Language Lessons

Following up on a previous article, I’ve decided to start chugging out my new TV show. Cutting close to the bone, the main character will now be called Nigel, and he too will scratch out a meagre living teaching English to foreign types (I will insist on playing myself of course, so subtle is my character’s personality). Nigel is a sexy and exceptionally smart guy, but he has his demons – he’s surrounded by morons and illiterates. Everyday he has to educate and edify those around him, whether it is his students, his friends, his colleagues, or the string of hot babes that fall onto his lap. I think Language Lessons is an apt title for the show. For fifty minutes a week, it stimulates the mind with its surprising plot lines and its witty and snappy dialogue; it stimulates the loins with its risqué and increasingly fantastical love scenes.

Let’s take a look at a sample scene I cobbled together:

INT. RESTAURANT - NIGHT

Nigel and Pamela, a dark haired, feline-eyed woman, with gigantic breasts, sit comfortably at a romantic dinner table for two. Pamela’s huge bosoms graze the table, as she leans forward to chat intimately.

Pamela: You were so cool around me; I thought you were disinterested.

Nigel: Uninterested.

Pamela: Sorry?

Nigel: I forgive you.

Pamela: I don’t understand.

Nigel: You meant uninterested when you said disinterested. I was neither.

Pamela: What’s the difference?

Nigel: One means objective or like a spectator, like me, gazing at your hypnotic bosoms. The other means not interested, like the vacuous zombies, who regurgitate bad English every day and have the nerve to say they’re native speakers.

Pamela: Ooh, I like it when you’re misanthropic. (plays footsy under the table) Maybe you can fuck the humanity out of me.

Nigel: No. I mean ‘yes’. Sure. But I’m not misanthropic. (sentimental music starts up) I just love language so much. When it’s good, it’s got a scent, you know?

Tears form in Pamela’s eyes.

Nigel: It’s so beautiful, yet so delicate and ephemeral, like ether. It skates momentarily over your tongue. With ultimate irony, its essence is ineffable. Almost like a childhood memory, so hazy, yet it fills you with desire to grasp it, hopelessly trying to return to some warm happy centre.

Music picks up in intensity, as we CUT TO:

INT. NIGEL’S BEDROOM - LATER

A steely, waxed stunt-ass gyrates, as Nigel pounds Pamela on a squeaky antique dressing table. The amber light casts their silhouette across a room full of tasteful, erotic statues. He swings her voluptuous body onto the canopied bed. She climbs astride him and her glowing breasts jiggle emphatically. We see a longshot of the lovers, before fading to black.

Irish Folk Song Omnibus, Vol. 1

In a flash of patriotism caused by my illness (If you look at the dates, you'll see that it's one of those diseases that works retrogressively though time. Eventually, the disease will de-age me and turn me into my father's sperm. If morbid had an antonym, I'd be using it about now.), I’ve decided to write a brief introduction to Irish folk music. When your plane lands amid the Celtic mists of the Emerald Isle, you’ll be well prepared for the rich, mentally ill, drinking culture of God’s own country.

Dirty Old Town

A song about an axe-wielding pussy hound, who seems to be getting drunker as the song progresses. Having only procured a kiss from the object of his courtship, he grows angry and sexually frustrated, seeing sex everywhere across the grimy city. Eventually, he makes a pathetic threat to chop the whole town down with his axe (the one he’s yet to make).

Rocky Road to Dublin

Man goes on a bender from Galway to Dublin (which had three syllables back then). He gets so inebriated he ends up dancing with pigs on a boat to Liverpool.

The Foggy Dew

A song about a man who witnessed the epic bravery of the 1916 Rising. Alas, he himself is a conversational bore and spends half the song talking about the weather.

The Auld Triangle

Brendan Behan’s elongated, sneaky plea to be moved from the men’s to the women’s prison. If it weren’t for his writing skills, this would look as lame as those ‘Cover me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians’ t-shirt.

When You Were Sweet Sixteen

A creepy song about an old man who can’t stop thinking about a 16-year-old girl and implores her to enter his dreams (where nobody will ever catch them together).

Raglan Road

You can knock Catholicism all you like, but if Patrick Kavanagh’s conscience hadn’t forbade him from masturbating, he would never have written this poem.

Monto

Set in the same red-light district as the hallucinogenic Circe chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, this irreverent ditty descends from trying to procure a prostitute to unbuckling one’s pants for Queen Victoria. Joyce would have been proud of such a garbled psychedelic misadventure.

Whiskey in the Jar

A man’s gun malfunctions at the crucial moment. His long-term lover betrays him for another man. Need I say more?

And the Emmy for Best Television Drama Goes to...

Hey, guys! I’ve a brilliant new idea for a TV show. Basically, it’s about me and my life, but altered to bring out the themes that run through my daily activities. It will straddle the lines of comedy and drama. This will enable me to take the audience by surprise, although the drama will predictably hit hard at the end of the episode. Some (surprisingly) insightful dialogue and acoustic guitar laden montages should drive the drama home, leaving the viewer profoundly affected as the credits roll. When we really need to play on the strings of the heart and mind, the main character will narrate, exploiting devastating existential truths.

Of course, the protagonist will have a job, like a lawyer or doctor, where issues of great gravitas arise every day. Perhaps a writer or actor, so he can muse artistically about his problems. He’ll have some eccentricities, which make his profession seem cooler and more unlikely. And he’ll get all the insights, as he edifies the other clueless characters. But it would be no fun to teach them in a didactic manner. Instead, he’ll use a roundabout method, where he acts like a complete asshole all the time, speaking about sensitive topics in a casual, disrespectful manner. This will create an edgy, comic effect. Of course, he’ll always be in control, so his manner will cloak how much he cares. In fact – in a brilliant twist – it will be revealed that his insensitive behaviour was caused by how much he deeply cares. This way, the audience can enjoy unfettered, troll-like behaviour without the guilt or indignation that their precious moral values have been offended. It will also make the main character cooler and even more insightful.

The other characters will only really serve to highlight the coolness of the main character and act as foil for his outrageous comic lines. I intend to setup the autocorrect on Word documents, so that ‘incr’ changes to ‘incredulous’, so often do I intend to use it when writing the other characters. The others’ lives will revolve around the protagonists dilemmas, and the protagonist always trump their wit and intelligence, even when it looks like they’ve got the best of him. Despite being a complete asshole, and probably having lots of idiosyncrasies and ailments, the main character will attract plenty of female attention. The women of the show (all of whom will be smoking hot) will be charmed and affronted in equal measure by the main character. They’ll try to navigate the difficult seas of his behaviour to find his heart. They’ll succeed. But no matter how deep and romantic the relationship, it will end within a season, because TV romances are only interesting at the start. It will end because of something cool and interesting the main character did, but it really won’t be his fault. He’ll regret it, but always have time to atone for it.

I was rummaging through names in my head, and I think House is a good, simple title. Unless I set it in California and load it with sex scenes, in which case I think Californication works.