Shiny Happy People

Usually when I am on a flight, I hear from the captain and the flight crew during the course of the flight. These fine people speak to the passengers in a professional and informative manner and we all understand what they say and are happy, informed and reassured.

Some flight companies adopt a slightly different approach. I recently returned from a holiday in Croatia with one of them (I’m not saying which).

Rather than letting the flight crew speak, we were subjected to messages pre-recorded by what I can only describe as “shiny happy people”.

The messages alternated between a man who seemed high on euphoria and a women totally immersed in rapture. I can kind of sense why these recordings exist and what they are meant to achieve but I get the feeling, looking around at my fellow passengers, that their goals weren’t quite met.

The airline is a budget airline that is striving to get people in the mood for their holiday while at the same time trying to raise their spirits about the two and a half hour flight ahead. It worked better on the journey out but not so well on the journey back.

I heard one guy say “What do they mean welcoming us home as if it is the best thing since sliced bread? I don’t WANT to come home! I was on holiday and I want to STAY THERE!”

It didn’t bother me too much because deep down I prefer happy people to miserable buggers (even though I can be a bit of a miserable bugger myself sometimes).  However, it got me thinking – always a dangerous thing.

What if the plane had a fault and both engines failed? What would happen as the aircraft started to dive towards the sea? Do they have a pre-recorded message for that?

Happy Man:  “Hey holiday makers! We hope you are enjoying our AMAZING flight but we do have a slight problem. Nothing to worry about but the aircraft is now plummeting towards the Atlantic Ocean as a rate of knots.”

Happy Woman: “Yes – the water is REALLY WARM at this time of year and to make sure that you fully enjoy it, please BRACE now! If you don’t know how to BRACE, our WONDERFUL flight crew will help you. IF you hear your fellow passengers SCREAMING, rest assured that they are screams of EXCITEMENT at a plunge into the warm wonderful water!”

Happy Man: “And after impact we will do our very best to get any survivors out of the aircraft as quickly as possible!”

Okay – that’s a bit extreme, I admit, but there are a lot of shiny happy people around, particularly on the radio and our telly boxes.

I no longer listen to the radio, apart from the news channel when I wake up, but in the past I recall overly happy DJs laughing at – well – nothing - in such a forced way that I thought they were all having a seizure.

I know things haven’t changed because this morning I saw an advert for the breakfast show on a local bus with pictures of demented looking DJs guffawing at something that was out of shot with a line that explained that their show was a mixture of music and “banter”. 

I assume that "banter" means lots of in-jokes from the DJ team that result in bouts of hysterical laughter at their own expense that the general public don't really find funny at all, especially while stuck in traffic, driving to a mundane job on a miserable, cold, dark Manchester Monday morning in the middle of January.

Similarly light entertainment programmes on TV are full of presenters who seem to have taken some form of drug to make them laugh hysterically at dull items and equally dull celebrity guests that I have never heard of as they try to plug their latest projects.

I am sure that you are now reading this thinking “You miserable bastard! Why don’t you just lighten up?”

The truth is that I provide my own form of entertainment on a daily basis at work by ranting mercilessly about things like reality TV, music, politics and shiny happy celebrities, causing joyous merriment amongst my co-workers as they realise that I am just a cantankerous old git who doesn’t understand modern culture.

And they are right.

But at least their laughter is genuine.

I’ll leave you with the song that inspired the title of this post.

I’m the grumpy git peddling at the start of the video.

Please don’t laugh.

Radio Grump FM

At work the other day, a fellow grumpy old man and I were discussing how miserable the world has become. For an instant we both forgot that we were supposed to be being productive, as demanded by our so-called superiors, and ranted about the state of the world and the general feeling of misery. Before I knew it I was ranting about how much Carol Kirkwood’s morning chirpiness annoys me (read about it here) and we both agreed that modern DJ’s should have to pass an IQ test, a humour test and play decent music instead of talking crap.

Another guy who was eaves-dropping suddenly said:

“You two should bloody well start a radio station of your own. Call it Radio Grump FM”.

Everybody laughed at the joke, except me. Why? Because I think that it’s a bloody good idea – and so does my fellow grumpy old man.

Pretty soon we were discussing how we would put the world to rights on our very own radio station.

Gone would be mindless inane chitter-chatter. Instead we would discuss how we would rid the world of everything and everyone that made us grumpy in the first place. Both of us have a list of people we would like to exile to Siberia (if the Russians would allow us to soil their land with people like Jamie Oliver, Vanessa Feltz and Jeremy Kyle) and we both have firm ideas about how we would rid the world of red tape, stupid rules, bad music, awful television, irritating jobsworths and ideas that immediately lower the IQ’s of those who have to partake in them.

But most of all we would love to talk about them to the entire United Kingdom for a start and then, when our country embraces us as national heroes, we would set about conquering the world. I know for a fact that the whole world is irritated by the same ridiculous nonsense that we have to put up with here.

The whole country would be on a high listening to us because, as we solved the world’s problems, we would play decent music on a regular basis.

There would be no rap, hip hop, boy bands, girl bands, dance music, r’n’b, pop music and definitely no reality TV singers. Instead we would play uplifting loud rock music that you could crank up in your car and make a complete arse of yourself to.

Imagine the pleasure of hearing how we would put Tim Westwood in a padded cell and force him to listen to Metallica until he stopped talking with a stupid accent? Imagine your delight as we described a world where it was a crime to be Simon Cowell or Piers Morgan? Imagine our plans to put Victoria Beckham and Paris Hilton on trial in order to make them justify why they think are celebrities worthy of a nanosecond of our attention?

And just imagine what we would dream up for the likes of George W Bush and all those greedy, arrogant and incompetent bankers who have made such a big mess of the world? Imagine putting all the world leaders in the Big Brother house for two years and forcing them to listen to each others awful speeches and lies?

Imagine a world without call centres?

I’ve already selected the first ten songs I would play:

1. The Pretender – The Foo Fighters


2. Knights Of Cydonia – Muse


3. The Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin


4. American Idiot – Green Day


5. Revolution – Judas Priest


6. Revolution Calling – Queensryche


7. Brutal Planet – Alice Cooper


8. The Fight Song – Marilyn Manson


9. Links 2 3 4 - Rammstein


10. Stick It Out – Rush
    

I think its a winner - who's with me?

Of course, I do realise there are people out there who don’t think like me. So in order to allow a reminder of how it used to be, I would allow Carol Kirkwood to read the weather – as long as she was angry about it.