I got hooked and have watched nearly every episode of Top Gear that Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May have hosted. These episodes have made me laugh so hard my belly hurt. They’ve also made me cry with both sadness and joy. Watching an episode of Top Gear is like watching an episode of the Simpsons: it’s crazy as hell, but someone always learns something.

Here are five life lessons that I learned from watching Clarkson, Hammond, and May:

1. Never be Afraid to be Yourself

This is a lesson it can take some of us decades to learn. In fact, I think this is an ongoing lesson for many of us. Running with the concept that your car says a lot about your personality, the trio often chose machines that fit their personalities all too well.

Never was this more apparent when they each chose supercars for travel across Italy. Clarkson, the biggest and loudest of the three, arrived in an orange Lamborghini Aventador. May quipped, “Hello, shrinking violet,” as Clarkson unfolded all six feet, five inches of himself from the cockpit.

When Clarkson says that the car was styled by someone who’s 12, he’s embracing his own 12-year-old self. For the same challenge, May, who’s known for being methodical and technical, to the point of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, chose a McLaren MP4-12C, one of the most technically advanced cars built at the time. Hammond’s choice of the Noble M600 pointed to his roots in the northern counties of the UK.

2. You’re Never Too Old to Learn

Throughout the run of the show, the trio took up many a challenge from producers. These usually entailed limited budgets and foreign countries. While there are multiple clips showing Clarkson, Hammond, and May being more than a little closed-minded, if not bigoted, these trips regularly showed a different side to them.

Broadcast in March of 2014, their trip through Burma showed that Clarkson was often the most open-minded of the three, especially when traveling. As he reflects on their days in the country, Clarkson breaks down into tears.

Historians emphasize the power of seeing through many lenses, as this often leads to a greater understanding of the world around us. Never is that truer when Clarkson, Hammond, and May learn something new from the cultures they visit.

3. Always be Prepared

When you work with cars or travel a lot, things often go wrong. This is compounded for the trio since they often take second-hand cars on long distance trips, putting them through their paces. The resulting breakdowns often lead to one of the trio being left to fend for himself.

Hammond and May aren’t always emotionally prepared for what happens, but they are prepared with mechanical skills to fix their own cars. Clarkson’s form of preparation is usually making sure he has a hammer.

Whether you’re a skilled welder or you rely on hammers, being prepared for anything thrown your way is one of life’s necessities. In fact, it’s probably time to learn to change a tire.

4. Choose Your Words Wisely

This is a lesson in don’t do as they say or do. If you’ve watched the show as long as I have, you’ve learned that the guys sometimes put their feet in their mouths. An understatement to say the least, it’s worth noting that they are journalists and TV hosts. Not everything they say is what they believe.

However, they often got in trouble for voicing opinions during live tapings that were better left to themselves. One of the most famous examples led to a race from Palm Springs to the Mexican border crossing. It quickly becomes clear that always bears repeating. Choosing your words wisely will keep you from hurting yourself and others. It could also keep you from getting fired.

5. Best Friends are Family

I’ve touched on the importance of friends before. We all need them, and they often become parts of our families.

Clarkson, Hammond, and May are proof that middle-aged men need their tribes, too. The fact that Hammond and May willingly left their gigs at the BBC after Clarkson was fired is proof that chemistry is sometimes more magic than science. They followed their friend to what’s turned out to be a much greener pasture.

Best friends are the people for whom you watch sports you don’t like or see movies you abhor. They are the people you follow into the proverbial battle.

The last couple of years has been tumultuous for the three TV hosts, but they’re about to return with a new show, the Grand Tour. A devoted fan of Top Gear before they left, I’m excited for this new show. I know what my Fridays will look like for the next few months.

Photo Credit

Image by GioBert on flickr – Some Rights Reserved

Guest Author Bio

H. E. James, MBA
Hattie is a writer and researcher living in Boise, Idaho. She has a varied background, including education and sports journalism. She is a former electronic content manager and analyst for a government agency. She recently completed her MBA and enjoys local ciders.

Follow Hattie: Twitter | Linkedin

I have no intrinsic interest in the Oval Office, in the White House, in the American presidency, or in politics, yet I find The West Wing (at least the first four seasons, before Sorkin, who wrote nearly all the episodes in that period, left the show) utterly compelling. I have watched some of the episodes more times than I can count and was inspired by the show to attempt a pilot and several episodes of my own series (I discovered, much to my surprise, that I am not Aaron Sorkin).

While the verisimilitude of the set does contribute to the attractiveness of the show and the premise—the inner workings and the human side of the West Wing—is a guaranteed draw, it is that rare miracle of television alchemy—the near-perfect blending of outstanding writing that produces intelligent, multi-dimensional characters, crackling dialogue, and the classic Sorkin walk-and-talk action, with a cast that breathes warmth, edginess, humour, and vulnerability into the characters on the pages of Sorkin’s screenplays—that gives us four seasons of almost pure gold.

