Britain's Got Talent

The sound has stopped working on my computer. Hurrah. (I'm searching for the sarcasm emoticon...) Quite what I do to deserve such dreadful luck when it comes to all matters technological, I'm not sure. I guess the simple truth of the matter is that I'm glued to machines for many, many hours a day, which makes the likelihood of them wearing out, or breaking, or sulking quite high...

I punished myself by sitting down to watch The Towering Inferno which happened to be on telly. A disaster movie is always brilliant when you're in a bad mood. However bad your life is, at least you're not trapped in a burning skyscraper with Fred Astaire and O J Simpson... Although one can't help but wonder if the tits who masterminded 911 weren't somehow influenced by the film.

I went to the gym feeling a little sorry for myself, trying to work on the bus, with the sound from my computer continually cutting out in my ears. As I reached my stop, the guy next to me nudged me and blurted out, "did you get married on the telly recently?" Obviously I said yes. "It was beautiful," he said, and my day was instantly made. Believe it or not, he's the first stranger who's approached me in this manner and I felt proud as punch!

The gym was exhausting, but even more exhausting was trying to write a sequence of underscore in the cafe afterwards. The sun was glaring through the window and I was forced to hold my headphones in a special way to make the sound work properly, but really the exhaustion was Brass itself. I'm right at the end of my proverbial tether!

I worked late into the night and finally turned a corner on the song I'm currently working on, which means another one can get ticked off the list...

I stopped for a while to watch the final of Britain's Got Talent, which was a fairly high-quality affair by these shows' standards. Still, I worry that the result will mean a plethora of over-produced formulaic albums of musical theatre and semi-operatic covers hitting the charts in time for Christmas. Yet again, an absolute riot of cliches sprang from the glistening lips of all involved. The opera girl, with the semi-okay voice which would benefit from proper classical training, was told she was "pitch perfect." I get so profoundly irritated by people using this term to mean "you sing in tune." Perfect pitch is a very specific thing, which should never be muddled up with other terms. If I were a doctor, I wouldn't get away with telling someone they had cancer if they were having a heart attack, so why should an "expert" judge on a talent show get away with critiques which simply don't make sense?

I wrote down a list of all the cliches uttered (without any form of irony) by one or all the contestants. I think we had the full compliment...

"We're going to raise the bar"
"We're going to bring it"
"Blood sweat and tears have led up to this moment"
"This is going to be the performance of our lives" (x3)
"I want to make my dad/ family/ little boy/ dead husband proud"
"This is the biggest performance I've ever done"
"This is the hardest I have ever worked"
"This show has made me believe in myself"
"It's been such an amazing/incredible journey" (x2)
"This performance could change our lives"
"Everything rests on tonight's performance"

How's that?!

Tragic!