reality fatigue

Well I seem to have got the flat but we didn't appear on TOWIE. We got 'bumped', as I believe the phrase is. And there wasn't much point looking for us on the live episode – we would certainly have realised if we had been part of that. It took the series to a whole new level – a lower one. If TOWIE was reality, this was going behind the scenes of reality. We were literally viewing, to paraphrase Iggy Pop, reality's ripped backsides.

And what did it look like? Well, it was all set around Arg's charity night, and for the most part it was like some amateurish and slightly bizarre performance that might have been taking place in a church hall just down the road. Which I suppose was more or less the case. As though in acknowledgement of the fact that nobody could possibly be interested in any of the stuff taking place onstage, they kept cutting away to conversations between the principals. Shorn of their usual thin sheen of 'glamour', these left the horrified viewer wondering: 'Is this what reality's really like?'

It would be tempting to say that TOWIE was jumping the shark here, except there never was anything quite so dramatic as a shark – more like one of those fish that eats your feet. Whatever happened to them?

Perhaps I will have to find my shallow amusement elsewhere – and (courtesy of Adam Buxton, who has been talking about it on his 6 Music show) here comes Bad Kid's Jokes, a blog on Tumblr in which a guy who mediates the jokes children send in to a website publishes the rejects.

The results (all sic) may be forthrightly lavatorial:

what did the women do in bed when she heard the alarm going off?

poo her pants

Surreal:

KNOCK KNOCK! WHOS THERE. REX THE DUMPLING EGG

Or curiously profound and melancholy...

if you shot down ten birds. how many would you have left.

none.

I haven't been this excited since Pets With Tourettes. And we all know how long that lasted.