President Bartlet, played by Martin Sheen (who was not first choice for the role, a role which was originally intended to be minor but was quickly expanded), is my favourite character on the show; he is smart, passionate, impulsive, funny, generous, and child-like. C.J. Cregg, Bartlet’s Press Secretary (played by Allison Janney), is at once sharp-witted and compassionate; Janney’s comedic timing, both verbal and physical, is a ten. Richard Schiff plays Toby Ziegler, White House Communications Director; Ziegler is a brilliant, angry, love-starved loser whose idealism drives everyone crazy. Other members of the President’s support team include Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (the late John Spencer), Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), and Josh’s assistant Donna Moss (Janel Moloney, brilliant). Lowe was the big name on the series, but in my opinion he was outshone by Sheen, Janney, Schiff, and Moloney.

If you have not seen any episodes of The West Wing, I recommend that you do; it is television drama of a high calibre that does not rely on violence, sex, sensationalism (even though it is the White House), or shock for its appeal. Go to the library, borrow the First Complete Season and watch the Christmas episode, “In Excelsis Deo.”

The West Wing is getting ready for Christmas. Amidst the festive activities and the usual hubbub of state affairs and political crises and intrigue, Toby gets a call from the D.C. police and is asked to identify a homeless man, dead of exposure, who was found on a park bench near the Washington Monument. The Communications Director has no idea who the victim is but when told by the investigating officer that his business card was found on the dead man, he realizes the corpse is wearing a coat he had donated to Goodwill. When he sees the tattoo of a U.S. Marine veteran of the Korean War on the man’s arm, the fervent idealist adopts the dead vet as a cause. Against all regulations and protocol, he uses the weight of the Oval Office to arrange a burial in Arlington Cemetery with full military honours.

In a beautifully written, shot, and acted segment of the episode, Toby ventures at night into the underworld of Washington’s homeless in search of someone who might know the deceased man. He finds the veteran’s brother—a middle-aged man of limited mental capacity— living in a garbage-strewn squatters’ nest under a highway off-ramp; he delivers the sad news of his brother’s death and convinces him to attend the funeral the next day. The exchange between Toby and the slow-witted sibling is heartbreaking.

After he tells the man that his brother has died and tries to explain—an impatient person summoning the gentle and loving patience of a father explaining a new and difficult concept to his young child—that he was a Korean War vet, Toby starts to leave and immediately turns back to the man. He says: “I’m sorry, this is absolutely none of my business. Your brother is entitled to a proper funeral with mourners, and I think he deserves an honor guard, and you don’t know me but [as if this is the most embarrassing thing he could reveal] I’m an influential person, I’m a very…powerful person and I would like to arrange it.”

Back in the West Wing, Toby is taken to task for his unauthorized action by the President’s secretary, Mrs. Landingham (Kathryn Joosten), but Bartlet, notified only moments before of the beating death of a young gay man in Minnesota, gives his blessing. Meanwhile, as Toby prepares to leave for Arlington, Landingham, who lost her two sons in the Vietnam War, is waiting in her coat and hat to go with him.

If the viewer is not in tears at this point, the scene of the burial ceremony itself, with its 21-gun salute, the folding of the flag that is then handed to the brother, and the brother placing a bouquet of flowers on the coffin, all of which is intercut with a children’s choir singing The Little Drummer Boy in the West Wing in front of the staff, will surely turn on the faucet. There is no cheap sentimentalism here: every scene rings with truth because it has been carefully set up by details of the plot presented in prior action and because it reflects some aspect or aspects of the character involved.

Other episodes from the first four seasons that I recommend are Take This Sabbath Day, In the Shadow of Two Gunmen (Parts One and Two), Noel, Two Cathedrals, Manchester (Parts One and Two), Bartlet for America, Posse Comitatus, and The Long Goodbye.

Photo Credit:

“Arlington National Cemetery Graves (Burial Criteria)” by Tony Fischer Photography. 

On the Friday evenings we are free, however, we can usually be found at home watching a couple of episodes of a TV drama series on DVD that has been critically acclaimed or recommended by a trusted source. Over the past several years we have watched Queer as Folk, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, NYPD Blue, The Wire, Mad Men, Damages, The Tudors, and The Borgias. On my own I also watched five seasons of Oz (much too violent for my series-watching partner). Some of these series we have abandoned after a few seasons, one or two after a single season or even a few episodes.

We tend to look for a series in which we expect that the writing will be consistently good—with smart dialogue, multi-dimensional characters, unpredictable yet believable plot developments—although we can be faithful if the weakness of one element is counterbalanced by the particular strength of another. In the first three seasons of Damages, for example, the dialogue is often wooden and predictable, but the labyrinthine plot, which is played out over an entire season, is so intriguing one is compelled to watch episode after episode.

