someone to recognise me from off the telly.
Well that was exciting. I’ll post more as soon as I’ve put something decent together. If you’re in the UK and you missed it you can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for the next week:
Just in case you haven’t spotted all of the not-so-subtle hints, or the post below, or are genuinely stupid, here’s one last reminder that I’m on the Weakest Link Tonight (that’s Monday 3rd).
That’s on BBC One, at 5.15pm. Just after Newsround. I’ll probably post more about it after the event. Unless I come across badly.
Being a cold-hearted rationalist, I’m unable to appreciate the abstract concepts of “luck”, “faith”, “hope”, and useless words that essentially mean “spurious assertion based on nothing” – this means that I have a habit of approaching everything rationally, with a sort of “risk assessment” and mentally judging the probabilities of things happening.
I could apply these skills that I assume I have to a career as say, a health and safety executive – or a spoilsport as they’re colloquially known. As it happens though, I instead devote this part of my brain to something far less useful: figuring out which television game shows it would be best to appear on to win some money.
I reckon if you can win pretty big on maybe three or four game shows a year, you may never need to get a proper job, and can sit at home with a self-satisfied grin on your face, like CJ and Daphne from Eggheads.
This may sound pretty silly – and twenty years ago, it might have done. Back in the olden days, before Chris [Tarrant] (BC), quiz shows never really gave away much money, and it was all about the prizes. It would have been all well and good appearing on The Price is Right or Bullseye or whatever it was people watched prior to my birth, but having watched years of repeats on Challenge TV on Sky of all sorts of crappy quiz shows, unless you can live in a speedboat, and eat chequebooks and pens for lunch, then living entirely off of the proceeds from quiz show winnings would have been impossible.
Thankfully now though, TV seems to chuck money at whoever can bark the answers to a handful of stupid questions, and thanks to satellite TV, there’s now enough channels with enough time-filling cheapo quizzes on to make this possible.
So what quiz show is it easiest to win big money on? There’s a couple of factors involved, I rationally think – the amount of prize money and the contestant turnover. Its all well and good going on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but they only have more or less one contestant a week (or at least did back in 1999 when people actually watched it) – but chances are, even if you make it on to the programme, you’re going to end up sat in the audience watching someone else walk away with £32,000. Similarly, going on Mastermind is great if you can handle the questions, and they have four people a week on… but is it really worth all of that effort for a trophy and bragging rights?
If you’re after some cold, hard, cash, then I think the game show that is best to go on is The Weakest Link. Sure, you only know how it works because you used to watch the last round after switching over from Neighbours, waiting for The Simpsons, but its almost the easiest quiz to get on: they have nine contestants every episode, and its on practically all year round, so they must need a lot of contestants – which increases your chances of being on. The prize money is good too – its nearly always over a thousand pounds – which really isn’t bad for a day’s work. And the best thing? You don’t even have to be clever or intelligent. The trick to winning is being the second cleverest, or good at pretending to be clever – as they’ll always vote out the strongest link in the penultimate round.
So that’s my advice – if you want to win money on the telly, go on the Weakest Link.
You might have spotted all of the subtle hints I’ve been placing over the past few months. I mean, if you’re an obsessive compulsive who’s obsession is me. But now I can finally tell you: I’m going to be on the Weakest Link. Yes, the TV game show.
Its going to be broadcast on Monday March 3rd at 5.15pm on BBC One. Tune in and watch me make a fool of myself! (It’ll presumably also be on the iPlayer for the week following.)
I’ll hopefully put some of the “best bits” (assuming there are some) on YouTube afterwards, complete with directors commentary.
I made the mistake of venturing into the part of the Sky EPG I never usually touch the other day, and discovered the 50-odd religious channels. It turns out that, shock horror, they’re shamelessly using religion to extort money from viewers! Here’s a little compilation video I made…
At risk of stating the obvious, I think its pretty clear that we’re getting close to Christmas. There’s explicably decorations up all over the place, I honestly couldn’t tell you what day of the week it is in absolute terms (only in terms of the number of days until Christmas. You could say that we’re current at tree-minus1 day until Christmas. Ho, ho, ho.), and perhaps the most obvious indicator: my propensity towards watching terrible films has increased.
Its almost become a festive tradition of mine to watch Small Soldiers again, as it is invariably shown at some point during week 51 or 52 (in TV industry terms). After scanning the Radio Times website though, it looks as though I won’t be enjoying Kenan & Kel’s seminal classic Good Burger this year, as it doesn’t appear to be scheduled anywhere.
Earlier this evening I watched a film which is more or less the antithesis of a cinematic classic: Tommy Lee Jones starring in Volcano. I’ve seen it a couple of times before (much like nearly everything else you watch at Christmas) and repeat viewings don’t unravel more layers of a cinematic onion - there’s no subtle allegory about humanity’s fragile place in the universe - you know what happens just by reading the title.
One particularly dire bit was towards the end when (spoiler!) they’d stopped the volcano and a rescue bloke asks a kid what his mum looks like. The kid looks up to see everyone covered in volcanic ash and remarks “Look at everybody… they all look the same” - which seemed a bit unnecessary as the film wasn’t about race relations. And it was undermined immediately afterwards when it rained, the ash was washed off and the apparent apartheid returned.
Are there any films on in the next week that I should watch, readers? Let me know, as we can make this blog interactive, and I could, like, comment on your recommendations, and you could make me endure watching crap for your own sick amusement, or something?
The craziest thing has just happened. I went to my local pub for once - literally the pub nearest to my house - this isn’t the crazy thing. Now, my town is one of those small towns where everyone knows each other, and don’t take too kindly to outsiders, so it wasn’t terribly surprising when we saw the man who owns the music shop in there (he was the man who leant me my trumpet, incidentally) - what was surprising was what he said.
If you missed the rather 
Well that was exciting. I’ll post more as soon as I’ve put something decent together. If you’re in the UK and you missed it you can watch it on the BBC iPlayer for the next week: