Most evenings I let the nippers watch The Simpsons at six. I love that program because as we know it plays on different levels, and the youngsters just like the slapstick of it (and they keep quiet when it's on, which is worth, oh I don't know, about a squillion dollars...).
After that Neighbours comes on. Now, I don’t follow it because it’s effing awful and the kids usually watch for two or three seconds and then go off and fight with each other upstairs or, if I’m lucky, they sit quietly and do a bit of colouring in, and if I’m exceptionally lucky the colouring in takes place in a book and not on the walls...
Anyway, in Neighbours it seems there has been a whole succession of calamaties over the past few weeks.
I think it began with a car crash, er actually no, it would have to have been a multiple vehicle pile-up, this being Neighbours, and then as a typoon swept ashore lightning stuck the town and then a light plane crashed, into a bigger plane, carrying the heads of state of all the nations on earth, and they came down in the bit of the town left after the tsunami caused by the earthquake just offshore swept the houses away, only one house was left and most of the Neighbours cast were inside it looking at each other with serious looks, as the house hung over a chasm to the centre of the earth that the tectonic plates, which are under the Neighbours town (and apparently Los Angeles too) opened up when the local nuclear power plant overloaded because the bloke who was supposed to be looking after it ran out in front of the car which caused the multiple-pile up, and he left the red lever down.
Sorry if you haven’t seen this episode yet.
Anyhow, I was emptying the dishwasher (yes, eventually it’s fixed, but that’s another story...) and I groaned and said, “I wish they would stop being so depressing on this program. Wy can’t we have some smiles!”
And Six turned from the TV and said, “Dad, I think things can’t always be the way you would like them to be.”