The series that, in my estimation, hit the mark in every season of its entire five-season run was The Wire. Smart, complex, grittily realistic, touching, funny, this series explores the dark side of Baltimore (I am sure there is a bright side too—isn’t there?) in which the good guys can be very, very bad and the bad guys can be complicated, self-aware, intelligent human beings in a tough spot. The character Omar Little, for example, is one bad dude: he is a stick-up artist with an ugly scar on his forehead, a mean crook who wears a big scary overcoat and carries a big scary gun, a weapon he is not afraid to use on those who get in his way or do him wrong. Omar specializes in stealing drugs and money from other criminals. He also happens to be gay, and when his partner, whom he truly loves, is tortured and murdered on the orders of a gang leader, Omar’s grief is no less real than that of the respectable English professor, in the film A Single Man, who loses his partner in a tragic car accident.

Yet there is only one series that has moved me to such a degree that I have been compelled to watch individual episodes numerous times. That series is The West Wing.

The West Wing apparently hatched from a lunch meeting in 1996 between screenwriter (and playwright) Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men) and heavyweight executive producer John Wells (Third Watch, China Beach). Sorkin thought that he and Wells were just going to “schmooze,” but he says, “As I walked into Ca’ del Sole…I immediately saw that I was screwed. There were three agents at the table. John hadn’t come to schmooze.” When Wells asked him, “What’s your idea?” Sorkin had to think very fast. It just so happened that the night before, the writer Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind) had been a dinner guest at Sorkin’s home, and during a smoke break from the World Series game had suggested that Sorkin could turn the material from his movie The American President into a great TV series if he concentrated just on the White House staffers. Sorkin pitched the idea to Wells who immediately bought it. It took NBC another two years to decide to buy it.

In its first season The West Wing won a record nine Emmy awards.

Photo Credits:

“Oval Office from Rose Garden” by Tuaussi

“Dignitary Entrance to West Wing” by Tuaussi

“The Craigdarroch Castle Historical Museum Society is thrilled that CHEK television will be airing our new documentary video, Victoria’s Castle, Thursday July 19th, 2012 at 9pm. This 52 minute educational video tells some of the stories of the Dunsmuir family and subsequent institutions who occupied Victoria’s Castle and highlights Craigdarroch’s relationship with the city of Victoria’s development.” ~ From The Craigdarroch Castle Website

If you are traveling to Victoria, be sure to visit Craigdarroch Castle. I assure you, you won’t be disappointed. If you live near Victoria and have never visited the castle, you are missing out on a great treasure!

If you have visited the Castle, please take a moment to leave a comment. I know that the staff there would love to hear from you

Here Is A Trailer Of The Documentary

Don’t miss it … Thursday July 19th, 2012 at 9pm

Photo Credits

Thumbnail and Feature Images – Screen Captures From The Video

Every morning — morning being that time of day immediately after I wake up, rather than anything relating to a.m. — I check my RSS feeds on my iGoogle page. On Saturday morning, I woke up and did just that, and came across this blog post written over on TOR — a blog for science fiction and fantasy lovers, and one of my favourite blogs. The post was entitled “A Response to the NY Times Game of Thrones Review” and the moment I saw the title I knew I was going to read about a New York Times review of Game of Thrones, the HBO fantasy epic based on George R. R. Martin’s series of books.

Now, let’s be fair. Not every “response to review” is a winner, nor worthy of attention. But TOR isn’t normally for the insecure, so I went in expecting to be shocked at the NY Times review.

I was.

Ms. Ginia Bellafante, the reviewer from the New York Times, has some serious questions to be asked of her:

a) What is wrong with intelligence?
b) What is wrong with fantasy?
c) Since when can’t fantasy secure a female audience?

I’m not going to sum up the review; if you care to read this post then I hope you’ll care to read the review, “A Fantasy World of Strange Feuding Kingdoms” and then the response on TOR before you continue reading here. And I recommend that you do, because in all seriousness, Ms. Bellafante is a nightmare-made-real.

Her agenda is set clearly from the beginning when she notes that “…[with]the amount of money apparently spent on “Game of Thrones,” … a show like “Mad Men” might have the financing to continue into the second term of a Malia Obama presidency.”

OK. So Ms. Bellafante likes Mad Men.

She goes on to say that “keeping track of the principals alone feels as though it requires the focused memory of someone who can play bridge at a Warren Buffett level of adeptness” and adds that a warning saying “if you can’t count cards, please return to reruns of “Sex and the City” should have run with the show.

And apparently Ms. Bellafante doesn’t like having to think.

It astounds me that something with this calibre of writing, i.e. minimal, is allowed to go to press. This review does nothing but marginalise and proves that non-intelligence is favoured these days. Heaven forbid we be challenged to think when we watch television, especially when short skirts and chauvinistic men are just an hour away.

One cannot help but see the blinding marquee that flashes from amidst this review, all but yelling to the world, “I’VE NEVER READ THE BOOKS!” When Ms. Bellafante refers to the show as “a costume-drama sexual hopscotch,” anyone who has read the books is forced to wonder just what set of blinders Ms. Bellafante was given before watching it.

