Hats

Hello. I've been off in Spanish Spain for a week or so hence the lack of blogitude. Sadly I was having far too good a time to watch much Spanish tv. Here are three tapas-sized factettes about what I did watch:-

• The 'noticias', the news, usually has thumping bassy music all the way through, like off of Radio 1;
• Spanish current affairs and discussion shows are mainly presented by forty- and fifty-something women, something you never see here;
• German MTV, always piped into hotels for some reason, has ten-minute breaks full of the same mobile ringtone ads on a loop. Literally one full minute long ad, then another, then the first one again. Times five. And, by the way, why is it just MTV for our German friends? UK viewers get CNN and, in the poncey hotel I was in, CNBC. News and that, not pulpy pop. Hmmm...

OK, so to the title of this blethering. A friend of mine is a big fan of Deadwood, the cowboy thing with him off of Lovejoy and lots of horseys, wooden houses, dirt, swearing and stuff.

I tried to watch this once and failed dismally. I thought it was my general dislike of costume drama - ie I managed five minutes of Vanity Fair or that one with D'Arcy in it. But, no, it's not.

I can't watch anything where the majority of the cast wear hats. It just really puts me off. "Look, he's got a top hat on!" I keep thinking. They may as well be speaking Spanish, I can't listen to anything anyone says when they've got, say, a bonnet on their head. The theme tune to Bonanza goes through my mind on a loop when Lovejoy was saying the c-word a lot, not "ooh, what a daring piece of drama" or anything. "Dang-deda-lang deda-lang deda-lang BON-ANNN-ZAAA!". Over and over again.

That's why all them fillums with pixies and goblins make me snooze immediately - hats. Also because they're overlong snoozefests full of people with fake noses stuck on too. And Orlando Bloom, who looks like Shirley Temple to me. Typing that last sentence makes me feel very old by the way. Sigh.

Hats. Keep 'em off the telly.

(OK, it's just been pointed out that lots of the South Park characters wear hats and I like that. But it's a cartoon. They're not real hats on real heads. They're just drawn on.)