Slightly Above Average Friday

Thankfully, I'm off work for a while now. The three days I worked this week crawled past in a haze of boredom and exhaustion. Consequently, I spent most of yesterday asleep, my slumbers punctuated by a shopping trip to buy the younger of my great nieces a birthday present and a trip to the pub. Feeling somewhat more rested today, I awoke looking forward to Good Friday, and all the delightful entertainments TV would have lined up for me on this bank holiday. You know, I can remember the days when the main TV stations made an effort on bank holidays and religious festivals, instituting special schedules packed full of film premieres, one-off TV specials and appropriately themed editions of regular shows. These days, the only concession to the fact that it was a bank holiday seemed to lie in BBC1's afternoon schedule, which changed to include a couple of family films and a live football match. As for the evening schedules, well, they just seem to have given up. The best I've been able to find on TV today has been ITV3's ritual bank holiday screenings of the film versions of George and Mildred (dreadful - even its star Yootha Joyce died before it was released, it was so bad) and On The Buses (the film which made the 1970s seem even more depressing than they really were and, even more depressingly, outgrossed Diamonds Are Forever at the UK box office in 1971), followed by the same three Carry On films they always show. I don't hold out much hope for the rest of the Easter weekend.

Away from the TV, a few posts ago I commented that I intended slowing down with regard to the output of stories on The Sleaze. I feel this needs a bit of elaboration beyond my original statement that the increased output had made no difference to traffic. Actually, there's a bit more to my decision than just that factor. The bottom line is that writing for the site was beginning to feel like working on a production line. I simply wasn't able to spend as much time as I would have liked on each story and I felt it was beginning show in terms of quality. Many of the stories I've published this year have - to me, at least - felt hurried and formulaic. Which isn't to say they were bad. Just not up to the standard I'd usually strive for. The only answer, as I see it, is to put quality before quantity and go back to something closer to the publishing schedule we had on the old version of The Sleaze, thereby allowing more time to properly develop stories. It will also leave me more time to pursue other projects, like the Sleazecast. OK, that said, it's back to Bank Holiday TV (Carry On - Follow That Camel is on at the moment). I don't know about it being Good Friday, more like Slightly Above Average Friday, even that's only because I wasn't at work today...