T&TV Go Interactive

I'm taking the almost total lack of comments on the last Tranny & TV to mean that you were all stunned into silence by TV's conviction and are now eagerly awaiting the conclusion to this nail biting story.

For that reason, I'm going to offer not one, not two, not three... well yes actually three... Three possible endings to the story!

All you have to do is choose an ending by commenting on this post with your choice of the following:

Option 1: The "Typical Transvestite Behavior" Ending

Option 2: The "Incredibly Bad Pun" ending.

Option 3: The "TV Actually Goes to Prison" ending. (There may be some reset button pushing involved if this one is picked).

You'll find a key pad under your chair, vote now!

Reset required

What happened to the "reset button"?

In the old days of telly, fantastic things would happen each week. Someone would discover a long-lost evil twin sister. Everyone would suddenly turn into sex fiends because of a virus. The moon would explode and rain fire on the Earth every week. Even in Little House on the Prairie.

But it was okay because at the start of the next week everything would be back to normal, because of the reset button. It let writers run wild with their imaginations, safe in the knowledge that no lasting change would befall their characters.

Some people hated the reset button, but I actually quite liked it. It meant you could miss an episode without losing the plot. The programme makers also loved the reset button because it meant they could show the episodes pretty much in any order without having to worry about the whole thing making sense.

Entire series survived quite happily with the reset button. Good series. Stuff like M*A*S*H and Doctor Who and Cheers.

Then something seemed to change and the programme makers seemed to fall out of love with the reset button. The new fad was the "story arc". Rather than telling lots of little stories, you'd tell one big one.

The insidious rise of the story arc can best be charted by looking at the venerable Star Trek in its various incarnations:

The Original Star Trek - No story arc whatsoever. The only way you could tell the chronological order of the episodes would be by watching Shatner's almost imperceptible paunch growth.

The Next Generation - Slight signs of story arc. Character allowed to grow a beard. Character gains a child that doesn't immediately get forgotten in the next episode. Nothing major.

Deep Space Nine - Some story arc at the start, by the end completely abandons episodic plots (and any real Trek-like sci-fi) for a seasons-long story line about war. Because everyone loves war, apparently.

Voyager - Not as arcy as DS9, but a bit shit. A blip in the generally upward trend of the story arc.

Enterprise - Never mind interesting characters, plot, situation or the established canon, just feel the arc!

Nowadays, no fictional TV show seems to be green-lighted unless it's effectively an epic 120 hour movie split down into 45 minute chunks over 7 years.

I don't know about you, but if you can't tell a story in 10 hours or less, I don't want to know about it. If you can manage it in 1 hour, all the better.

What makes it worse are the people who have the full pay packages on satellite or cable, because even if you did fancy watching something when it comes to "normal telly" you're so fed up with everyone telling you how good it was on cable you'll stubbornly refuse to watch it.

I don't want to be told about programmes that "get good in about episode 7", I want programmes that start good straight away!

To enjoy telly you need to discover it for yourself. In the old days, you could catch a mid-season episode of a show and think "hey this is rather good, I'll think I'll watch this", without having to worry about the episodes you'd missed. Those episodes would be repeated sometime anyway, and you could watch them without them being spoilt by you "knowing the ending", because each episode stood on it's own merits.

Long story arcs just make for lazy writing. If you're not bothered about how you get from A to B because B isn't for another 18 weeks, you won't necessarily bother concentrating on making this episode particularly interesting.

I think I know why the story arc became de rigueur, and it's nothing really to do with writers wanting to "tell big stories", it's more to do with boosting DVD sales and box sets and paying for subscription channels. Because if you want to catch up with a series that's already in it's second season, you have to buy season one, or watch the "catch up" shows on the same network. If you don't download them from the internet, of course.

Of the TV I watch regularly, I can only think of one show that gets it right. The new Doctor Who manages to have compelling story arcs and make each show a gripping and complete story in itself, with no need for a reset button.