Ms. Bellafante’s underlying thread is made clear when she starts summing up her review with the following:

“The true perversion, though, is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise.”

No woman alive would watch “Game of Throne”s? I assume they wouldn’t read it either, right?

As Amy Ratcliffe in her TOR response reasonably asks, why didn’t  Ms. Bellafante “get crazy and try to seek out a female fan of Game of Thrones? Trust me, there are thousands of them! Then you could have asked her why she likes the series. Or you could have been more scientific and asked lots of female fans. This is better than simply making the arrogant claim that this is boy fiction.”

The sweeping antagonism towards fantasy fiction is evident when Ms. Bellafante adds that she has “…never met a single woman who has stood up in indignation at her book club and refused to read the latest from Lorrie Moore unless everyone agreed The Hobbit first.”

What is wrong with The Hobbit? In fact, what is wrong with George R. R. Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire upon which “Game of Thrones” is based’? Or is there something inherently problematic with fantasy? And why is it labeled boy fiction? In fact, what is boy fiction for that matter?

The real crime, although I have trouble highlighting one single aspect out of this entire tragesty ( a combination of the words tragedy and travesty for those who are wondering), is the final paragraph of this insipid review:

“’Game of Thrones’ serves up a lot of confusion in the name of no larger or really relevant idea beyond sketchily fleshed-out notions that war is ugly, families are insidious and power is hot.”

I get the feeling that, if Ms. Bellafante has written a review for the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies, she would have summed them the trilogy up as “a cheap and false look into a world where evil and good fight.” It’s like willingly ignoring the idiom “it’s just the tip of the iceberg” and explaining how it’s actually a whale.

That lack of understanding extends to Ms. Bellafante’s overriding belief that nobody but a few males living in the basement of their parents house appreciate fantasy.

“If you are not averse to the Dungeons & Dragons aesthetic, the series might be worth the effort,” she notes. “If you are nearly anyone else, you will hunger for HBO to get back to the business of languages for which we already have a dictionary.”

So in short, what have we learnt?

Fantasy is for boys, thinking isn’t appealing, and girls like sex?

After all, summing things up in such simple terms seems to be the way we do things these days.

For my part, nothing has me more excited than the premiere of “Game of Thrones” or the possibility that I can go back and reread the books that spawned this series. The depth of character and meaning that George. R. R. Martin has poured into this series, along with his very soul, make these books some of the greatest reading you will ever encounter, whether you like fantasy or not.

Maisie Williams, left foreground, and Sean Bean in “Game of Thrones,” a 10-part series beginning Sunday on HBO. Photo by Helen Sloan/HBO

The Popculturist tries to decide whether or not to watch reruns of the cult comedy series, “The State”. Will the show’s funny factor hold up over time?

I used to watch a lot of sketch comedy shows when I was a kid. The early 90’s were a great time for that genre — Saturday Night Live had one of its strongest casts during that time, and In Living Color debuted and launched the careers of stars like Jim Carrey and the Wayans brothers. And then there was The State, which I always thought of as the Velvet Underground of sketch comedy — relatively unknown to mainstream audiences but with a devoted cult following, and ultimately very influential on groups that came afterwards. To my young mind, The State represented the pinnacle of comedic achievement, and it became my yardstick for funny for years to come.

Somewhere along the way, though, sketch comedy shows just stopped being funny to me. At first I blamed it on falling standards and — as old people are wont to do — wistfully thought of the “good old days.” Eventually I stumbled onto some SNL reruns on Comedy Central, though, and I was cured of that notion relatively quickly. Nothing shows you the rose-colored glasses of your memory like watching “Toonces the Driving Cat” with grown-up eyes.

Still, I couldn’t completely blame it on myself, either. Take a look at Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for example. It still kills after over 40 years. Heck, look at Abbot and Costello. Some comedy is timeless.

The reason I bring all this up is that I recently found out that the entire run of The State had been released via Netflix’s instant streaming service. Now, The State was my unrivaled favorite comedy show from high school. Catchphrases like “I’m outta heeeeeere” and “$240 worth of pudding (awww yeah)” became staples of my young pop culture vocabulary, and the show became my measure of funny for years to come.

For a long time I had bemoaned the fact that the show was unavailable after it finished its three-season run on MTV, so you might think that my discovery of its presence on Netflix would have been an unadulterated joy. But after spending almost half my life idolizing the show, I worried that there was no way it could ever live up to my image if I revisited it. I spent a few weeks vacillating, and eventually jumped back in.

It wasn’t as funny as I remembered it being. It almost was, though, and considering how long I’d had to build it up in my memory, that’s something. Of course, some of the references are a little dated, particularly the ones that relied on the audience being familiar with the MTV landscape of 1993, but a surprising amount of the humor held up. In some ways, having some distance from high school (and even early adulthood) actually made it even funnier.

I suppose that in entertainment, as in life, you can’t really go home again. But sometimes it turns out that even if what you find when you revisit your past isn’t quite what you remembered, it’s still worth having made the trip.

