Guilty (and not-so-guilty!) telly pleasures

Don't judge me, but one of my most recent "guilty telly pleasures" was 'The Jeremy Kyle Show'.  I really don't know why; I caught the end of a show last week and it annoyed me so much that I just had to turn the TV over immediately.  It's a bit like when I used to read 'Heat' magazine, which was something I did religiously every Tuesday and now whenever I flick through the latest issue at the hairdresser's I have no idea why I loved it so much.  I suppose I didn't take either Jeremy or 'Heat' very seriously and enjoyed them for what they were, but they just became a bit same-y for my liking and so I abandoned them.  I really hope I didn't abandon them just because I became a little bit more of a snob than I already was.

Other "guilty telly pleasures" can be explained away by extreme youth.  When my sisters and I were younger and lived at home with Dad, we didn't have the money to go out very often (cue violins!) so we'd all stay home and watch sitcoms that UK Gold has now revealed to be highly questionable...step forward 'Bread' and 'On the Up'.  The ones we all really liked, though, were those that sort-of reflected things that were going on in real life.  At the time my Dad had joined a dodgy 'single parents' club called 'The Gingerbread Club' (that still makes me smile every time I think of it) which congregated every Thursday in a draughty council hall, so episodes of 'Dear John' could be more than related to.  Ditto 'Me and My Girl' with Richard O'Sullivan; the story of a man bringing up his daughter on his own (my Dad used to refer to it as 'Me and My Girls').  'Dear John' carried such fond memories that I bought the DVD box set for a friend who also expressed his love for it as a kid, thinking it would be a nice nostalgia trip for him.  He was thrilled, but two days later I got a text from him saying he'd never realised it was so "full of derogatory gay references!"  I was mortified, but he just said it was strange how he'd never noticed it at the time, being gay himself.   A "guilty telly pleasure" in more ways than one!

The more obvious "guilty telly pleasures" are the glitzy ones, things like 'Dallas' and 'Dynasty' which everybody seemed to love (they wouldn't now though, would they?  Those shows could only ever be popular in the Eighties; I don't think there's ever been a clearer example of shows that are so utterly of their time).  When I was little we used to have a sixteen year-old babysitter called Sharon who'd let me stay up a bit later than my sisters to watch 'Dynasty' with her.  She'd introduce all the characters to me by saying "that one's the King, and there's the Queen, and those are the princes and princesses" like a mad version of 'Jackanory'.  And I absolutely loved it.

Other shows my sisters and I watched with Dad are probably responsible for our 'blokey' sense of humour...they weren't shows that little girls with mothers were allowed to watch.  My sisters and I were well-acquainted with the semantics of every episode of 'Blackadder', 'The Young Ones' and 'Red Dwarf' before we'd hit ten years old; something that got my little sister into lots of trouble when she innocently quoted something mildly offensive from 'The Young Ones' in front of our Nan, who voiced her concerned opinion that us girls living in a house with no mother was only going to lead us on a path to self-destruction.  But I'd like to think it didn't; in fact my sisters and I all lead very 'normal' lives with nice husbands, kids and dogs (though I only qualify for the first of those three things; I can't stand dogs, but that's another story!)