Dengue Daze, Electric Who? My Mate Greg...

A recent, but thankfully minor health scare got me reminiscing about a not so minor one I experienced some years back when I was laid low for more than a month with a typically tropical hideous disease. My only salvation – trash telly.

1. Dengue Daze

Erin Murphy was a child star on Bewitched, but that “doesn't define who she is as a person.” One would hope not, given that her last appearance on the show was in 1972. I have learned a lot about Erin Murphy in the past few weeks from high-rotation re-runs of Oprah. I have heard about her struggle with bulimia, her stalled career on the motivational speaking circuit and her preferred colonic cleansing retreats. In fact, I have learned many things slumped on my couch, remote control in hand, recovering from Dengue Fever through most of October.

Now, as I emerge from the delirium and take my first tentative steps back into the real world -- or the twisted Bangkok version of it -- I find myself faced with a much bigger hurdle; breaking my recent, but full-blown cable TV addiction.
Dengue is a peculiar beast. It is enervating, debilitating but characterized by periods of deceptive lucidity, followed by times of incoherence, inertia, depression, aches, pains, sweats, shivers and shakes. And wild mood swings, that mark an emotional roller-coaster ride, much like that endured daily by many of the characters on the 85 TV shows that have insidiously hooked me during my convalescence.
But I should count my blessings -- and not just because I shed 7 kilos in 3 weeks, eclipsed only by my fabulously self-destructive cocaine issue a year or so before.

My problems are nothing compared to the misfortunes the vets in a small Yorkshire community on The Chase have had to face. In the BBC serial, which I haven't missed in 17 days, handsome Tom is married to cheerful but irritating Anna and they have four rosy-cheeked offspring. Their veterinary practice may be struggling, but at least they are happy. They have their family, their health and the occasional night out at The Rat and Parrot. Or they would have, had Tom not bonked conniving receptionist Fiona in a moment of drunken, dick-driven lunacy -- and gotten her pregnant -- while Anna was in hospital popping poppet number four. Anna doesn't know about Tom and Fiona, but her sister Sarah does. And she's threatening to blow the whistle, even though she knows the shocking revelation could destroy poor Anna, who is only just beginning to heal from the heartbreaking setback of discovering she was adopted. Their widowed father Roy, meanwhile, has recently re-married, to a gold digging slapper called Maxine who is taking him for a ride, "in more ways that one." (Boom Boom!). It's gripping melodrama, and, being a BBC show, slickly produced and well acted.
Not so The Bold and the Beautiful, the long-running American show. But the daytime soap’s mind-bogglingly plodding pace matched my own during my early disease-stricken days. I swear I nodded off at times only to awake 10 minutes later to find Blake still staring ponderously out of the window of the Santa Barbara hospital room where Autumn (where do they get these names?), immaculate in full face make-up, still showed no signs of emerging from her coma.

