Another TV post, inspired by Scary and friends.
Christmas Day 2003. Absolutely nada on TV (We'd watched Meet the Parents, just three days before Jimmy's first visit to my mother's house...)
We fell onto Reality TV (241 on Sky). Oh, that channel is bad. No actors, no scripts no stunts. Cheap titillating TV. What got me was an imported programme called "When Good Pets Go Bad". You've Been Framed Animal Special. It wasn't enough that we should laugh at the man who lost his trousers whilst being attacked in a field by a bull, or watch the smallpox-infected monkeys make their break from the vivisection lab. Oh no, every five minutes we were told "There is no such thing as a bad animal, just bad humans who mistreat good animals."
It was particularly entertaining to see moralising mixed up with xenophobic cultural imperialism. Those naughty rodeos in the 'badlands' of Mexico THIS IS CRUELTY; those Koreans and their horse fights THIS IS BARBARIC; those Spaniards setting fire to bullls's horns BRUTAL EUROPEANS.
The longest strand was, fitingly, about Father Christmas. Or, rather, some good ol' boy who kept reindeer and dressed up as Father Christmas. Unfortunately, one day he had a horrible run-in with a reindeer, which took a very long time to maul him, and drag him round the paddock and blah blah blah, and there wasn't a lot the emergency services could do , and poor old Santa ended up in hospital with broken this and that. And the poor old reindeer had to be put down.
"But we staged this reconstruction so that you can see exactly what happened when a good pet went bad..."
Erm, excuse me! You made another reindeer maul and drag this bloke round the field, dressed as Father Christmas, merely to provide cheap TV footage, with not even the excuse of cultural tradition, and you dare to lecture the dreadful dirty foreigners about animal cruelty. It so got my goat (which proceeded to toss me on its horns round the living room, which just shows that there's no suchthing as a bad pet, just a good pet that has been hurt by the cruelty of humans).
