How Did I Get Here?

 1) I'm on Instagram. I'm scrolling down the page. I get a suggested post from Digitalspy, whom I don't follow, and which seems to be some sort of meme farm. It wants me to look at a split photo of two people, telling me they are Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams. Rachel McAdams I recognise, because I've seen Mean Girls and Dr Strange. In the left hand photo they're walking confidently down the Hollywood Walk of Fame, looking sleek and laughing at crowds. In the right hand photo they look callow and slightly embarrassed, standing on what looks like butcher's grass. They look like they got rained on at a school formal and are shrugging it off. Emblazoned across these photographs is a caption from someone called "Laine" and she writes, "about time (2013) nation rise!!! love them badd to this day". 

From what I can work out the two actors were in a romantic comedy called About Time in 2013. So the photo on the left is a sort of reunion for them while Rachel is getting her star on the Hollywood walk of fame, some years later. 

I don't care about this. I've not seen or even heard of that film. I gather the ginger lad is Brendan Gleeson's son. I don't know who "Laine" is. Don't why she spells bad with a double d. I don't know what "nation rise" means in this context. I don't know why the before and after photos are the wrong way round. I don't follow Digitalspy, I don't know why the algorithm suggested this, and I don't know why 5 and half thousand people have liked this confusing, arbitrary image. I don't understand the intent. And I don't understand the engagement. 

2) I was watching the television and a show called Lost and Found in the Lakes came on. The premise is this: people sometimes lose things in the Lake District, so Countryfile's Helen Skelton, looking more glam than usual, puts together a crack team of detectorists and free-swimmers to find the lost items. In this episode a woman called Jeronima, no really, has lost her ring while mucking about with molehills at the side of the road, and a pair of detectorists, who have mistaken shouting for having a personality, go detecting to try and find the ring. They don't find the ring. Helen, in a warehouse, has to break the news to Jeronima who breaks down in tears, but immediately perks up when Helen reveals that, as a booby prize, she has commissioned a twee piece of tapestry about a mole running off with her wedding ring or something. When asked if this will become "a new family heirloom" Jeronima says yes, of course it will. 

The second story is about a phone that's been found. There's an ID card in the phone casing, so a woman puts the name into Facebook and then they ring the owner and tell him they've found his lost phone. Then they interview him and he explains he lost his phone and that he's pleased to get it back because it's got all the footage he took at gigs, even though it would all have been on the cloud and, anyway, he films gigs on his phone, so fuck this guy. And that's that. They put that on television. 

There's 19 episodes of this. It's an odd cross between Detectorists - without the charm or the gentle comedy but with added shouting - and The Repair Shop. And footage of the Lake District, which is, admittedly nice. 

I'm continually shown things I find baffling. Everything seems slapdash, thoughtless, pointless, the language used impenetrable. People's engagement and involvement is confusing and disturbing. There is a kind of visual grammar used here that seems deliberately lazy and moronic. I suspect that would be the point if there were a point. But reasons are so 20th Century. So why am I being shown it? Is this getting old? Am I being shrugged off, not by the next generation, but by the next generation after the next generation? Is this the order of things? Happy to be shrugged. 

Is TV this simple now? Or so hard people are panicking and combining the same six ingredients over and over again hoping something sticks. The Lake District is nice. People like finding things. They're happy when they get them back. Can that be the show? If they get mucky or damaged a twinkly eyed expert "crafter" can touch them up again. Can that be the show too? Cool. Make twenty of those. Richard Osman probably thinks the formatting is genius. But Richard wouldn't like to drive home in a cut and shut car. Some things can't be made just by shunting two different things together and hoping for the best. Modern TV is like a fairground mermaid: a monkey's head and salmon's arse. And it fucking stinks.