Glacial narrative arc aside, I am more than a little curious to find out if Stone will divorce Paige, whether Thorne will discover Starr's awful secret and the true identity of mysterious windsock tycoon Flapper. What's happening to me? In an attempt to stop my brain from turning to mush, I tune in to quiz shows.
"Meet the most feared woman on television," the Beeb voiceover announcer booms as black-clad dominatrix Anne Robinson, host of "The Weakest Link UK," flashes up on screen. Anne, apparently, is a legend. She asks questions and hurls abuse at the contestants on the show who vote each other off round by round. "Which village is missing its idiot? Which imbecile thinks that Thailand is next to Sock World at the local mall? It's time to vote off the Weakest Link," bellows Anne. She is rudeness on legs and I instantly warm to her. It's the contestants that I find terrifying. "I'm Moira, I'm 53 years old, single, and I work as an assistant product packing supervisor at a hubcap manufacturing plant in Swindon, Wiltshire," announces a horsy woman with peroxide hair, lemon slacks and an alarming nose. "I'm Ray, I'm 49, from Clacton-on-Sea, and I work in the entertainment industry," says toupeed-Ray, who turns out to be an amateur ventriloquist. "My name's Bill and I'm a bingo caller from Margate," mumbles Bill, who should seriously consider ditching the bingo halls to pursue a career as a Benny Hill impersonator. Surely these people are not representative of mainstream Britain. The Brits I know are not as bizarre looking or as clueless as this ludicrous bunch. Well, not all of them. Beset with nerves, Moira is off to a rocky start on the day I tune in, incorrectly guessing that the capital of Portugal is Barcelona. Wrong country darls, I sigh. Things deteriorate in round two, the multiple choice bit, where she embarrassingly answers that a balaclava is a wind instrument. "Oh for god sake," I shout at her from my couch, trying to suppress the alarming realization that I've started talking to my television. Her confidence in tatters, Moira is booted straight back to the hubcap factory after round three, sparking guffaws from the other contestants in the process by answering that the 37th president of the United States, who was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal in 1974 was George Washington! What the hell, she was only 180 years out. "Fool," I yell at my flat-screen as she departs, her outfit clashing with the blue studio set and the strobe-lighting lending a garish hue to her unfortunate perm. But before you can say 'Bling, mood swing" my disdain turns into deep, heartfelt sympathy for Moira during her "Walk of Shame" interview. "I thought by coming onto the show, I'd gain some self-confidence, as I've always been socially awkward and had trouble making friends," she says as we both fight back tears. "Instead, I'm going to be a laughing stock for being the first one voted off." Oh no, the poor thing, I wail, making a mental note to write to her, before breaking down in sobs.

Predictably, my sympathy for Moira soon segues into self-pity. Afterall, who am I to scoff at her taste in slacks? I’m no fashion plate, nor is my life one fabulous big success, I bawl, realizing it might be time for a lay down.

Mood swings, sulks and sobs aside, my TV odyssey has left me more informed on a wide range of subjects. I know from CSI and Numbers, for example, that the trick in tracking down serial killers is to dress well, exude sex appeal, utter witty asides -- despite the serious nature of your job -- and keep an open mind. Oh, and it helps to have a geeky but 'appealing in a disheveled sort of way,' mathematical genius on staff. Someone to point out to the other smoldering crime solvers and us lay-people at home, what should have been obvious: That mass murderers, although seemingly random in perpetrating their odious acts, may have, in fact, been basing their slaying pattern on an ancient Pythagorean equation which, when deciphered and translated from Latin, divided by the square root of 645,912 and written backwards over a stencil of Nostradamus' prophecies, could point to the killer's MO and help nab the sonofabitch. Or at least explain why blonde sorority sister Laney Henderson's executioner gouged her eyes out with a spatula and removed her head with an oxyacetylene torch before downloading a photograph of half of her torso onto his blog. How could we have missed that? The clues were all there. Man, these guys are good. And they get so much done.

Even when I'm not on death's door, it takes me the better part of an hour to haul myself out of bed, shower, dress and jump on a motorcycle to work. In the same time period, Kiefer Sutherland on 24 is able to comfort survivors of a nuclear attack in Valencia, California, alert the Pentagon, track down the leader of the terrorist group suspected of carrying out the atrocity, take a call from the President, reconcile with his estranged father, argue with his girlfriend, make up with her, have mind-blowing sex, shower and decide whether to have tacos or tapas for supper.

I really need to be more organized.

Overwhelmed, I switch over to E! Channel, where the programs aren't quite as intellectually challenging. E! has imbued in me, among other things, the knowledge that school dances in America are dangerous events to be avoided at all costs; Prom NightMares -- Those Who Never Came Home; that Lindsay Lohan's mother Deana is a gravity challenged vexatious litigant -- Living Lohan; that former supermodel Denise Richards' life is complicated -- Denise Richards, It's Complicated; and that Meg Ryan has not spoken to her surgically reconstructed mother in 19 years -- Meg Ryan, True Hollywood Story. Above all, I've learned that celebrities are human, and that E! Channel is nothing, if not repetitive. Madonna, I learn, “is not just a star, she's a businesswoman, a wife and a mother;" Sarah Jessica Parker "is not just a star, she's a businesswoman, a wife and a mother," and JLo “is not just a star, she's a businesswoman, a wife and a mother." Yeah, Okay, I get it -- hire some new writers for chrissake!
It’s not that I’ve ever eschewed television. In fact my old favourites have helped me recover from Dengue and deal with Deana Lohan's breathtakingly vile behaviour. I've never been able to resist the fabulously camp Desperate Housewives, the gorgeous Ugly Betty or the frocks on Sex in the City. Not to mention Amazing Race, Project Runway, Mad Men, Maeve O’Meara’s Food Safari and everything on the Turner Classic Movie channel.

