THEY Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
On occasion, I wish I’d shot the jockeys riding horses I’ve backed.
But that title belongs to a Horace McCoy novel, set in LA, during the Great Depression. McCoy’s depiction of down at heel drifters, and wannabe starlets, converging on dance marathons, not only survived its own day but came to symbolise that day. As only a powerful novel can.
It carries a message. I prefer messages to come in bottles. But gruelling dance marathons attracted prosperous audiences to watch desperate, exhausted couples entertain them. Participants were given a shot at movie fame – a prospect as illusory as instant riches.
When They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? got the Hollywood treatment in 1969, Sydney Pollack, the director, filmed the desperate contestants as human cattle. A metaphor for the humiliation fame-chasers are subjected to.
Sydney Pollack’s human horses raced through my mind when my lawyer-at-large, John Alvin Ray, told me Big Brother was coming back. If you tell me there’s any merit in this, I’ll take your word for it. That’s because I won’t waste electricity watching "reality television". Reality is all too real for me. I don’t need the manufactured version.
“Millions watch them,” John Alvin declared. “Yes, but they all eat crisps.” I countered. “Are my viewing choices to be dictated by infants, inking love hearts on posters of Ed Sheeren?”
My lawyer-at-large is a lovely man, personally. Professionally, he would scoop the sugar out of your tea. Literally. Forced to give the kiss of life he’d charge you for the breaths you owed him.
He was sowing the seeds of some nefarious lawyerly ploy.
Coincidentally, that evening, after conducting a Tour of Duty around certain public houses, my grasp on my surroundings was somewhat tenuous. I found myself sitting through American Big Brother. An abomination of intrigue,betrayals, and, I believe, a soundtrack by The Dixie Chicks.
I still hate my eyes for seeing it.
I’ve long known the idea of TV enlightening the masses was a fallacy. A polite fiction. Remember when ailing TV-am was saved by Roland Rat in the 1980s?
We awoke to find a puppet rodent displacing the journalist, Robert Kee. It was the first recorded case of a rat saving a sinking flag ship. Mind you, Roland was marginally less irritating than the also displaced David Frost.
That nefarious lawyerly ploy? All was revealed the following day.
John Alvin confided he’s negotiating to star in a TV reality show. Provisional title: I’ll Be Suing Ya! It’s an everyday tale of lawyer folk pitting their wits against the criminal class. He’s having difficulty differentiating the "criminal class" from TV producers.
Furthermore, a name change is required.
They suggest the more showbiz-friendly, Johnnie Ray.
I reminded him Johnnie Ray was a singer. He sang lachrymose songs, like CRY and the self-penned, The Little White Cloud That Cried. This earned him the monikers: Cry Guy and The Nabob of Sob.
How appropriate. TV is awash with tears. Usually, the viewers are shedding them.
Brian McGeachan is an author and playwright
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