The Glass and Tubing Between Us
One of the upsides of TV-watching from the safe confines of your couch is that you can abuse people to your heart’s content and emerge outside no less kind and compassionate in the eyes of others, despite that comment you made about that celebrity’s nose and the likelihood of it being able to open an oyster. My mother, for example, is a devotee of quality current affairs and international relations programs, and for a long time I was convinced that deep set concentration in her eyes stemmed from a real interest in and thirst for knowledge — that was until she made one too many “doesn’t that newsreader realise that tie is two seasons old? I haven’t seen a tie that skinny since the 70s!” comments, and I began to suspect otherwise.
Objects of her TV ire extend past unfashionable newsreaders, however, and into the domain of the incomprehensible: anyone who knows anything about radio and Spicks & Specks star Myf Warhurst would say she is clearly one of the loveliest and most good natured women in the Australian entertainment industry, or indeed, Australia itself.
But not Mum. Mum has decided that Myf is egregiously bubbly and god-knows-what-else, freezing at the very sight of her and muttering things that don’t bare repeating on such a tame blog. Lately though, she has made an admirable attempt to “reform” her Myf-bashing ways, and now when seeing music’s golden girl on the idiot box she says nothing, just tenses up and sets her jaw. Now I won’t pretend that I’m scot free of my own irrepressible disdain for certain TV mainstays (such as Peter Cundall and Phil Harding, which makes me look like I have something against old guys with funny accents and a passion for horticulture and archaeology, respectively), but this post isn’t about my foibles, is it?
For you see, Mum’s deviance of judgement does not end there — it works the other way too. Although she has also apparently “reformed” on this particular character, she once had a short-lived but no less disturbing obsession with Argentine tennis play David Nalbandian.
I mean, look at him! He has zombie eyes! And he totally contradicts all her previous nose insults! Maybe if he had a lovely on-court nature, the same kind of gentlemanliness as Roger Federer, or the strangely hot demons that make Marat Safin pound his hapless tennis racquets into the grass/clay/plexicushion, but no. Nalbandian is a good player, but that makes him no more remarkable than any other pro player, and certainly no less creepy.
A person on whom Mum has yet to reform so far is Lehrer NewsHour anchor Jeffrey Brown.
From what I have been able to make out from her somewhat unfathomable rationale for this attraction, it is that he reminds her of the New English Boston-Symphony Orchestra-attending Toryness of her lost youth(?) I’m not really sure. All I know is he isn’t as bad as David Nalbandian, though I wouldn’t exactly run out to put Jeffrey in a sweatband and short shorts either. Oh well. Maybe it’s his fish eyes. Maybe it’s because he has more than half a brain cell, and often reports for the artsy poet segments of the NewsHour. Maybe it’s his groovy, In Fashion ties. Maybe we will never know.
I’m just glad there’s a whole lot of glass, tubing and sometimes continents between Mum and the people who appear on our TV.
N.B. [None of these images are mine --open them in a new window to find their original source]