But I need to face facts.

My problem has spiraled out of control. Like all junkies, I've already begun trying to hide my addiction. And, oh, the lies. "Ahem, no I'm not really well enough to meet for dinner just yet," I tell a friend, particularly not on Wednesday, I think to myself, desperate to see whether time traveler Doctor Who and his assistant Martha can rescue William Shakespeare from flesh-eating Dejunes in 16th Century London. "No, I'm still not up to tennis," I fib, especially not on Thursday when I'm busting to find out if Tom will finally make a move on his sexy fellow forensic pathologist Nikki on Silent Witness. "Sorry, but Sunday is not good," I apologize, guiltily relishing "Prom NightMares 2" on E! Channel.

So, how to deal with this?

What would Anne Robinson do in my situation, I wonder? How would Ugly Betty cope? Should I seek advice from Oprah? Or am I beyond help? Have I already become the weakest link? The dunce among the deadwood? The village idiot? The loose spoke in the bicycle wheel? Maybe I should just come clean. "Hello, my name's Craig and I'm a cable TV addict. Hello Craig." It's too tragic for words. Should I check into a rehab facility in Malibu? Or just learn to live with my addiction? Others have coped with worse. So what if I watch 87 hours of television a week. It's just one of my many idiosyncrasies and, like Erin Murphy, it doesn't define me as a person. Does it? I can only pray that, like the 300 celebrities I now worship, I will be “blessed” with finding a solution to my remote-control abuse issues in the weeks ahead. Or maybe I'll luck out and clarity will come sooner.

Even, dare I hope, after the next commercial break.

2. Electric Who?

When my much-adored friend Ruth Pollard – who is Middle East correspondent for Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age newspaper posted on Facebook that “Electric Blue will be huge this summer, believe me” I was overcome with excitement.

I immediately logged into YouTube and keyed them in. Nothing. I googled them. Nothing. I logged onto ITunes, still nothing. I even called up the Billboard Dance Chart webpage. Not even a mention. I emailed friends. “Never heard of them,” came back the responses.\
She’s obviously got the name wrong, I mumbled to myself, before keying in variations by merging words, changing cases and trying hyphens.

Emma and Stu had recently turned me onto Lana del Rey, Marg in Sydney introduced Anna Calvi into my life, it was Ruth’s turn. This week’s new discovery would be Electric Blue,
who I would absolutely rave about for two weeks before completely forgetting them.
I finally gave up in a mild state of irritation and went to bed, messaging her the next day for clarification. In hindsight Ruth, who has covered the Arab Spring, various uprisings, the ongoing Gaza clash among other things, must have thought I had either been on a binge or had lost all perspective of things, but she did, graciously, reply.
Just before her note landed, the penny dropped and I had that awful but much experienced “I’ve made a complete fool of myself’ feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Ruth was talking about the color, electric blue. It was as simple as that. Shouldn’t that have been obvious? Why did it not even occur to me? Am I losing my mind?

So many questions, but wait there’s more.

Is there a name for what must surely be a psychological condition in which one automatically assumes that everything – be it a color, car, clothing, animal, vegetable or mineral mentioned on a friend’s Facebook page is a new electro-pop gay dance act? More importantly is there a support group? A cure? Or will it just get worse? What next? Stay un-Tuned.