Photo Credits

Courtesy of “The State: The Complete Series”

In 1994, I was living in Houston, Texas, and hanging out regularly with a couple of friends from a 12 step recovery program. We had also started playing on a softball team together and had begun to get together every two weeks to talk about where our world was headed — our dreams and aspirations. We’d meet at a small Chinese buffet where we could talk and graze, talk and graze. That was the advantage of the buffet — they never rushed us off. After a while they got to know us and would bring us our regular drinks when we walked in.

One of the guys, Pat, was a bearded mountain man type and a rugged outdoorsman. He came in one evening and started chuckling as he described this TV show he’d watched on PBS. Something about a bunch of guys in the woods of Canada who congregated at a place called the Possum Lodge.

We didn’t think much about it, and went on with our conversation. A couple of nights later I was at home and, just out of curiosity, turned on the show he’d mentioned – “The Red Green Show”. It sort of reminded me of a combination of the Beverly Hillbillies and the Three Stooges. It seemed kind of dumb at first, but after a few minutes, I found myself chuckling. The head guy, this Red Green character, started talking about how men are and how we have to bond together. I related — it had a ring of humorous truth to it.

Then Red was out in the middle of Possum Lodge place talking with his nephew Harold – dork defined – and they were going through an Abbott and Costello type of routine. I found myself laughing several times. This was followed by a silent routine with some white-haired guy named Bill, which was a real hoot, and I started really laughing. Then this Red guy came back on and did a segment called “Handyman Corner”, where he used mostly duct tape to create some bizarre invention. Having worked on maintenance crews and wheat harvest crews where duct tape held the operations together, I found this really funny! Finally they had a meeting of the Possum Lodge, whose motto was “Quando omni, flunkus mortati” — “When all else fails, play dead!” That really seemed like a wonderful send-up of the way guys did things! It reminded me of Ralph Kramden and the lodge.

The next time we met for dinner, I reported I had enjoyed watching the Red Green show. Our other buddy Mike said he would give it a watch. Within three months, we were all hooked! And it was not lost on us that our buddy Pat could be a twin of Red Green! Pat’s big vacation each year was to go tubing — floating down the river on an inner tube — on the Frio River out in the Hill Country of Texas.

He invited me to join their group – his family and relatives all went camping together, sleeping in tents. There were electrical hookups, and after a long day of tubing, Pat would bring out a little TV and tape VCR and we’d sit around the campfire watching taped episodes of Red Green. Ridiculous, yes, but something about watching the dufus clan in the Canadian woods as we were sitting out in the middle of the woods ourselves felt really congruent.

Then Pat showed up at dinner one time and said, “Hey, there’s even a Red Green Fan Club.” We looked at each other, smiled, nodded, and several weeks later received our membership cards in the Red Green Fan Club. What the heck, it was all a lark, and to be somehow officially accepted at Possum Lodge felt humorously right.

These were the days of the Men’s Movement — guys going off into the woods for “Hairy Man” gatherings — to find themselves as men. Part of that movement had been invaluable for me, as I recounted in Ghosts of the Wheat Harvest, because it led me on a journey to heal old wounds with my Dad.

Yet there was much of the men’s thing that felt a little over inflated to us, and somehow the Fan Club was a way to keep us balanced and not get sucked in to the whole “finding yourself” thing too much. We would even hold our fingers up by our heads like moose antlers, and say “I’m a real man, right!” in a high pitched voice (think Possum Lodge meeting).

In one way, this was truth, because we were still in the process of claiming our true power and somewhat unsure about it all. That was underlying our reasons for gathering at the table regularly. On the other hand, it was helpful to take some of this Men’s Movement with a grain of salt. We had all seen various movements come along claiming to be “the fix” and were a bit leery of anything with that claim.

Then one day Pat called me at work. “Hey, guess what? They’re having a fundraiser telethon at the local PBS station, and I just got contacted that Red Green is going to be there. They’re inviting all the local members of the Red Green Fan Club.”

I had an immediate vision of sitting in some bleachers with a group of guys, some dressed up like Red Green, and watching this character drum up pledges on local TV. Hm! Could be entertaining, and maybe we’d even get to shake hands with this guy I decided to do it.

I thought about doing the dress up thing – we had all gotten Red Green suspenders. He wore them every show – one red, one green, and they were kind of like his signature. (I still have mine today.) I decided that would be too much and I’d just go in regular clothes, sit up in the bleachers and watch.

Pat had a conflict that night and couldn’t make it, so Mike and I agreed to meet each other at the studio. We got there, went inside, and told the receptionist we were part of the Red Green fan club, there for the telethon. She got kind of a funny look on her face, and told us how to get back to the studio. We went around a corner, through a door, and there was the telethon – people sitting at phones, evidently waiting for the next commercial break.

