An obvious put-up job
By Victor Lewis-Smith, Evening Standard
21 February 2003

With hundreds of digital TV channels, all desperate to fill their
schedules, is it any wonder that the airwaves are once again crammed
with public information films? Nowadays, these short films are mostly
bland announcements about income tax and child benefit, but in my
youth they were positively horrific, with titles like "Loose Stair
Carpets can Kill" and "Fireworks Maim for Life," made by civil
servants who clearly harboured ambitions to be the next Sam Peckinpah.

Day after day, children were traumatised by the sight of falling chip
pans that left infants looking like Simon Weston, splattered peaches
representing heads going through windscreens, and senile grandads
turning their son's house into a blazing inferno with carelessly
discarded roll-ups (an unlikely scenario, I grant you, because in my
experience keeping a home-made ciggie alight is as difficult as trying
to ignite a damp Shredded Wheat in a wind tunnel). And the result? A
generation who grew up frightened to leave the house, yet terrified to
stay in.

Things were no better if they retired to the garden shed, that
sanctuary of infallible inflammability where old codgers sneak off to
enjoy a sly face tube amongst the cans of meths and creosote, and end
up celebrating Burns Night in their own special way in A&E, with ne'er
a bagpipe nor haggis in sight.

Yet despite their inherent combustibility, these flimsy wooden
structures offer a tranquil space in which crushed and defeated
husbands can seek refuge from the battlefield of the marital home, and
it is to those war-weary refugees that Shedheads (Discovery Home &
Leisure) is attempting to speak.

"One in six of us is the proud owner of a shed," enthused Stu Evans
and Rick Tate yesterday morning, promising that we too could "get away
from it all to enjoy a hobby" if we followed their advice.

"This workroom cost £600," they told us, pointing to a large pile of
unassembled wood on the lawn, then added that they could show us how
to save £600. So, ipso facto, surely the shed ought to cost us nothing
at all?

Sadly, the £600 saving turned out to be the additional cost that you'd
otherwise have to pay a professional to help you achieve a full and
satisfying erection in the privacy of your own garden (you can fill in
your own joke here). But besides demanding several days of your time,
Rick and Stu's thrifty scheme required a work bench, circular saw,
electric screwdriver, concrete mixer, and an assortment of other tools
(costing far more than the proposed saving), and also obliged you to
possess a variety of manual skills which those of us who did arts at
university have seldom acquired.

Bugger that. People who sell sheds will invariably assemble them for a
modest fee, and I'm certainly not spending my weekends getting felt up
on the roof (once again, fill in your own joke here), or trying to
make perfect corners "by using a technique called the three four
five". No, if it's corners I require, I simply pop down to my local
corner shop and buy some, and as for that hard-to-handle roofing felt,
I'll never shed a tear over a tear in a shed.

In an attempt to raise the tone, the programme briefly derailed into
an item called "Sheds of Distinction," featuring an 18th century
witch's house that evinced no B&Q-style shedness whatsoever, having
cost £19,000 to renovate, and resembling a cross between a Bengal
veranda and a Puglian trulli.

But although Stu and Rick's interest in their subject clearly borders
on fetishism, their use of garage music to accompany their labours
didn't fool me into thinking that conventional sheds are "happening"
and "now", because frankly even Glenn Miller would have seemed a
trifle racy in this context.

"Hold the shutter ply up, stop it bellying," they advised us in a
language tantalisingly close to English as they prepared the concrete
base, thereby confirming my belief that building jobs are best left to
professionals, as indeed is the construction of television programmes.
Because while their finished shed looked solid and true, their feeble
attempts at lively presentation (adopting singsongy voices and saying
"diddly bom" "diddly do"), allow me to redress the balance by asking
them, "Cor blimey, who done this programme mate? Cowboys?"

For Rick and Stu, the appeal of a shed obviously lies in its
construction, but to me the edifice seems a perfect metaphor for life
itself. Indeed, the tragedy of human existence is surely that men
spend their early manhood paying scrupulous attention to clothing and
personal hygiene, so they can invite a succession of young women on
exciting and expensive nights out, during which they make prodigious
efforts to appear charming, witty, urbane, erudite, considerate and
above all fascinating. And why?

So that they can marry, set up home and buy a shed in which to spend
their free time for the next 50 years, going back into the house only
to eat, during which time man and wife sit facing the TV, without ever
exchanging a word. And then they die.

eddy wrote:

With hundreds of digital TV channels, all desperate to fill their
schedules, is it any wonder that the airwaves are once again crammed
with public information films?

My very favorite, which my (former) employer used to drop into the schedule
whenever there were a few minutes unaccounted for, was "Potatoland,"
featuring "Miss Maine Potato of, I think, 1958" describing how potatoes
were grown, including the herbicide that's sprayed to kill off the foliage
a little early!

A local radio type lampooned those home improvement shows as:
"This is Bob Condo, telling you that you with your limited skills and
finances can do the same job as my crew with the best craftsmen in town and
all the time and money in the world. Which proves that P.T. Barnum was
right."

Heck, knocking together a half-dozen wood frames for some seed cleaning
screens is about the limit of my ability.

My shed was bought in panelized form; I had to handle the erection myself.

#end cabinFever rant.


Gary Woods AKA K2AHC- PGP key on request, or at www.albany.net/~gwoods
Zone 5/6 in upstate New York, 1200' elevation. NY WO G