The previous post was the one I'd planned for February and I'd delayed posting it as I saw it as my equivalent of Prince's Black album. I want to include it now as I want to say how much I do now enjoy having Sky especially as I got it just in time to catch the second season of the glorious, ludicrous, sweary vampire series True Blood. (Not in time to catch Being Human though... Hang on, letter to the Beeb coming up - "Come on, BBC, time to repeat it now, surely? It's been Bloody Ages (excuse the pun). I for one am very pleased about the amount of vampire programmes being made now and I'm wondering if there are any plans to make a vampire soap? If Albert Square in Eastenders became overrun with vampires then I would even start watching that tired old miserable wank. Thanks, WD".)
My favourite TV guilty pleasure, though is Monster Hunter- ( Known in the US as Destination Truth - Sorry, I can't tell you what day it's on in the UK, or what channel - I stumbled across it by accident and series-linked it). It's a bit like Ghost Hunter but instead of not finding any ghosts they don't find any monsters. I bloody love Josh Gates,though- the Kermit-voiced Monster Hunter of the title. It is his job to travel the world, take the piss out of locals, fuck about for a bit and look for things that don't exist. I so want his job!
The series is as enjoyably formulaic as an episode of Scooby Doo . Josh leads his trusty team halfway across the world, takes a broken down jeep along a dirt track to the middle of nowhere in search of creatures with names like Wazzat or Hoojaflip. There he finds a starey-eyed local with teeth like piano keys who informs him that the Yazoo, an enormous bat-like creature which makes curious 'whoo' noises, has been terrorizing the local village and once arse-raped his brother. (I am constantly amazed just how he finds these mouthbreathing fucktards - these people look like they've only just been toilet trained and worked out that their pants don't go over their heads. I suspect that none of them are actually locals and that they are specially flown in by the TV crew. )
Armed with such valuable inside expert knowledge, intrepid Josh finds a likely hangout for the mythical creature and sets up infra red cameras at nightfall to capture it on film. Cue lots of Blair Witch/ Derek Acorah bollocks and close ups of frightened team members getting startled by random noises or creatures showing up on heat monitors. It is usually the girl member of the team's job to scream wildly at something just before it cuts to an ad break. Sometimes it can be genuinely suspenseful but other times less so,such as when they went to investigate Icelandic Elves ( I shit you not).
So when they have picked up the sound of a jungle twig snapping or a thermal image of a passing mouse, they head back to their studios in Los Angeles to analyse the data. By this stage I am yelling at the TV 'Of course you picked up something on the thermal camera, you were in the middle of a fucking jungle at night.' Using state-of-the-art equipment, the blurry pictures caught on camera which don't look like anything are sharpened up to reveal ...blurry pictures which don't look like anything. 'GET FUCKING BETTER THERMAL EQUIPMENT! I am bellowing now " YOU TRAVEL HALF WAY ROUND THE FUCKING WORLD, BUT YOU COULD'VE PASSED A DOZEN APEMEN AND DINOSAURS ON THE WAY AND YOU'D NEVER FUCKING KNOW ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOUR CAMERAS ARE SO SHIT'
If something is revealed, it is usually just a passing bat or a hippo and the results are unsurprisingly inconclusive and the programme lurches to a halt. All it really needs is Josh Gates to unmask Mr.Crawly the butler ( "I'd have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you pesky meddlin' cryptozoologists"), make an unfunny joke and crow "JoshyWoshyDOO" in to camera and the whole thing would be perfect.
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