3. My Mate Greg

Greg Truman, who I have known since he was the smoldering sexpot of a lead singer in a critically acclaimed but commercially underrated late 80s band is doing what I’m doing: Putting out a blog. He’s very good. In fact, I think he’s better than me, and I rarely say things like that. Anyway, we’ve decided to be blog buddies, and unashamedly send out each other’s semi-regular diatribes on each other’s lists. You will enjoy Greggy. I certainly do. Watch out for him oh my scores of followers. He is officially now on my blog email list which includes Kim Kardashian, Robert McGabe, Sporty Spice, the bald man from Aqua and the entire cast of Downton Abbey.
Over and out, my many loyal fans!

Craigy

Lawn Bowls, Reality Check, Anna Calvi...

1. BOWLS WITH KNOWLES

At a training course for young journalists recently, the facilitator announced that I had “more than 30 years experience in journalism and the media.”
I felt like The Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, minus the wrinkles, thanks to my new Botox regime.
Paranoia set in. I was convinced these bright young things were staring at me in barely disguised incredulity that I was not hunched forward as pools of dribble trickled from my mouth, or that I was able to walk without the aid of a stick.
One smartarse even asked if “there was TV back then?” Making a mental note to reduce Mr. Smartarse to a laughing stock and place shards of glass on his chair during the lunch break, I began my little introduction, after being wheeled to the podium, oxygen tank in tow.
I put on a brave, neutral face. I didn’t snarl at them or even frown, again thanks to the Botox, which I’m starting to think I maybe overdoing.
“Well firstly, I didn’t start out as a television journalist,” I began. “And secondly, I am 48 not 100.” Then a wave of nostalgia swept over me, or perhaps I just lost my train of thought.

CUE: Back-in-time dream sequence, scary music, clumsy dissolve segue; Voiceover: ONE HUNDRED, One hundred, a hundred….

