Weekly Sanity Check

Just as I despair of the all the attention seeking, the shallow me only selfishness and the endless mindless prattle that fill every day along comes Alison Graham's weekly column in the Radio Times. A breath of sanity. A welcome no nonsense, face life as it is and get on with it attitude. She, like we all, has her lapses when she get overcome with girlyness. Fair do's and she does forewarn with an unmissable klaxon before she gives into her temptation. Her doing girly is of course gritty, blunt and scalpel sharp to the point. Gets over it and gets back to her plain, but so nicely couched self. So often she mirrors, or rather she hones in with clarity on thoughts that were rambling around in me. Or perhaps more honestly, she plucks out of all the chatter a key essence of social conduct that I wish I had had the sense to see, before her enlightenment. And consistent, week after week. No overblown ego, no inflated sense of importance, just another generous insightful observation sparked off by some TV media event.

Her day job, the one that pays the bread, those previews of all the up-n-coming schedule programmes she is paid to write are equally pithy and to the point. A degree of dissemblance is entirely forgiveable. She is employed after all to promote programmes appearing in the schedules and though she seems to have a range of freedom, it is clear she cannot just say, it is all rubbish this week but has to find something. Over time it has become very clear those days when she is of a mind it is all unworthy rubbish, then picks out some long standing formulaic series or some oft repeated golden classic to make her choice for the day. Her linguistic somersaults and verbal gymnastics become words of wonder, as she trips lightly through many varied degrees of faint praise to satisfy the only upbeat requirements of her paymasters. Not that that stops her, occasionally firing both barrels from the hip, finding up-beat words to scathingly expose the nature of rubbish that she has been paid to praise.

A very loud thank you, Alison Graham. Each week you restore my faith as I brace myself for another week's bombardment of trivia. Thank you pay-masters, for carrying on having the courage to give her her head.

Oh yes as a ps, whatever she says is liberally drizzled with high octane irony, delicious!