retrospective seven: and you're back in the room

I have to face it, it’s me as much as anyone who dominates the TV in this house, me who is seduced by it. But who can blame me? Freeview has opened up a whole new world. It’s 1997 week on BBC4! Hard to believe that I might previously have lived out my days without knowing that. The other day I even saw Help, My Dog’s As Fat As Me!, which was swiftly - and perhaps insensitively - followed by Kill It, Cook It, Eat It. See, even if the programmes are crap you can admire the scheduling.

In between programmes we sit there deconstructing the adverts. ‘No-one wants to be a sausage in a sausage factory’, says the one for Dolland and Aitchison, attempting with a feeble cartoon to dramatise the soulless, mechanistic treatment you supposedly receive from rival opticians. But if you were a sausage, Dave and I aggressively maintain, wouldn’t that be the best place to be? It would be the place where you were born: better than a freezer in Sainsbury’s, or a frying pan. And what do sausages have to do with opticians?, we splutter, outraged. They don’t even have eyes. Except maybe all ground up inside them.

Then there’s that Iams ad where the woman talks about her ‘furry alarm clock’, meaning her cat waking her up in the morning; but it always sounds like some obscure innuendo to me, and never fails to make me snigger.

At work, Paula spelt ‘deceit’ wrong on one of her ‘recommends’. She spelt it ‘deceipt’. When I pointed out her error she accused me of ‘taking the p’. Ah yes, the standard of banter is so much higher in a bookshop than in other working environments, n’est-ce pas? I know I moan about work, but some days I'm as happy as a sausage in a sausage factory.