We looked for the bleachers and the fan club, didn’t see anything. Some guy came over and asked if he could help us. We told him we were with the Red Green Fan Club. He got the same funny look, and waved us to follow him. We went back to what looked like a break room with some cokes and snacks set up, and there was Steve Smith – Mr. Red Green himself. The Guy introduced Mike and I and told Steve we were there as part of the fan club, and now Steve got the funny look.

He shook our hands and began visiting very naturally with us. On the show, he had a sort of grizzled rough voice, but off camera he spoke in a very mild quiet voice completely unlike the onstage character. He thanked us for being there with the fan club, and then explained the funny looks we’d been getting.

“I’m really glad to see you here – you two are the whole Red Green fan club for tonight!” He laughed and said not to worry about it, we’d have some fun with it.

The Guy came back in and told Steve it was almost time for the next break. Steve started walking back to the studio, and The Guy motioned us to go with him. The next thing we knew we were standing next to Steve as he began the next pledge drive break, riffing about how these loyal members of the Red Green fan club came out in droves tonight to support PBS! By the time we realized we were on TV, he had moved over to talk to the host, and we just stood there, almost in shock.

That was the trend that was to continue throughout the evening. We’d go back to the break room while they ran episodes of The Red Green Show. Listening to Steve back there was like a show itself — he told stories that I only wish I could remember, and had everyone in earshot laughing helplessly.

During the next break, we stood next to him while he told some Handyman story. We guessed we were supposed to just stand there quietly, but Steve was so funny we were cracking up, the same as the cameramen, the phone people, and everyone in the studio. Only we were on TV right next to him.

Then during another break, we saw some of the production people huddling up, and The Guy came over and asked me to come with him. They put me behind a camera, put the headset on and told me I’d actually be running this camera for the next break and pledge drive segment. Then they took another camera and focused it on me.

While Steve was on camera, he talked about how involved the Red Green Fan Club was tonight, even helping in the production of the show. They switched to the camera showing me, and through the headset someone told me to look at the other camera. I didn’t know what to do. Then it just came to me, and I waved the silly wave, smiling the silly smile, that Bill the guy who never talked did on the show! Cracked up the whole audience.

Finally the whole thing was over, and we laughed as we went out to our cars to drive home. We were sure that since it was a PBS fundraiser, probably none of our friends would have seen us — the odds were slim in a town as big as Houston.

Of course that didn’t happen.

I had two messages when I got home asking if that was me on the pledge drive with the guy in the funny suspenders. The next day several more friends let me know they had seen me. I’d had my moment in the sun, and the Red Green Fan Club had done its part. They might not have found us handsome, but at least they found us handy!

Speaking of which, this would not be complete without a little bit of Red Green himself! Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHYbbKIybvI

Photo Credits

Photos courtesy of The Red Green Show
Fan Club photo courtesy of Dan L. Hays

Catchphrases from TV sitcoms have become such common currency that British English is in danger of becoming a totally separate language from Canadian English. If anyone in Britain asks you,

The Mclean catchphrase “A Cunning Plan” came from the Blackadder series, with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry as incompetent officers and Tony Richardson as the simple soldier Baldrick, who always had a cunning plan to rescue the army in 1914. A “Cunning Plan” is always destined to fail but only after tremendous effort and time have been lavished on it by the incompetents who conceived it.

One of Ted’s colleagues had bet him that grouse couldn’t be raised in Normandy. Why not? People were starting to raise quail and wild boar and salmon. It was time for a “Cunning Plan”. Another of life’s challenges! Pourquoi pas?

We found out that a British government environmental research project, studying life styles of capercaillie and grouse, conditions for reproduction and possible combination feeds of grit and grains, was being conducted up near Aberdeen. We contacted the boffins. They offered to reserve us some fertilized grouse eggs, telling us to bring a big Thermos lined with peat to transport them. We had to prop this up in the car in such a way that we could turn the eggs every few hours.

Before speeding off to Scotland in the company Mercedes, Ted spent hours planning and building a bird cage/hen house, more of a Lord Snowden type aviary really, attached to our garden shed. On the instructions of various hen-raising locals, he completed the interior with little triangular hatching huts which just fit neatly over broody hens and eggs.

We drove all the way up to Aberdeen and all the way back to Normandy in great haste and excitement. Ted had to rush back to work while I negotiated with a neighbour, Mr Capon, to lend me a couple of broody hens. I transferred the little eggs carefully into the hatching huts, plopped the hens over the eggs and left them to it. They could just get their heads out to the little feed bowls nailed on the front. I failed to notice ominous cracking sounds as I backed away.

A couple of days later, I went out to see if any progress was being made. The broody hens were definitely looking defeated. I picked up the hutches and the broody hens staggered forth, feet covered with raw grouse egg omelette. Apparently, I should have used Bantam hens that, as every boxing fan knows, are considerably smaller and lighter than the Rocky Balboas I had landed on the eggs.

I managed to rescue some of the eggs which had simply been buried under the earth by the weight of the hens. I raced over to return the heavy-weight hens to the Capons. Mrs.Capon, covered her mouth and giggled and Mr Capon, controlling his spittled mirth, just shrugged his solid shoulders at the waywardness of nature and the stupidity of townies everywhere.