Wollongong, Australia, 1981
Not many people reach 100, but Beryl Cheadle was among them. She was the first person I interviewed for the first story I ever wrote on my first day as an 18-year-old cadet reporter on my hometown newspaper, the Illawarra Mercury.
It was an easy assignment, the chief of staff assured me. Ask her a few questions, get a photo of her in a party hat, preferably holding a balloon, and that would be that. Beryl was as bright as a button and a barrel of laughs, the nursing home staff had assured him.
Wrong.
Beryl was a foulmouthed, demented old bag.
When I wished her happy birthday she spat a mouthful of cake all over my face, before launching into a tirade about what a no-hoper of a son I had turned out to be, how I had made nothing of my life and how I had left her to rot in this “stinking shithole.” Evidently she had mistaken me for one of her offspring who, understandably, never visited her.
Beryl’s centenary celebrations culminated with her scowling at the photographer, letting out a loud fart, soiling her nightgown and ripping her party hats to shreds while yelling at us to "Piss off." It wasn’t an auspicious start to my career but not quite as bad as having to interview a ventriloquist's doll when the visiting ventriloquist himself refused to speak the following week.
Beryl ended up as 2 lines below a tiny photo on page 7, I ended up on the sports desk.
It was compulsory for all cadets to spend a year covering sport back in those horse and cart days. Most of them excelled at it, turning out rip-snorting reports regaling readers about rugby matches, golf tournaments and fishing contests. I was the exception.
While I was a reasonable volleyball and tennis player at school, sport did not interest me in the slightest, nor did I know the slightest thing about it. I couldn’t tell a quarterback from a lock-forward, a birdie from an eagle and I wouldn’t have know a flathead if one had jumped up and bitten me on the ass.
I was so bad, they ended up consigning me to purgatory by putting me on the lawn bowls round.
Lawn bowls, for those of you not familiar with it is “a lawn game in which the objective is to roll slightly asymmetric balls so that they stop close to a smaller ball called a jack,” according to Wikipedia. It is played outdoors on a bowling green, which in Australia are located behind booze-selling bowling clubs. The average age of the typical lawn bowler in 1981 was 107, or so it seemed to me.
But my grandfather had been a champion bowler, so I was familiar with the environment, which usually involved beer and slot machines inside the clubhouse, and I managed to turn in copy that wasn’t a total disaster.
In fact, after a few weeks the desk gave me my own column.
It was called – wait for it – “Lawn Bowls with Craig Knowles” and featured a picture byline of my still pimply face next to an image of a bowls ball whipped up by the art department. My column was published every Monday. It was opposite “Tennis with Dennis” and next to “Fishing with Phil.” I swear I am not making this up. The Mercury, or Mockery as it was often called, loved these little rhyming humiliations.
To this day, I still don’t know the first thing about lawn bowls, I could never grasp the concept or see the point of it. But it did teach me two golden rules of journalism: 1) When in doubt, bullshit your way through things, and 2) everyone, even lawn bowlers, have a story, you just have to ask.
After a while, my initial horror at the embarrassing column, for which I was mercilessly ridiculed, and dismay at covering this ridiculous sport began to dissipate.
Because of my inability to come to terms with the technical side of things, I went for the feature stories.
Among others, I found and wrote about amputee bowlers, blind bowlers and a woman bowling club president who celebrated her 80th birthday by parachuting from a plane onto a bowling green.
She actually missed her mark by miles and had to be disentangled from a tree by the fire brigade, sustaining serious injuries and suggestions she may never walk again.
But the sub-editors cut that bit out and my “Flo’s Flop --Parachute Plunge a Fiasco” ended up as “Flying Flo an Inspiration at 80!” You gotta love tabloids.
Astonishingly, after a few months I began to build up a following. In fact I was becoming a ‘personality’ in the Greater Illawarra lawn bowls community, my first brush with fame!
People wrote in to commend some of my stories, or to point out the 45 glaring errors in my match reports.
I was invited to VIP events, emceed weekly meat raffles, guest judged ballroom dancing contests at various bowling clubs and even took part in the 1981 annual Illawarra “Celebrity Bowls Match.” I have it on good authority that I still hold the record for the worst ever performance.
My year on the bowling greens, or at least looking out at them from my bar stool, culminated in winning the Cadet Journalist of the Year Award for a story I’d written on a Vietnam vet who had taken up bowls to help overcome post traumatic shock then became an outspoken advocate of Asian migration, urging Australia to take more refugees, especially victims of the Indo-China Wars, an admirable and brave thing to do in the racist steel town that was Wollongong in the early 1980s.
I felt a bit of a fraud in accepting the award. (Another recurring journalist's trait).
I’d stumbled into journalism by accident. During my final year of high school, with absolutely no idea of what I wanted to do with my life --my preferred choices for work experience – where you went and worked at a ‘real’ place for a week –- swimming pool lifeguard, frock salon assistant or bartender, fell through. The first two had been snapped up early, the third was a non-starter because at that stage I was 17 and not legally entitled to enter a drinking establishment. So I was relegated to the Mercury as a last resort and was completely indifferent about it.
But as soon as I walked into the smoke-filled newsroom, saw the mayhem, heard the clatter of typewriters, abuse and expletives being hurled from the tele-printer to the subs desk, met the eccentric, outrageous, borderline personality disorder, substance abusing hacks and inhaled the post-lunch, or rather pub break alcohol fumes that seemed to permeate from every pore of every reporter, my life changed in an instant.
These were my people. I knew I had found my place. So after finishing school, I spent about three months partying before hounding the editor until he gave me a cadetship.
Bowls gave way to triple homicides, drowning deaths and level train crossing accidents as I graduated from the sports desk to police rounds and general reporting. You were thrown in at the deep end in those days. It was old school, your copy would be torn up, editors would yell, bellow and bang on and on at you until you got it right. And eventually you did. The skills I learned in those four years gave me the grounding I needed to work all over the world, which I have done, eventually moving from print into radio and TV.
And to think, I owe it all to lawn bowls.
I didn’t share all this with the young journalists. These bouts of nostalgia are occurring more frequently of late. Face it, I do have decades of experience and I am old, almost old enough to take up lawn bowls myself, though people say I don’t look my age. This may well change when my complimentary Botox coupons run out.

