Fiendish Games

I brought home-made sandwiches into work on Monday and they were lovely. Ham and mustard pickle in French bread, if you must know. Total cost? Dunno, about a pound, I’d guess, for two sarnies compared to the £2.90 I normally pay at EAT for one.

I really must get my act together and get up early enough to make sandwiches every day, because even restricting myself to just one sarnie a day from EAT that is still £15 a week on food at lunch-time. That’s over £700 a year.

Apparently, just over a quarter of the British work force takes a packed lunch into work, whereas 41% buy their lunch from the local supermarket, according to a recent survey released – for some reason – by The Co-operative Insurance Personal Pensions company.

Around 14% visit the staff canteen – a figure that would undoubtedly be higher were it not for the fact that the staff canteen seems to be going the way of the dodo.

Incidentally, did you know it was not man (directly) who killed off the dodo, but rats? True, man introduced rats to the island habitat of the dodo, but it was those rodent bastards who raided the dodos’ nests and killed off their young.

Sure, some dodos were killed by human settlers but they quickly discovered that dodo meat tastes like Charlie Chaplin’s boots.

I digress.

Around 12% (characterised as “one tenth” by the non-numerate PR firm that disseminated the results of this survey) get their lunch from a sandwich bar while 4% (“less than a fifth” – technically accurate as a description, but you wouldn’t want the person who equated 4% to “less than a fifth” to divi up the bill at the curry house would you?) get their lunch from a fast food bar.

According to the survey, the nation’s favourite lunchtime meal at work is a BLT sandwich, a banana and a packet of crisps, washed down with a café latte. For those enjoying this lunchtime repast, they could save themselves £4.36 a day if they made their own sarnie and substituted water for the café latte, the survey says.

Or simply cut out the café latte and save themselves £4.35 a day, says I, returning to a theme of what bandits coffee shop owners are.

I am guessing that the Co-Op Insurance company would like us to make our own lunch and spend the money we save on – guess what? Pensions! So that the pension companies can piss it all up the wall on our behalf, I suppose.

Not that I am adverse to saving up for when I retire, but I prefer to handle my own investments and have a lump sum available when I retire, rather than be forced to buy an annuity at what might possibly be an inopportune time.

If I run short of funds as a pensioner, I could always go from office to office selling sandwiches.

Here’s a real conversation stopper for you to use next time a dinner party is getting a bit too boisterous. Name 5 good ITV situation comedies.

Considering that the commercial network has been around for about 50 years it is disturbing that the only candidates I can come up with are: Rising Damp, New Statesman and, at a pinch (and mainly because I fancied Penny Spencer, the original Sharon Eversleigh). Even then, The New Statesmen feels like it should have been a Channel 4 programme, and it may well have been.

Other than that, I have vague recollections of some halfway decent effort involving John Thaw as a single father, and, of course, by the standards of ITV’s normal comedy output the likes of “Man About The House” and “George and Mildred” take on Clement & La Frenais like status in comparison.

However, when it comes to ITV comedies, one’s mind is inexorably drawn back to those masterpieces of racist bigotry, “Love Thy Neighbour” and “Mind Your Language”.

Still, recalling “Mind Your Language” has reminded me that the “Doctor” series (“Doctor At Large”) series was also on ITV, and that wasn’t too bad.

One only has to look at the sad demise of Morecambe & Wise once they returned to ITV to see that the UK’s mass-market commercial network does not really get it when it comes to comedy. All of which makes it all the more surprising that they commissioned “Harry Hill’s TV Burp”, which is elevated above the mundanity of the normal clip shows by the magnificent Harry Hill.

The BBC has clearly been taking notice of the success of this programme because last night on BBC4 it showed a kind of “retro TV Burp” in which comedian Sean Lock presented (off screen) a series of clips, most of them long forgotten, from the archives of TV history.

Though it was a bit hit and miss, when it was good, it was very good. It would have been OK even without Lock’s commentary, what with features that included an interview with a man who purported to be able to speak the language of numerous alien species from the solar system and a documentary programme where an MP took a dose of mescaline and acted like a rambling prat for 30 minutes; kind of like Boris Johnson on “Have I Got News For You”.

However, Lock got some really good sarcastic comments in that had me laughing heartily.

Now, people who can’t do sarcasm very well often regurgitate the ancient and hackneyed opinion that “sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.”

Well, who says it is? Is there some sort of Comedy Tribunal that ranks the forms of wit? Does the ghost of Oscar Wilde sit on it?

Are we really to believe that the work of Groucho Marx and Woody Allen is a lower form of wit than, say, the puns of Richard Whitely?

I digress.

Lock came up with some fantastic comments on this show, none better than the one relating to a cookery programme where Hugh Fearnley Something or other cooked a woman’s placenta, turned it into placenta pate, and served it to her friends and relatives.

“Viewers who aren’t big fans of watching people eat meat plucked from a vagina, look away now.”

Quite.

Being as it was aired on BBC4, you will have numerous opportunities to watch this programme if you missed it first time round or if, like me, you fancy watching it again. The programme was called “TV’s Believe It or Not”.

Live astronomy will never be the same again.