Tag: TV

Showtime

Eleven months ago, I inexplicably posted my student essay analysing Oasis’ Be Here Now on this blog. Complete with its footnotes, too. I can’t imagine many people were very interested in that, but if you were one of those uninspired readers, then fear not. I reckon you might be intrigued by what happened two days later, when I went off to London to do something altogether more exciting. Something that has, until now, been a secret from many – the quiz show Pointless, to be precise, alongside my cousin Matthew.

It was a brief adventure – lasting just over a day in total – but it was still unlike any other I’ve ever embarked upon. Matthew and I are both keen quizzers, but when he first tried to rope me into joining him in January 2023, I wasn’t sure about venturing that far out of my comfort zone. But what’s life without a few risks? All I can say now is that I’m glad I did!

I knew the show would be broadcast eventually, but once we’d filmed it, it just became something that was slowly approaching from a long way away. Life went on. We genuinely didn’t know when to expect it, and we told anyone who asked just that, sometimes on multiple occasions every week. It got old very quickly – so imagine how we felt when we finally got our airdate.

Thursday 3 October 2024, at 5.15pm, on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. Tomorrow night, in other words (at least if you’re in the UK). I am excited and bricking it in equal measure, and I think a few other people might be feeling the same. It’s not every day you get a primetime audience, after all. Maybe you’ll be among them? If you are, I hope that you enjoy it, and that I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself.

I’ll see you on the other side…

Mason

Copied To Your Clipboard

I have long considered myself a trivia enthusiast – I love to know things, and I don’t mean that in the nosey sense. Long-time visitors to this blog might recall this interest from my university quiz days, and back then it served my friends and I very well. Generally speaking, it still does. Every now and then, however, it backfires a little bit. Allow me to demonstrate what I’m talking about.

One of my strongest areas trivia-wise has always been popular culture – TV and music in particular. And when you spend as much time as I do reading about both online, algorithms start to recognise this, so you find yourself presented with more and more posts about each on social media. Of course, it’s the same on every platform, be it Facebook, X (forever Twitter, whether Elon likes it or not), Instagram or anything else – certain posts will interest me, others less so. I scroll mindlessly through those that aren’t so captivating, and apparently, I sometimes do that with a very heavy finger. Imagine my surprise when I whizzed past one article the other day, only for my phone to surprise me with a message:

“Copied to your clipboard: AN INTERVIEW WITH SIMPLE MINDS’ JIM KERR…”

It wasn’t just the title, either. That was followed by the rest of the text! Now, I neither like nor dislike Simple Minds. Like a lot of artists, I judge their output on a track-by-track basis. Having said that, though, I might not have lived it down if I’d accidentally copied Jim’s thoughts on his latest album into the family WhatsApp chat.

Mason