July 10, 2012
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(written on 4 March 2013)
The picture is a bit boring, I admit, but I just wasn’t in the mood for much else. I took it as I was sitting at my table (which doubles as a computer desk) working on my pictures (and getting quite concerned with the lack of progress on my blog) whilst the Kid and his boyfriend were sitting on the couch watching a film, Guess Who’s Coming For Christmas? – rather badly timed, if you ask me. One of the actors in the film had a very recognisable voice. It was Richard Mulligan and that brought back many memories. Mulligan played Burt Campbell in a sitcom that I absolutely adored when I was a kid myself, namely SOAP. I’d almost say that I had a rather dubious obsession with that TV series at some point, going as far as recording many episodes on tape, writing them out in a note book and then also typing those scripts (with a real type writer, not even an electric one) into another note book. Nevertheless, I would argue that having that slight tic actually has helped my understanding of the English language tremendously – something I am benefiting from to this day. Besides, Susan Harris (the writer of SOAP) has such an amazing sense of humour, which was also apparent in The Golden Girls (another one of my favourites) that I believe that my own sense of humour stems mainly from watching her sitcoms.
Of course I didn’t mention anything about this to the Kid. SOAP was on TV in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the Golden Girls a decade later, and both series ran before Daniel was even born. Mentioning the fact that I loved Mulligan as an actor in a TV series from the 1980s would only result in one of Daniel’s infamous “you’re old” looks, quite often followed with the word “Grandpa!” – something I was quite keen to avoid tonight. I had a similar thing the other week when I discovered that Carl Sagan’s amazing TV series Cosmos is now in its entirety on YouTube. It was a brilliant discovery as I think that no TV series shaped my understanding of the world, physics, history, space travel and humanity as much as Cosmos did all those many years ago. I devoured the accompanying book then and marvelled about the spaceships such as Voyager I and Voyager II that only just been sent out to the stars then. And even now, seeing the show on YouTube, that same enthusiasm grips me and I watch every episode with intense attention. But again there is no point of sharing that with Daniel. “Oh that’s stupid,” he said as he walked past my computer screen and saw three seconds of Cosmos. “You know what is really stupid?” I corrected him, “You dismissing this show without having the slightest idea what it’s about.” He laughed and agreed. Progress.
