New Season

All the signs are there that we are slipping into Autumn.  (In meteorological terms, we're already there, as the start of September is the official start of the season).  For one thing, we've seen the start of all those campaigns to get us to give up anything we enjoy for a month.  I've never seen the point of these campaigns.  If you want to give something up, just do it.  Don't stop, say drinking alcohol for just a month - you won't give it up for good, you'll just spend the following month binge drinking. Then there are the campaigns to get you to grow facial hair for a month for charity.  Oh do fuck off!  If you want to give money to charity, just do it.  Moustaches are for life (or maybe holiday romances, like mine at the moment), not just whimsical charity campaigns.  In days gone by, the surest sign that the season was changing were the TV schedules - each new actual season was accompanied by a new TV season.  The most of important of these was the Autumn TV season, with its run up to Christmas, which was always the TV event of the year.  As the nights drew in, people inevitably turned increasingly to their TVs for entertainment.  Consequently, Autumn was when the TV stations debuted the new series of all their top shows.  By contrast, Summer was the least important TV season, with stations assuming that everyone was out enjoying the good weather and not watching TV, so they filled their schedules with repeats, shows they had no faith in and sport.

Nowadays, it is often difficult to tell the difference between TV seasons.  Sure, stuff like X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing still run their new series in the Autumn, but the good old days of the big 'New Season' announcements by the main TV channels seem to be long gone.  New programming seems to spread more evenly across the year: even Summer now seems blessed with its fair share of new series.  The main thing which seems to have denoted the start of a new TV season are the adverts.  Not that there has been a wholesale change in what we're seeing in the commercial breaks, but several long-running series of ads have been showing new 'instalments', while several others have switched formats completely.  Most notably, Confused.com seems to have dropped James Corden, although that Mercedes he drove in their ads is still there.  Now, however, it is being driven by some weiro who is probably a serial killer and has Corden's body in the boot.  I'm not quite sure why they  have decided that a psychopath is the best spokesperson for a comparison site, but I guess that when the alternative is James Corden... Well, personally, I'd have brought back Brian the Robot.  I wonder whatever happened to him, who is he doing ads for now?   More shockingly, it seems that Oak Furnitureland have finally sacked the two guys who have been in their ads for what seems like decades.  You know the ones I mean: the hapless store manager and his even more hapless assistant, who spend their time 'knocking on wood' and vising customers that 'there's no veneer in here'.  What are they going to do mow?  It was apparently the only work they could get (apart from guest appearances in Holby City as' patients of the week').  But that, it appears, is what the new TV season has come to: a few news commercials.  Ah, for the good old days!