Bring back proper episodic telly, not epics cut into episodic chunks. Maybe I'll watch a bit more then. I might even buy the box set.

I can't believe no-one's noticed this before

Listen to the start of this...

Now listen to the start of this.

See what I mean? It must MEAN something! Possibly related to the Illuminati.

This blog post is sponsored by Stolichnaya vodka and orange juice.

TV Goes Down

Dreams do come true! (In a bad way)

Jane and I decided to check out our new "local" tonight, a smallish hotel with bar and restaurant.

It was absolutely ghastly, in a way best described by Jane. On the way back I suddenly realised why I'd found it so unnerving. The endless nasty ornamental tatt adorning every bit of free space gave the horrible impression that you were drinking and dining in someone's front room.

Just like my dream.

I'm terrified that the hordes of trannies will start turning up soon. Bar the doors! Fill the baby oil cauldrons! (It ruins makeup).

My incredibly hard life coping with a pregnant wife (bring small violins)

I'm living with the soft furnishing equivalent of a black hole.

Jane attracts any bedding item within 100 yards. By the time she's settled in bed, she has three of the four pillows under her head, another cushion under her feet and three quarters of the available duvet.

The other day she added to this list by purchasing a special boomerang-shaped pillow, which apparently has multiple purposes including supporting the tummy and acting as a nursing cushion, not to mention poking me in the back every time I edge further into the bed in search of more of the elusive duvet.

And the snoring! Don't get me started on the snoring! If only there was a pillow that stopped that!

(Pauses a moment to get images from the end of the film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" out of my head.)

... Perhaps not that permanently.

I have a theory for all this. It's all down to evolution.

Every time I mention my lack of sleep due to sharing the bed with the Pillow Monster to my male colleagues who are already fathers, I get very little sympathy.

"Just you wait until the baby's born," they chuckle. "Then you'll really be missing sleep."

Which got me thinking, maybe pregnant women have evolved to prepare husbands for the complete disruption to their precious sleep patterns that a small baby brings.

I'm perfectly confident that my child will have such superior genes that it will come out with an innate sense of proper bed times, and also not getting up before 7 on a weekday (9 at weekends), so I really don't need this preparatory training!

...ahem...

In other sprog news, Baby is getting bigger and stronger by the day. What were once tiny flutters are now punches and kicks and great arching stretches that suddenly change the entire geography of mummy's tummy. It's great! Jane might disagree there. She used to ring me up from work when she first felt the baby move, now the novelty has started to wear off a little.

Babies, apparently, can learn their father's voice while in the womb. So I'm singing to the baby most every day, usually because I run out of things to talk about.

Current favourites (based on kick responses) are:

The Wheels On the Bus Go Round and Round - not including the controversial "Terrorist on the Bus goes boom boom boom" verse.

The Theme to Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds - which I found out the other day was first on telly over a quarter of a century ago. Makes me proud to be teaching my child the classics.

Just under 10 weeks to go. I'm sure I'll start feeling like an adult any day now.

Man Product

One easy way to come up with a new fashion trend (and thereby fill a few yards of copy in newspaper style columns and fashion mags) is to take something that traditionally only women wear, and create a male version. Then invent a new name that's a tortured masculine version of the original word.

Finally, get a picture of David Beckham wearing your newly invented product. The best way to do that last bit is to send a free one to Victoria.

So far we've had "guyliner", "mantihose" and now "meggings". What male versions of female accoutrements will the style gurus think of next?

I have some suggestions for them:

Malepolish - Nail polish for men! Comes in a range of practical styles and colourways including "Desert Storm", "Nostril-Proof" and "Hammerite".



Geezerdle - Girdles for geezers! Nuff said.

Chapstick - Lipstick for chaps! (Possible trademark issues with this one.)

Sir-kirts - Skirts with pockets! Actual fucking pockets!! I'm sure no-one's thought of that!

BLUSHMAX! - Accentuates the cheekbones, to the MAX! (Not to be confused with Original Diet Blush, which looks exactly the same but is designed for ladies).



