Late Night Musings

It's another of those days where I just can't come up with anything to post.  There have been a lot of them of late.  I find that I go through phases like this, when the ideas refuse to flow.  This one has been more prolonged than most, which is slightly worrying.  The problem isn't that nothing is happening worth writing about, but rather that there is too much, leaving me indecisive as to what to post.  The biggest difficulty is that, right now, the political situation is dominating everything, resulting in a temptation to just go on about politics here.  But, to be frank, me keep on ranting about the dire and depressing political situation in the UK would simply be repetitive and dull - how many different ways are there of saying that we are in the process of destroying our entire democratic process in an extreme right-wing quest for their Holy Grail of leaving the EU at any cost?  Not only that, but it just isn't good for my mental health.  On top of all that, I'm feeling listless and unsettled, unhappy at work, worried about friend I seem to be drifting apart from and left socially rootless by the loss of my local pub and my inability to settle anywhere else.  None of this is conducive to being creative.

What I really want to be doing is getting back to posting about pop culture, nostalgia and trivia, but I just can't seem to come up with suitable ideas.  Sure, there are film reviews and movie trailers I could be posting, but I want to do less in depth stuff than that, not to mention covering more varied subject matter. But nothing is currently inspiring me.  Even that usually reliable stand by for inspiration, late night TV, is failing me.  I mean, what has happened to late night TV is this country?  We have more channels than ever, yet none of them can offer me anything better than repeats of MASH or The Waltons.  Or Wheeler Dealers and The Bill,  Back in the day, all manner of weird shit used to turn up late at night.  Not to mention the movies - the sort of stuff that used to fill the late night schedules was amazing: wall-to-wall schlock.  Quite apart from the ancient old black and white films that Channel Four used to specialise in, ITV used to show all manner of English-dubbed continental movies.  It was in the middle of the night that I first sampled the delights of policiers like Le Marginal and Le Cercle Rouge, not to mention a number of dubious sex comedies whose titles I have long forgotten.  Truly, the late night schedules used to be a journey of discovery. 

It all started going wrong when the main commercial channels decided to start showing those bloody all night gambling shows instead of proper programming.  But even after that, the advent of digital TV brought some new late night TV delights.  I remember that BBC Three and BBC Four used to offer some interesting late night programming.  But the former is now defunct and the latter repeating staid and earnest documentaries or endless back-to-back repeated episodes of Line of Duty or Peaky Blinders.  Gone, it seems, are the days when I could stumble across a fascinating documentary about some esoteric subject, or a surprisingly entertaining low-budget drama about such things as the Wolfenden Report or the Lady Chatterley trial.  Channels like Talking Pictures TV, Movies4Men, ITV 4 and even 5Spike intermittently serve up interesting late night movies, repeated old TV shows or other weird stuff, but all too often I just can't find anything to hold my attention late at night.  In these days of apparently endless digital channels, couldn't we have a dedicated late night channel that starts broadcasting at, say, ten thirty in the evening and goes off air at four in the morning, serving up the sort of stuff we used to get on the overnight schedules?