Max Brenner! Max Brenner?? Really channel 10! Max Brenner!
Twice a week I spend an entire hour of my time watching a television show my daughter will never be allowed to watch. And tonight the ‘big date’ is bowling (I like bowling, bowling is fine) and a shameless couch snog in the middle of a deserted Max Brenner. Just like the one on every freaking corner selling stale waffles and reheated, over inflated chocolate pots. Channel Ten! I can take myself to Max Brenner!
I know they’re trying to make Nick appear like a normal bloke. I know they’re trying to play up his regular, everyday man persona. But seriously, when I turn on my television to knowingly subject myself to more fiction, I want more than a freaking stale waffle I can buy for myself at the hyperdome.
It’s been a rough week in the world of love. I’m on holidays. In my novel two of my favourite characters died in each other’s arms after choosing to end a life of adventure together in war destined to take only one of them, I watched the Guernsey Literary Potato Peel Pie Society and spent the next hour after it finished angry/sad that I’ve settled for a life of less when I’m clearly supposed to fall in love with a literate pig farmer in the English Channel and now the Bachelor takes me to … Max Brenner.
If I could communicate an eye roll in words, I would. An emoji is a ridiculous addition to a piece of writing but it feels like the only way to stress how disappointed I am in the fake world of escapism I keep trying to put myself in. I know the Bachelor is a bad idea. I know that putting twenty-five women in a situation to compete for the affection of a man is not something I ever want my daughter to think of as ‘normal’. Which is why, channel ten, we wait for the ridiculous helicopter rides, the empty restaurants and the million-dollar yachts on the harbour. Those are things the rest of us will never get. They are the fiction. They are the reminder that what is happening here, is pure narrative. I don’t want to see the place I go to eat my feelings on the television!
The TV I watch, the books I read, the movies I choose to lose myself in allow me, allow us all, the space to be lost in what is not real. What we wish was real, what we think our stories should be like and more importantly to allow us to become part of a world where the characters we love, and love to hate, get all of the things they deserve and more. I’ve gotten too old to spend my leisure time wallowing in reality and what the real world is like and now The Bachelor has gone too far.
I tell the world frequently that I don’t believe in ‘that kind’ of love. But that’s not strictly true. I do believe in love. All of the kinds of love. But I do believe that all kinds of love are not meant for everybody. And no matter who we are, there is at least one kind meant for all of us. But often it’s not the sort we want or think we are going to get. And that is the real world. That is the reality of our everyday so we look for different ways to make sure we get it all – one way or another.
I watch it, read it and in my real life, I get to be the person who legalizes it for those who are lucky enough to have found it. All of the romantic love in my world is a fairy tale and in those moments when I get angy/sad that my pig farmer isn’t crossing the seas to find me, I have to take an hour to remember that it’s fictional. That just like the bachelor, there’s a narrative, with tension and drama, conflict and ultimately a resolution. Constructed, fabricated and thought up in the brain of another for entertainment. Even weddings are constructed. Those fairytales, of a single day, while based in the love stories of those people, I get to write them and make the decision that they all end with a happily ever after.
So yes, tonight channel ten, you’ve ruined that in one, badly timed product placement. You took a magical fictional date to the place I take myself when I realise my pig farmer isn’t coming for me. I’m sad/angry at you. Get back on the helicopter, please. Before my daughter arrives and breathes air and I’m never allowed to watch this show again.
life in big frilly knickers 