And finally...

Tena-Bloke - For every woman with bladder weakness, there's a man with a weakness for getting bladdered. An absorbant pad that's able to cope with the thinner, faster flow of six pints of Stella.

I welcome your suggestions!

Flickr Fakr?

Not done one of these recently: fake or fantastic?

I wouldn't suggest it if I wasn't pretty sure it's a huge bit of fakery. But there's no "smoking gun", so to speak. Apart for it's a bit weird for a young TS to be in some of the hardcore groups that she is. Any opinions?

...

Signs

My journey home starts at 5, and I often tune in to Radio 4 to catch the main stories of the day in the 15 minutes or so it takes to get home.

By the time I pulled up outside today my eyes were moist, a lump in my throat, and I was looking forward to a big hug from Jane just to make everything all right again.

The crimes of Joseph Fritzl are so off-the-charts in terms of evil that it's difficult to hold the idea in your head all at once. For one brief moment I seemed to comprehend it fully, after some almost throw-away comment by a doctor who'd been treating the daughter and children. He said they need to wear special sunglasses to cope with the sunlight.

They'd never seen the sun. The hate and horror just rose inside me at that point, in a way that I've never felt before.

And then, another story, about a butcher found guilty of horrible negligence, causing an outbreak of the E Coli virus, and the death of a small boy. I heard the mother speak in measured but emotional tones about being powerless to stop the virus that ravaged and then killed her son.

Two horrendous stories, seemingly different but sharing a common thread. In the case of the butcher, there was a failure by the authorities to spot obvious patterns in the inspections they were making, and the inconsistent answers that the butcher was giving to questions. They didn't cause the outbreak, but they didn't stop it either. They didn't see the signs.

With Fritzl it beggars belief that no-one in the long years of his terror spotted something. Did the people who interacted with him, visited the house, not see any signs? Or did they choose to ignore them?

We're all guilty in our lives of living a blinkered existence, ignoring things just to make life a little easier. I think it's natural to be this way, as it's also wrong to live in constant suspicion of others. There's a balance that needs to be struck between being "nosy" and being negligent, but sometimes, I think, we need to take stock, take off the blinkers and actually think properly about the things going on around us.

With any luck, there are no more Fritzl's in this world; but there are dodgy butchers, hospitals disregarding basic standards of care, children slipping through the social worker net. They're all different levels of evil, some much worse than others, and we all need to keep our eyes open for them, and tell someone if we think something's wrong. If we do, maybe my journey home will be a bit less miserable!

Now you know how to greet people in Italian!

Official Spokestranny to Merseyside

The interview went quite well, I think. I recorded it in the morning before work, so I got to listen as it went out live. Always weird to hear one's own voice, and my bit seemed to sit rather awkwardly with the stated topic of "all men should wear a dress". I must admit my heart started to sink when I was listening to the bits before mine about dragging up for Sound of Music shows and beauty pageants in Magaluf, but I think I raised the tone (which is a first for me).

You can hear it for the next seven days here, my bit kicks in at 2:23 and ends at 2:34. Hopefully I'll get a more permanent copy for my records! (Thanks Justine!)

Hmm, two radio interviews and a 2-page news article. I'm becoming a bit of a spokestranny, aren't I? I wonder if I could do it full time. Imagine it...

"It's 5:33 on PM, over to Becky EnVérité for the tranny view on this story. Becky, how does Sarkozy's announcement affect trannies?"

"Well quite frankly Eddie, not in the slightest."

"Thanks for that. Now finance news..."

Hmm, maybe not.

The talk of Liverpool

For those of you in Merseyside, the North West and North Wales (or with access to the Internet for the live stream) I'll be talking about trannying on the Duncan Barkes show on City Talk 105.9 today. Tune in at about 11.20 and let me know how I sound!

Kevin McCloud has missed a calling

Pub-quizzers (and potential Twitter quiz-cheaters) Pandora and Jenny might appreciate this...

