For Fork's Sake

I'm clearly losing my mind. I'm convinced that I remember switching off my television on Saturday afternoon, before going out. However, when I came home it was still showing Carry on Nurse on Film Four. It is pretty disconcerting to open the front door and hear the murmur of voices behind the living room door. So disconcerting that it resulted in me stalking around the house brandishing a gardening fork. Obviously, there was no one there - I was still alone in the house. If you are wondering about the fork, I'd just bought it, along with a shovel and a rake, with the intention of attempting to reclaim my back garden from the chaos I've allowed to engulf it over the past few years. I actually did make a start on this Herculean task once I'd calmed down from the TV incident - I cleared most of the path and rediscovered the external stop cock cover. Ultimately, I was defeated by the large tree branch which was snapped off of one of the trees in the next door council park during the recent gales and which wound up in my garden. The council have so far been reluctant to do anything about it, (it is far too large for me to deal with), or the other branch growing from one of their trees which threatens to smash my bathroom window every time there's a strong wind.

The whole ordeal left me exhausted and aching from head to foot, with only the energy to crash out on the sofa and watch that treacherous TV. So, you can imagine my outrage when I found, instead of Indiana Jones on BBC1, bloody tennis. And it went on, and on. Eventually, bloody Sue Barker popped up, jovially boasting that they had been on air for almost twelve hours. Believe me, that's not something to be proud of. As you've undoubtedly gathered, I detest tennis and dread those two weeks every year when Wimbledon disrupts the TV schedules. Now, I feel I have the right to get angry on this subject as, for the duration of Euro 2012, I've had to listen to non-football fans complaining about the amount of time devoted to football in the schedules. But come on, it didn't take up anything like the time Wimbledon has so far - it certainly didn't cause a completely unscheduled six hour interruption to the schedules. As a licence fee payer I really do object to having to put up with what is a very minority middle class sport being rammed down my throat like this. Anyway, the upside of all this was that I ended up watching Richard II on BBC2 in its entirety (I don't usually have the energy for anything cultural at weekends), which was pretty bloody good. Similarly, the night before, more Wimbledon overspill had forced me into watching Simon Schama's Shakespeare, which was also very good. But, getting back to the point, I'm sure that I'm not alone in resenting this takeover of the BBC's prime time schedules by Wimbledon, particularly as, within a month, we'll be suffering wall-to-wall Olympic coverage across the whole of the BBC. I'm really not looking forward to that.