Why Ham is the New Netflix …
I’ve just watched the final episode of Celebrity Traitors.
I don’t usually watch these Big Brother, Strictly, or Britain's Got Talent-type shows. The over-dramatisation of the minutiae makes my shit itch; it just gets under my skin. I hate the big pregnant pauses before the often insignificant statements uttered by their guests/talent/hosts. So rather than sit and blatantly whittle away the precious minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years that will ultimately complete my life, and complain, tut, and exacerbate, I turn my eyes and mind to other things.
Others around me have banged on, yes, banged on, about Traitors, so I was curious. Finding myself with a couple of the previously mentioned minutes of my life, baron of distractions, I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me, and I started to watch the damn show.
After the first episode, I was actually invested, truly hooked! The clever editing, the music, the format, it demanded my soul, and I gave it willingly.
For those who haven't seen this seductress of a TV show, I’ll explain …
19 celebrities (and to my shock, I knew who most of them were!) get to live in a huge castle-type house, somewhere in the country, to complete games while trying to work out which 3 of them are designated ‘The Traitors’ of the group. At the end of each day, they gather around a big table to discuss who they want to banish: ‘Who is a traitor?’ Of course, they often get it wrong. In the dead of night, the traitors decide which of them will be ‘murdered’. This is usually based on which of the rest of the group appears to be threatening the traitor's discovery.
The next day arrives with one of them missing, and then the whole thing goes around again.
As this was a celebrity version of the show, money won from each daily task went to charity.
This is not your usual thing, Wally. Why are you writing this? That's a great question. Here it is …
It started a chain reaction of thoughts in my poor little brain.
The extravagance, this eloquent lifestyle being played out before me, left me feeling uncomfortable, ashamed to be human, and a little sad. I sat in my own home, warm, fed and watered, while these people on my TV were surrounded by all that luxury, fancy food and drink, and blacked out executive cars to ferry them around to each of the tasks, while all the time looking as if they were dealing with some of life's biggest questions. In reality, of course, it was just a very regal-looking game of cat and mouse. I disliked myself for enjoying it.
I consoled myself with the fact that it was all for a good cause, which cause would ultimately depend on who the winner happened to be. Did we get any real insight into the benefiting charity? No. They were not included in any of it.
The winner, Alan Carr, did say after announcing Neuroblastoma UK as his chosen charity, "It's a wonderful children's cancer charity... that money will change lives." Alan is a patron of the charity. He was able to give £87,500 to them, so I’m sure this injection of cash into the bank of Neuroblastoma UK will, as he said, “change lives”, but just how much profit did the show make, and why couldn’t more be done for other charities with their hat in the ring?
All that revenue tipped in to create such an opulent TV show, just to be able to hand £87,500 to a very worthy charity. I think I'd have been just as happy to read that the BBC had just donated without making the show at all. But then, with the price and let's face it, relevance of a TV licence being on the tip of people's tongues these days, I suppose I should be grateful for the existence of The Traitors. At least my money is going somewhere.
Our world is driven by consumerism, and most of us are guilty of being materialistic from time to time, and I hate society for bestowing these ‘gifts’ upon us. You only have to walk around one of the big supermarkets to see it laid out in front of you, especially as we head towards Christmas. I found myself standing staring at 2 packs of ham the other day, wondering which would be the best for me. Should I get honey roast or black pepper ham? Which speaks to me the most?! I should have been asking myself why there are so many varieties in the first place! Do we need 20 different hams? And the packaging … man!
If you went back 60 years and explained the ham situation to your granny, she wouldn’t believe you! I mean, she wouldn't believe she was talking to a time-travelling grandchild she didn't even know she had, no doubt, but that's not my point.
If you find yourself wondering whether you need the plain gin or the one filled with glitter this Christmas, take yourself off to a food bank, because some people have to make choices between eating or heating.
This year, I have been taking a breath. When materialist Andy pops up, I pause. I ask myself, Do I need this? After a day or 2, I usually conclude no, I don’t. If I do, I try and buy second-hand. My kids laugh at me for dressing myself from local charity shops. If I’m wearing something new that they haven't seen before, they ask if I’m wearing dead man's clothes. I respond by saying every pound I spend in charity shops goes somewhere good, it's consumerism with a conscience, and that makes me feel good.
Let's go back to ham, it's said that energy never goes away, it just gets converted, you know, kinetic energy to heat through friction, that sort of thing. If you consider our pig and just how much energy goes into rearing, dispatching, processing, packaging, shipping and finally to us at home. It sits in our fridge in its hermetically sealed plastic house, dormant, having swallowed up thousands and thousands of kilowatt-hours per ton of energy. We eat it, taking on 140 calories per 100 g and we then use that energy to keep us breathing, blinking, and watching TV. After a couple of hours, it's done its job, and that energy has gone. Or has it? Yes, we converted it to movement, heat, and electrical energy, but then we have to do it again, carry on living, but I don't feel as if I have passed that energy on to be stored and dissipated later in the world.
Look, I don’t know if any of this article has any cohesion, I’m spilling my mind out to stop it rotting brain cells, but what I do know is that the final episode of Celebrity Traitors Commanded 12 million views at its peak. If all of us 12 million gave just one pound, imagine the good that would do for that lucky charity.
I dont know about you but, instead of waiting for the next thing to be rolled in glitter so as to highlight its importance to me, whether it be a vital charity via a shiny TV program or honey roasted pig in plastic, I’ll donate something, buy second hand, support a small local shop instead of lining the pockets of Jeff Bezos’ at Amazon.
And yes, I know that's slightly hypocritical considering that I have a bloody book out on Amazon! I also have it in a local book shop, and we all have to start somewhere, right?
The world is a wonderful and baffling place to exist in, amongst other things, it's amazing, disgusting, beautiful, weird, dirty, selfish, and giving, all at once. Fuck New Year's resolutions, it's new life resolutions I’m interested in. Help local people to you, buy fresh food locally, check on neighbours and friends, help make your part of the world the best it can, and sure, buy those new cushions, but donate the old ones. If we all did small things, made tiny changes, think of the possibilities.
But hey, perhaps I’m overthinking it.
Photo by The Oregon State University Collections and Archives on Unsplash
