…god alone knows what that’s about. i say this because no-one i know watches it, except me, and that’s because i am sick and have nothing else to do except smear raspberry jam across my fevered brow. obviously, i don’t understand most of what’s said. it does have great range though. there is one channel seemingly devoted to replaying obscure english football games from about 10 years ago. there is another channel which shows nothing but models walking down the catwalk complete with the most head-sickening camera movements known to tv. my favourite though is probably the russian version of nickelodeon. russian cartoons are dark and flickering, the colours always charred. and the subjects are equally grim – a puppy with cheeky, joyful eyes hides in a dark alley while a crippled old woman gets off a night bus into the snowy, deserted street. the puppy then launches itself from the shadows and viciously attacks the woman, dragging her screaming to the floor before scampering off with her handbag. another one showed a dappled doe frolicking in the snow, the winter sun casting bleak shadows over the animal’s joy before a hunter emerges from hiding and shoots the deer square in the head. touchingly, the animators lovingly detail the powder burn around the entry wound, as if searching for the mystery of the doe’s lost soul in the blackened fur.
i have been given a copy of winnie the pooh to watch when i get round to fixing up my vcr. it is not the disney version. by the look of the cover, winnie is a dark and mournful bear with cruel teeth and claws, while eeyore is a shabby drunk close to death by cirrhosis. if there is a tigger i suspect he will savage winnie in some kind of terrible cartoon cock-fight. the whole thing looks like it was directed by bergman deep in a ten-pill-a-day depression. this is what makes russian tv so very uplifting. there is a programme called ‘calm down’ which, in between shots of a presenter as happy as the sun, shows nothing but people drowning, houses burning, animals with two heads dead in a barn and other brutal stuff like that. i could not understand the title at first, but having watched the cartoons, all is clear: you are going to die, it will be terrible, but so what – get over it.