2. REALITY CHECK

I am officially over my obsession with reality TV. Hooray, you say.
It wasn’t that I finally got bored with the falsity, the foolish fame-whore contestants or my own inability to become one of them and get on a show despite 54 auditions in 4 years. It was Bangladesh that did it. Yes Bangladesh.
I arrived home a month ago after shooting a film about malnutrition in one of the poorest nations on earth, dumped my bag, switched on the telly and up came The Biggest Loser.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I despise fat people -- except on airplanes, trains, in cinemas and on dance floors -- it just felt like I’d been catapulted into a parallel universe.
From having just interviewed people who were lucky to scrape together a plate of rice a day, and witnessing heartbreaking scenes of pot-bellied children on the brink of death, here I was staring at 420 pound Americans in pink polyester pullovers “trying to get their lives back” and “change their eating habits” which apparently had involved 78,345 McNuggets, 96 pizzas and five buckets of ice cream a day until they managed to get on the show.
I used to weep at their breakdowns, cheer them on, shed tears of happiness when they broke the 100-pound barrier. I cried and cried and cried watching that show, which in hindsight I think may have been my outlet for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Now I stared at these morbidly obese morons and actually started hurling abuse at my TV.
“Send them all to Bangladesh for a month, that’ll sort them out,” I shrieked, sounding alarmingly like my father (I’m often a bit odd when I return from shoots). “None of this luxury Malibu ranch bullshit. If you don’t want to end up weighing 743 pounds then don’t eat 754 donuts for breakfast for fuck sake. “ I wanted to throttle them.
To be fair, I still like The Amazing Race and Top Chef, but traveling to some of the poorest parts of Asia seems to have put things in perspective, given me a reality check so to speak.
Then I got to thinking, and others have helped with this including my fabulous friend MP Nunan in New York, that maybe there’s a market for more humorous, Asian-based reality shows that satirize all this U.S. nonsense.

In fact, I might even pitch them to funders. Picture these:

This week on Reality Check Asia Channel….

--Fatima and Faheeda come to blows as a sari sale turns ugly on the Real Housewives of Sindh Province, Pakistan….

--Marianne Soo travels to Canberra, Cheboksary, Putra Jaya and Banda Seri Begawan as her quest to discover The Dullest City on Earth switches into top gear….

--With just five refugees remaining it’s Krispy Kreme Donut time on The Biggest Gainer….

--Six self-righteous plain people compete to construct a yurt for Mongolian AIDS orphans while vying for the title of Asia’s Most Insufferable Aid Worker….

--Four domestic servants struggle with nausea in the blue-cheese platter playoff in Maid in Thailand. Who will take home the $16 winner’s cheque?

--The capacity building Bosonova and Conference Call Cha-Cha prove unsustainable for some semi-finalist stakeholders in So You Think U.N. Can Dance…

--With nine teams eliminated Mindanao, West Papua and Southern Thailand are left to battle it out for the 2012 Insurgent Idol Crown….

--With the Hmong sarong and Lahu shoe challenges behind them, some ethnic designers are running out of ideas on Project Hilltribe….

--Eight teams make their way to Luang Prabang in Laos where they must perform an ancient Animist dance while dressed as Liza Minnelli on Amazing Gay Race Asia….

--And in a twist that trumps all of this season’s dramas, Asia’s Next Miss Supermodel degenerates into a tequila-fuelled slap-fest when it’s revealed that half of the remaining contestants are actually male. Will they be disqualified?

These would be much more entertaining than those awful housewives, the Bachelorette and Bill and Giuliani, don’t you think? Oh I just thought of another one:

--Kim’s callousness turns to caution following Chloe’s fatal inflatable jumping castle accident. With two down and six to go, how much longer will it take to KILL THE KARDASHIANS..

Bravo!

3. AWESOME ANNA

And finally, last blog it was Lovely Lana, this time it’s Awesome Anna Calvi.
Thanks to my good friend Marg, who I have know since our shared Illawarra Mercury days 30, yes THIRTY years ago, for turning me onto this week’s diva

Check her out…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo267BTLnZk