He suggested I buy an electrically controlled hatching box which turns the eggs every so often and controls the level of humidity. I rang around farm supply shops.

“Yes, Ma’am, we have one of those. How many hundreds of eggs do you have to hatch?” When I admitted I only had a dozen or so the salesman stifled a laugh and recommended another shop. It all got set up eventually and I waited hopefully. After week or so, I realized our “Cunning Plan” had come unstuck. I finally broke open the eggs which were black and stinking inside, having never ever been fertilized.

Brambles branch up and over the coop, weeds invade the inside and the hatching huts fall apart and I just haven’t the heart to start again. Well, as Robbie Burns said, ‘The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft a-gley.”

Obviously, this time next year we are not going to be millionaires! Time for another “Cunning Plan”!

Photo Credits

All photos by Julia McLean

I am referring, of course, to the stable of unstable “Retro” cartoon characters to which Warner Brothers subjects our children on a regular basis.

Come on, you can’t tell me you didn’t realize these guys had serious problems? Let’s take the Tasmanian Devil, for example. With such poor impulse control one can’t help but diagnose hyperactivity.

While he pursues Bugs Bunny his distractibility consistently proves to be his undoing, confirming that attention deficit is also present. Clearly ADHD is present of the predominantly hyperactive impulsive type, diagnostic code 314.01.

Moving on to Daffy Duck, the diagnosis of paranoia immediately takes wing. This whining, overbearing, insecure creature must surely be more pitied than blamed. He has strong goal-seeking behavior, and yet his poor social skills and outbursts of temper often sabotage his success.

Daffy thinks the world is out to get him. He is suspicious of everyone’s motives, bears grudges and trusts no one. This behavior consistently alienates him form others, only further aggravating his paranoid ideation.

Clearly he has had some bad experiences as a duckling. Label him paranoid personality disorder, cluster A, diagnostic code 301.0.

Yosemite Sam manifests a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others. He fails to respect the law, is unable to delay gratification and is deceitful in his dealings with others. He is irritable and aggressive, resulting in frequent fights or assaults.

Sam shows little regard for his own safety or that of others. Yet his impulsiveness and failure to plan appropriately frequently frustrate his efforts. Sam’s a typical antisocial personality disorder, cluster B, diagnostic code 301.7.

Now Marvin the Martian is an interesting study. He has a one-track megalomaniacal desire to conquer the world and will calmly disintegrate anyone who gets in his way, without remorse. He is clearly delusional if he believes that, even with advanced technology, he can do this single handedly (or at most with the help of his dog).

Marvin most likely suffers from a psychotic, delusional disorder of the grandiose type, diagnostic code 297.1. His dog on the other hand shares his master’s delusion in that he slavishly follows him despite Marvin’s illness and clearly should be labeled a share psychotic disorder (“folie a deux”), 297.3.

Pepe LePew is another sadly disturbed character. He is preoccupied with fantasies of ideal love and therefore follows and victimizes a helpless and hapless feline.

He lacks the empathy to see that his feelings are unrequited and shows an unreasonable sense of entitlement to the affections of the poor cat. Obviously we are dealing with a narcissistic personality disorder here, cluster B, diagnostic code 301.81.

The cat herself shows signs of pathological passivity in that she does not seem to express her rejection in an effective and assertive manner to Pepe. Her half-hearted attempts to escape make one wonder if she enjoys the victim role. Perhaps at a subconscious level she likes the attention.

Tweety and Sylvester pose an interesting diagnostic dilemma. At first one tends to label Tweety as the victim and Sylvester as the victimizer. But look at what happens in a typical interaction. Tweety maintains a pose of innocence while engineering all sorts of horrible events for Sylvester.

The cat falls from great heights, is attacked by aggressive canines and otherwise is beaten, maimed and subjected to all sorts of negative life experiences. Who is really the victim here?

Tweety is a typical passive aggressive personality. Unfortunately, this useful term seems to have been engineered out of the present DSM-IV (revised), so I can’t give it a code number.

What about Sylvester? He seems to be a co-dependent in this sick relationship. Why doesn’t he just leave, or seek counselling to escape this cycle of violence? Alas, he could be a little better endowed in the brain department (witness his mistaking a baby kangaroo for a mouse).

Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner present the single-minded fanatic and the object of his fanaticism. Wile E. is obviously highly intelligent, judging from the various schemes and plans he develops to capture Road Runner. He most certainly manifests strong obsessive-compulsive tendencies as despite consistent failures he is always ready to try one more time.

It is my opinion that the Coyote shares traits in common with most successful scientific researchers. Perhaps he had previously focused on other, more lucrative areas of inventing and hence the financial wherewithal to purchase myriads of expensive devices from Acme in his pursuit of Road Runner. Also, since he obviously can afford to buy food, his obsessive pursuit of RR suggests other, deeper and darker motives than just hunger.

