TV Transylvania #2

I sent my previous list of suggestions to the Director General of TV Transylvania but so far have heard nothing. Very strange considering how my wife’s friend knows his cousin’s hairdresser and was sure she could put in a good word for me. Anyway, there you go, I’ve had to think of a couple more:


TIME TOILET

The state of the toilets in rural Romania would make a coprophile blush, but I don't mind them. (The smell of one’s wife’s relative’s crap may be overpowering but at least it makes a change from the smell of animal crap which is dominant elsewhere.) And they’ve given me a first-rate idea for another TV show. Like those kids shows* where mop-topped youngsters or English eccentrics go into a tunnel or a phone box or whatever and it takes them to another moment in time. Except in this show people would be transported to 2009 – yes, THE PRESENT! Bloke goes in thinking about his animals, his soil, Laura Lavric (again) and his dinner, and he emerges thinking about hedge funds, feng shui, Russell Brand and existential angst. He’ll wish he hadn’t bothered. Plus, all the nations’ couch potatoes are laughing at him!

*Yes, yes they are, they’re kids’ shows: Doctor Who is not scripted by Shakespeare, in the same way that Harry Potter books are not written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.


TOP DACIA*

This was going to be a contrived attempt to tell Jeremy Clarkson that he’s wrong. I used to hate him, seeing as how I’ve almost never owned a car yet don’t feel my life to have been entirely meaningless. Admittedly, I gained a grudging respect for the man when he convinced the nation that oily rag I. K. Brunel was our number 2 Briton. But now I just found out that he punched arch media-tw*t Piers Morgan, and my hatred has turned almost to affection. A Dacia is a Romanian car. They make fancy ones now with French engines and cappuccino holders, but the real one is a 1970s design that you run on petrol, butane, ţuică, manure, or any mixture thereof. It’s the best car here simply because it’s 6 inches higher off the ground than any other car, and it needs to be. If Clarkson ever has to do community service for crimes against the ozone layer, I’ll make a case for the defence that he comes here and makes programmes only about Dacias, and he’s got to have a pig on the passenger seat and 2 ton of straw on the roof-rack.

*Pretend that it rhymes with “Gear”, though it doesn’t really.

TV Transylvania #1

I'm still exhausted, so here are some suggestions for television programmes that they could show over here, if somebody had an ounce of imagination, that might perk me up a bit.

DONKEYS DO THE DARNDEST THINGS

Everybody – everybody here, at least - agrees that there’s nothing funnier than a kitten on a skateboard, a dog chasing its own tail or a hamster trying to escape from a pan of frying chips. (Why they use canned laughter on these programmes I do not know – it’s always drowned out by hysterical real laughter in every household I’ve been in.) But the potential entertainment value of the donkey has not been explored to its full potential. There are many of these lovely animals here but they’re made to perform manual tasks like pulling carts of hay. I’m convinced they have a more artistic temperament and are just dieing to get on the stage, maybe simply to waggle their ears in time to The Birdy Song or to do a Graham Norton impersonation. Or they could be asked questions: stamp a hoof so many times for the number of sides on a pentagon, wonders of the ancient world, horsemen of the apocalypse, etc. It’s TV Gold.

SAME OLD, SAME OLD

Until the presenter got pregnant the most popular programme in Romania was Surpriză, Surpriză!. Yes, the same one we used to have in UK with the lovely Cilla Black. It used to go on for about 7 hours every Saturday evening, and in a country where people get by with so very few dreams it made most of those dreams come true. But more realistic – and more modern, considering the “reality television” phenomenon - would be a programme with absolutely no surprises at all. Bloke wakes up, goes and milks the cows, bids his neighbour good-day, calls him a twat under his breath, goes home for breakfast, grunts at his wife, feeds the chickens, has a dump, goes home for lunch, grunts at his wife again, feeds the pig, talks to the dog, digs the vegetable plot, goes home for dinner, grunts at his wife, shuts himself in the bog for 20 minutes with his memories of Laura Lavric, goes to sleep. Every day.

LOTHARIO WATCH

Back in the Good Old Days there was only one channel, only 4 hours of broadcasting per day, and half of those were dedicated to the doings of Comrade Ceauşescu and his Charming Wife Elena. Some people actually miss those times: they were starving but at least everybody else was too, and they were ruled by a megalomaniac arse but at least he was their megalomaniac arse. I’d like to bring back a bit of that for the sake of nostalgia. The only Romanian man alive with comparable standing to “The Genius of the Carpathians” is Ilie Năstase. Ilie played good tennis but is now mainly known for being 6th on Maxim magazine’s list of lotharios, having slept with 2500 women despite looking like my friend Steve*. I think many people would like to spend 2 hours an evening watching and learning his technique.

* Steve is sadly no longer with us, but he was also astonishingly successful in this arena of human endeavour.