It will probably come as no surprise to you that Karen and I like to watch TV programmes with a bit of an edge to them. We have no objection to shows that contain gratuitous nudity, foul language, drugs, violence, baking, and so on and so forth.
Last week, Karen’s mum was staying with us, and we did a masterful job of accidentally watching the kinds of programmes that one would not normally watch with one’s mother-in-law.
On Monday evening, while I was out at a band rehearsal, the two of them decided to watch Black Swan. Since I wasn’t there, I’ll let Karen tell this part of the story:
Well the most remarkable thing about our viewing of Black Swan was that the keyboard kept trying to save me from embarrassment by taking it upon itself to fast forward at random. I replaced the batteries and returned to the end of the scene before the masturbation scene, and then we watched that through. The keyboard glitched again shortly before the lesbian sex scene but mum pointed out that we had got the gist and did not need to rewatch it. Karen out.
On Tuesday evening we decided to watch some nice light sitcoms. First up, an episode of Taxi that hasn’t aged well. Maybe in 1980 it was funny to watch Louis de Palma sexually blackmailing Elaine Nardo in exchange for adequate working conditions for the rest of the staff, but in 2014 it’s knee-deep awkwardness from start to finish. We followed that up with an episode of Cybill, in which Cybill and Marianne write a porn movie, and Cybill also discovers that Zoe lost her virginity in Europe and they have a nice little chat about that. I hasten to add that I didn’t select these episodes specifically for maximum discomfort, these just happened to be the next ones on the unwatched pile.
By Wednesday evening I had learned my lesson, and was playing it much more safe – we watched the first in the new series of Great British Bake Off, and then I saw that Raiders Of The Lost Ark was on BBC3 so we watched the first 80 minutes or so of that. Thursday evening we got our kindles out and and read instead. While I know it would make a far more exciting blog post if we watched Wolf Of Wall Street (which we actually watched with my dad), or The Inbetweeners (which we watched with my mum), or Total Recall (which I once watched with my granddad (Mmmm baby, you make me wish I had three hands!)), we didn’t.
I was actually praying to some sort of deity that mum would make no remark on the virginity-losing scene.
Is it possible to see Raiders in the schedule and not watch it? No matter how many times you’ve seen it before? I did exactly the same thing. Shaun of the Dead had a very similar effect on my last night too. I’m doomed if I see Shawshank on telly late at night on a weeknight….
Certainly in this situation, it was exactly the sort of family-friendly lighthearted action frolick that we needed.
yeah – Harrison Ford films of about that era are probably perfect. Except maybe Witness. Or Blade Runner…. but otherwise…
I have nightmares about listening to Blood Sugar Sex Magik by the red hot chili peppers in the car with my mum. I hadn’t, until that moment, realised quite how childishly smutty the album was.