Best phishing mail ever!

Oho! This just ended up in my inbox, possibly because my phishing filter knows that I like a laugh:

Greetings to you,

Hello!

On behalf of the Obama's Foundation...

Good start, get the President's name in there. He's bound to have foundations and stuff that dole out free money.

... we wish to notify you as a beneficiary of $99,000,000 USD in compensation of scam victims.

NINETY NINE MILLION DOLLARS!! Do we get that each!? I didn't even realise I was a scam victim! Well, I suppose your answer to that is "not yet". I'll summarise the next part...

... blah blah blah send all your personal details to...

Managing Director of the HSBC BANK,UK
Name: Mr Branson Wayne
Private Email: bransonwayne@ymail.com

The managing director of HSBC uses Yahoo mail? Are things that really bad in the banking sector?

Yours Faithfully,
Dr.Caravan Marvis
Coordinator.
OBAMA'S FOUNDATION

Doctor Caravan?? Did you ask someone for the most homely English word they could think of?

Still, ninety nine million dollars. That's got to be worth a punt. Marjorie! Bring me my letter writing hat and the keys to the safe!

Hypothetical Question

A complete stranger adds you as a friend on Flickr. You look at his stream and it's filled with God-awful pics of him bending over in nothing but a nasty bra and suspenders to show you bits of his body you really didn't want to see. You certainly didn't ask to see them, but because you've got a few pictures on Flickr showing yourself fully clothed, albeit as a different gender, you're somehow seen as fair game to anyone with a selection of poorly fitting lingerie and a cock like the last chicken in the shop (if the shop were a post-nuclear-holocaust bunker specialising in irradiated bonsai poultry) to add you as a "friend", in order to share their tenth-rate porn with you.

That same person has one picture on which he's inexplicably printed his full Yahoo username and password together with the message "use me and abuse me".

Would it be wrong to take them up on their offer, log on to Flickr using that Yahoo ID and password, and delete the entire Flickr account so that it were as if it had never existed? And then sit back with a strange sense of satisfaction that there was one less pointless sexually retarded loser using Flickr, and the world was a infintessimally nicer place because of it?

Hypothetically speaking, of course.

PC World "Collect at Store"

Why do I ever shop at PC World? I've received shoddy customer service there on countless occasions. The whole chain deserves to go under and with any luck this recession will put it out of it's misery.

Forgive me for posting an email here that I just sent to their customer services address. I'm only doing it because I get several hits a day via Google for people looking for stuff about Sky TV and finding my rant against their customer services. It's kind of satisfying to think that maybe I lose them a customer or two now and then. Hopefully this will do the same for PC World.

PC World UK are useless gits. There, that should be good for a few more Google hits.

. . .

Dear PC World Customer Services,

I'm writing to complain about my recent experience of the "Collect in Store" service from PC World.

Earlier today I was in search of a set of speakers. I used your site to find the item, and it informed me they were out of stock in my local stores.

Just to be certain, I looked up the number for my nearest store (King's Lynn) on the web site. I rang the number given as was put through to the national line, not the local store.

The lady I spoke to was quite helpful, and advised me that there was stock at the Norwich store.

Later in the day I decided to reserve the item at the Norwich store. I checked the site and it still had stock, so I went ahead and reserved the item.

Norwich is a 80-mile trip for me, so I decided it would be a good idea to check with the store itself. I looked up the number on the website and noticed it was the same for the King's Lynn store, and there'd be little point ringing as I'd just get the same national customer services system I'd spoken too earlier.

So I travelled to Norwich this evening with the sole intention of picking up the item. When I arrived they had my reservation I had made already printed out, and went to get the item. One of the salesmen assisting said that he didn't think they had any in stock.

After waiting about 10 minutes I was then told that they didn't have any in stock. Despite the fact that the stock system in store clearly displayed 3 items.

The assistant suggested that Colchester had some in stock, "but they might not want to send them over". Quite what use that would be to me in Norfolk I'm unsure.

