Yesterday, and the day before I had been thinking about putting something on a day-log. But after reading all the new-noder advice, particularly the bit about whether something was significant or not, I decided not to.
And so it would have been if the most surreal thing hadn’t happened to me today.
I got a phone call asking if I would be willing to be flown to New York and be interviewed on T.V.
A bit of a surprise considering nothing much has happened so far this year, and that I live in England. But I still wondered if it is significant enough to count as writing for posterity or whatever the term used on E2 is and sort of came to the conclusion that it wasn’t.
However the sequence of events that happened next struck me as being really quite significant, in terms of the way users of E2, myself included, assume a common culture and a similar understanding. So here it is, my significant event for this day.
My first response to the request to get on a plane to be on American T.V. was to think “forget it” so I did the sensible thing and said “ I’ll call you back” and I put the phone down.
At this point you need to know that I don’t really enjoy being interviewed and I don’t have a very high opinion of the media in general, having been fairly well misrepresented in the past by local hacks that just want some fluff to fill a few seconds or column inches with. The other thing that you should know is that I had absolutely no idea who David Letterman was, or rather is. Of course I had heard the name, just like I have heard the names Bert Newton, or Ryan Tubridy in other words I understood that he was a well-known T.V. personality in the states (the other two are Australian and Irish), but I had no idea exactly what it was that he did, or does.
As I went downstairs to tell my wife, it started to dawn on me that there might be more to this than I first thought. She confirmed it, having lived in New York for a while in the Eighties, she had seen him and could fill me in on the details. A bit of Internet research and my worst fears were confirmed, the U.S. equivalent of Jonathan Ross, the day has turned decidedly surreal. My first response was to laugh it off, then I started to think that being flown across the Atlantic, first class, to stay in a hotel for just long enough to be taken to the studio and then back here to England could be a bit of a hoot. I started to warm to the idea.
Now I sure that I am not alone in being puzzled why people that appear on chat shows never seem to have done their homework. You know the sort of thing; some poor minor celeb comes to the U.K. thinking that the show is genuinely interested in what they do, only to find that Mrs. Merton or Reeves and Mortimer aren’t exactly what you’d call gentle. It is the shock on their faces that provides the payoff. Well I’m not going to fall for that, even though I know for certain that anything I may have done that is worthy of T.V. coverage is not the reason that I have been asked. I have been asked to provide some quirky interest that stems from a recent project of mine, and it is probably going to be used as something to give David some good lines.
Now I have to know just what sort of show this is that I am now considering going to?
Am I likely to be set upon by a herd of tame llamas or will I be able to get in the spirit of the thing and have fun?
I never realized how difficult it was to find out anything about another countries popular media, it is so universally known that nobody bothers to describe or even comment on the nature of the show, rather it is talked of in a sort of code where everyone is expected to know the relevance of the fact that ‘Pee Wee Herman has made many appearances with his bag of props/toys’? O… K…
In the end I made my decision on the fact that I like the look of the guy, that and the fact that he does seem to be genuinely creative about the way he makes programmes, and in my eyes that has got to be a good thing.
So if all goes well, I should be whisked away sometime very soon. I just hope that I can keep the stage fright away and remember to treat it as it is, a bit of a hoot. That way I will at least get to see something that is really close to the American psyche as an unattached observer. It might even make sense of some things that puzzle me about the land across the water. I’ll let you know.