Shattered Mirror: Living in a Sitcom

Life’s good.

Generally, anyway. Living on this rock isn’t that bad, compared to say, life on Skaro, where as mutant octopuses we’d be contained inside metallic pepperpots with plumbing apparatus and a cooking utensil for appendages. How would we ever write ironic postcards emblazoned with ‘Wish You Were Here’ to lure unsuspecting Time Lords to their death?

Sure, there’s the everyday annoyances: teenagers wearing jeans that don’t cover their arse, Justin Bieber, faces glued to smartphone screens, UKIP, and the Kardashians. But they’re bearable because they exist on the periphery of our daily lives. You aren’t likely to bump into the Kardashians in Tesco…unless MTV offered them £100,000,000,000,000 for a series entitled ‘Every Little Helps With Klan Kardashian’. Then, we’re doomed.

Doom would be constant if we were the inhabitants of a sitcom. Our existence would be overseen by a malevolent  god with an absurd, twisted sense of humour intent on making our lives as miserable as possible. We’d be the favourite snack of sewer monsters hiding beneath open manholes. Zoos occupied by taxidermied mammals. Wars over the literary value of ‘The Beano’ and ‘The Dandy.’ A human hating, mutually assured annihilation obsessed, cannibal lizard queen ruling with an iron fist.

So, it’s shit that the real world has started to share the traits of the bizarro, twisted, shattered mirror, crapsack world of sitcoms.

An unelected leader! Serial back stabbings! Brexit! Coups, coups, coups! MPs vs Party Membership! The backroom political machinations of Yes, Minister have become a reality. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if the Guardian revealed Theresa May blackmailed members of the Civil Service to accept their new Cabinet overlords. Jim Hacker would be proud, and then advise she launched into a Churchillian speech as the ultimate defence mechanism. Who cares if it’s utter shite, when it sounds good?  The mantra of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. Still, Iain Duncan Smith growing a conscience is going a bit too far. The sitcom god  laughs.

Our political system isn’t the only victim of the malicious sitcom god, no aspect of our lives is safe. In The Inbetweeners, the malicious deity skewers our teenage foibles into the grotesque. All we recognise from our school days is caricatured and exaggerated to the extreme: the non-academic kid becomes Neil, the cocky gobshite is Jay, the sarcastic smartarse is Will, and the grumpy, cynical one is Simon. And all four deal with their anxieties, want for a relationship, and sexual frustrations in the same way: like walking, talking erections on pussay patrol, planking their way to keeping their virginity. School’s hell.

A day at work, is eight hours of sitting in a cubicle or coming up with Trotter esque get quick rich schemes, without the sex dolls filled with explosive gas or the luminous paint or dodgy Russian camcorders or running into bent coppers like Slater . If it all works out we can be one of the  CEOs of a generically named company the government sells off Human Rights to. All we need is a Reliant Regal Van and some panache.

Or  we’re working in shop having to deal with all the eccentric types that walk through the door, ready to fuck up our day. Which is annoying, when you’ve been endowed with the social ineptitudes of Miranda Hart. Even worse is having to put up with a Basil Fawlty like boss going around hating on the poor, promiscuous, and few who are more snobby. It sucks not being a Mr Burns type with an offshore account or not having Donald Trump’s hair and a L’Oreal advertising deal.Work’s hell.

Retirement is going to be even worse. The sitcom god dishes out slapstick abuse to  pensioners; falling off a ladder or being dragged along by a car is just the way it goes in The Last of the Summer Wine. Someone should call Age Concern.

It’s all sitcom-y now, there’s no escape from this bizarro world.

Life’s hell.