I gave my contact number at the time of reserving, it would have been very easy for the staff at Norwich PC World to check my item pre-order, and called me to let me know the error, BEFORE I'd travelled out.

It would have also been nice for the assistant to offer some kind of decent alternative to waiting to see if Colchester would give up one of their stock. Such as offering to order the item for home delivery. As it was I was given little more than a shrug of the shoulders.

I'm not too experienced with retail, so perhaps you can explain how a shop's actual stock can be 3 whole items astray from it's computer records. Especially as the item in question wasn't particularly cheap. And if the system is routinely this inaccurate, how you can expect to run a collect in store system with any level of success?

Yours sincerely,

Simon

Support Your Local Award-Winning Tranny-Friendly Journalist

Do you remember that lady who wrote that fantastic newspaper article about me? Her name is Stacia Briggs, and she's won Columnist of the Year for her work in the Norwich Evening News, and won my undying respect for writing such a thoughtful and balanced piece on trannies without selling me down the river.

I've been meaning to big-up her new-ish blog for a while, as a source of much wit and entertainment, but things have taken on a slightly more urgent edge.

My understanding of the economy is a bit fuzzy, but bear with me. Basically, due to all the bankers losing their jobs, they're not buying local newspapers to roll up and hit their servants with. This has had a massive knock-on effect on jobbing journos, and if they all get sacked, what happens to the corner shops who sell them fags, booze and those small bits of card with "press" written on that they keep in their hats? I think you can see where this is going.

Anyway, to save the entire economy, I recommend nay insist you go and read her column in the Norwich Evening News; and then click the little "RSS" button and add it to your feed reader. This will help ensure she keeps her job, the NEN flourishes, and ushers in a new Golden Age of Print Journalism.

Also read her blog, which is as good as the column, and she uses the word "fuck" a lot more. I'd just like to state that I was going to make this point before she mentioned it in her current blog entry and completely stole my thunder.

Anyway, go read. The corner shops of this country are at stake!

Nightie

Redefining Femininity

I'm a tranny, I'm also a feminist. The two things sometimes have trouble sitting together. Sometimes I had to think hard about the way I wanted to express myself, because on face value the things I wanted to do seemed to present a rather shallow and negative impression of my feelings about women. Eventually I worked something out in my own head, and it's now time to explain it to you. Because then it's not rattling around my head taking up room that other things can use.

First, here's a concept for you: femininity is completely unrelated to being female. In fact, the words "female" and "femininity" actually suffer from the association that comes from sharing the same root. There should be a different word altogether for femininity, because it's nothing at all to do with being female.

(Okay, lets get the usual disclaimers out of the way: Your mileage may vary. "Tranny" is used in the context of a transvestite and not a transsexual, because I don't really know how transsexuals think so I can't really speak for them. I can't really speak for other transvestites either, but I do anyway because I'm less scared of them beating me up.)

Trannies don't aspire to be female, they aspire to femininity. Why is this important, and why do we need to separate the terms? Because "femininity", especially in trannies' minds, is wrapped up with some potentially unsavoury traits. Traits such as submissiveness, sexually provocative dress and behaviour, even lack of intelligence (feined or otherwise).

Not all trannies of course, see the disclaimer above, and there's also a sliding scale of trannies from the ones who use "Slut" as a surname to the perfectly proper cross-dresser who occasionally confesses to a "blonde moment". They're both displaying traits which are "feminine". You get male sluts, and male blondes, but rightly or wrongly the words aren't seen as masculine.

Lets invent a temporary term for these "negative" traits, and call them Z.

Describe Z as female traits and you'll quite rightly get slapped silly by anyone with half a brain. Women are different from men, it's mad to pretend otherwise, but they're not different for those reasons and anyone who considers otherwise is a misogynist of the worst kind.