Elmer Fudd superficially resembles Wile E. Coyote in his single-minded pursuit of his quarry, Bugs Bunny (with an occasional foray into duck hunting). It is evident that he does not share the Coyote’s high intelligence, though in fact IQ doesn’t seem to correlate particularly well with success in either case.

One wonders if Elmer has some doubts about his masculinity, as he is almost always seen holding a large gun with its obvious phallic symbolism.

Finally we must deal with Bugs Bunny himself. Bugs is a relaxed, laid-back sort of fellow, who rarely gets too excited. Even when threatened by various and sundry of his unbalanced brethren, he usually handles the situation with aplomb and sang-froid.

On the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale in Axis 5 of the DSM-IV (revised), we could say he shows “superior functioning in a wider range of activities, life’s problems never seem to get out of hand and he is sought out by others because of his many positive qualities”.

My only qualm is his dependency problem with carrots. While it could be argued that this is not really an addiction, Bugs enters risky situations for these crunchy treats. I’ll leave this one at a questionable diagnosis DSM 304.9, “other substance abuse”.

It would seem from the great number of disordered cartoon characters in film and television that normalcy is a condition which may be desirable, but makes for boring programming. As Pepe LePew would say: “Vive la difference!”

Photo Credits

All pictures courtesy of “Looney Tunes” Warner Brothers

This article appeared previously in The Medical Post.

Merriam Webster’s online dictionary defines “reality” as a real event, entity or state of affairs. So if I am experiencing a real event, how did my actual state of affairs translate into an entity on television showcasing someone else’s life? How did the oxymoron “reality television” infiltrate our lives? Did we let our state of affairs lapse into a state of unconsciousness?

Every month a new dose of reality comes into our awareness and robs us of another valuable hour of time, precious time that should be used for creating our own reality. But I must confess, at times I too am drawn in by the illusion.

There are two types of programs that assist in developing my reality. I love those house hunting/home improvement programs and the wedding/bridal planning shows. Perhaps the first one is appealing to me because I have recently purchased my first house and the second one peaks my interest because I purchased my first house alone as a single individual. You see, I find myself challenging a belief that a house isn’t a home unless a loving couple resides there. Fortunately, the belief is changing with every monthly mortgage payment.

But I must say the bridal shows throw me a curve. One show permits the bride to exhibit atrocious behavior while her friends and family act as if this is a typical character trait for her. Another show flaunts opulence by displaying the line item costs for a million dollar wedding.

My favorite segment in that one is when the bride opts to purchase a designer gown that is the same price as a minimum wage workers annual salary, simply because she cried when she saw herself in full bridal regalia in the mirror for the first time.

One day as I watched a favorite episode for the 12th time, an epiphany disconnected my focus and a flood of questions commanded my attention. Why wasn’t I spending my time working toward one of the goals on my list?

Was striving for a goal so tiresome that I had to have a respite period between achievements? Were these non-reality television shows providing a decompressing resting depot for me until I was motivated again?

In that pivotal moment, I turned the television off and immediately went to sit on my front porch. I’m glad I did because it was an absolutely gorgeous day. I heard the children’s laughter as they played a rousing game of kickball and met several new neighbors with whom I exchanged telephone numbers and shared in vows to assist when needed or to watch over the homes when each one was away.

I had a sense of connection with my new-found community. And the best part was I didn’t have to sit idly by and listen to conversations that I couldn’t participate in; I was totally engaged in human interaction. It made me fill so vibrant and alive! And that is exactly the missing piece that removes the real sense from the so called reality phenomenon.

Now I won’t tell you that I am totally cured and void of my favorite non-reality shows, but I will tell you that I have limited the amount of holding power they have over me.

The conscious choice to do so has certainly enhanced the richness of my life. I am more focused on staying in the moment of my state of affairs and guarding them like a pack of pit bulls.

I use my mind to do more constructive activities such as decorating, writing, reading or checking on a neighbor, instead of drilling it on what TV show is on that particular night.

I feel like a prisoner who found the key when the warden’s back was turned. I’ve found a new freedom and I won’t give it back.

I’m sharing a poem to celebrate my release:

I cannot participate; I can only sit and wait

I can’t suggest a thing to you, not even when the show is through

Yet I invite you in for every night to see if you will start a fight

or buy a house or make a date or win the money or just procrastinate

How can this be my reality when I don’t know you and you don’t know me

Then you tell me what not to wear, when I am here and you are there

I’ll take a minute to deeply breathe and that will end your hold on me

Then I’ll realize you only exist if I permit your plot to twist

You’ve lost your grip, I’ve loosened your rope, you’re sinking fast, there’s no more hope

The ballots are counted, there’s no more vote, you’re outta here baby, as soon as I find that remote!

Photo Credits

“TV Necklace” B Magazine’s B Blog

Jaimie Perla, 30 was on a bridal reality show WEtv’s “Platinum Weddings.” Photo by Infinity Photography Inc.

“On the Set” House Crashes by Slice