The trouble comes down, as a lot of things do, to the way a man's mind works. Men's minds are pre-programmed to be attracted to certain behaviors and traits. The trouble is that these traits are often the ones covered by Z. This isn't excusing men for harbouring non-PC thoughts about women, but unfortunately these are instincts that formed long before PC was invented.

Any normal civilized chap manages to live with these instincts without them controlling his life. And most men also learn to find more sensible things attractive. When a man says he's "attracted to powerful well-dressed intelligent women", he's not lying, but equally the top shelves in the newsagents aren't exactly bulging with titles like "Businesswomen in Nice Suits" and "Young Female Ethnobotanists".

So men find Z attractive. Trannies, being men, also find Z attractive. However, something in a tranny flips this attaction from just lusting after Z to wanting to emulate it.

So,when a certain kind of tranny emulates Z by dressing provocatively, acting submissively and basically pretending to be a bimbo, all in the name of "being more feminine", this can (again quite rightly) be seen as a pretty awful indication of what they think a woman is.

The thing is, most trannies don't think this is what a woman is. They're just aiming for Z, which to get back to my original point is nothing to do with being female.

If you think of Z as a set of traits that are neither female nor male, then both men and women can strive towards it if they want to as (and I use this word in it's Platonic sense) an "ideal".

Obviously I'm not saying that an "ideal" woman displays these traits. That would be moronic. Still, some women play with Z when they want to, and it's more "acceptable" for women to do so rather than men. Women are better at doing it than men too. It's just one of the cultural tools of the trade when it comes to displaying sexuality.

Maybe there should be a proper term for Z that separates it from female and feminity. Then Z can, if necessary, take on all the negative connotations of "degrading" behaviour without being linked intrisically with women.

Well, that's what I think anyway. I hope I explained it well enough that maybe you agree.

What if you held a party and everyone came?

We were out for a meal in a place that had been recommended, but turned out to be someone's front room. Disappointed, we headed home. On the way, somone suggested that if people could have pretend restaurants in their front room, why couldn't we have a tranny get-together in my place?

Contacts were called on mobiles, and by the time we'd reached home things were organised for that evening.

Parked nearby the house was a car with a driver I didn't recognise. He gave the distinct impression of a nervous first-timer tranny in drab mode.

I asked if he was here for the party. He said he was and asked if there was somewhere to change. I explained that the party wasn't starting for another four hours and he'd just have to change elsewhere.

As I headed for the front door another car-full of trannies were inexpertly trying to parallel park beside the house. Another group were being warded off at the back door by one of my eating companions, who I suddenly realized was Joanna Nicholls.

The party, it seemed, had morphed into an impromptu open-invite tranny gig. I decided I'd better start getting ready, so I headed upstairs (I'd never noticed before that our bungalow had an upstairs) and was waylaid by a bunch of gay guys, who were here to "ensure that our club had an integrated LGBT policy".

As I was talking to them, I could see from a bedroom window that the crowd of trannies was growing. They were standing listlessly in small groups, like something out of Hitchcock's "The Trannies".

It was at this point in the nightmare (you had guessed it was a nightmare right?) that I awoke with a start. I staggered blearily through my reassuringly one-storied bungalow to the kitchen for a glass of water. Pausing only briefly to peer out of the window to make sure the garden wasn't filled with menacing groups of trannies, I returned to bed and fell quickly to sleep.

And like a ITV movie premiere returning after the news, the dream resumed.

The party/club was in full swing downstairs and I still hadn't managed to get ready.

Siobhan and Valerie appeared to tell me that a tranny who'd posted some particularly dodgy photos to Flickr was trying to get into the club. A meeting was convened of tranny club's management team, which seemed to consist of me, Jo, Siobhan and Valerie. It was agreed that a "no weird tranny" policy should be enacted.

It was possibly too late. I still hadn't got ready, and now it sounded like the trannies downstairs were wrecking the place. I rushed to a spare bedroom, where I met my mum...

It's at that point my subconcious must have thought it was getting all too Freudian and woke me up again. This time I decided it was better to stay that way.