According to the statistics, there's double the amount of jobless men in Ireland than women. This obviously doesn’t include stay-at-home mothers and high class prostitutes, but still is an interesting marker. What all of this means is that roughly the same amount of penises as breasts spend their day lurking about the house in pitiful states of self-loathing. As of today, daytime television is 87% geared towards women. This means that the dominant of the jobless species – the man, is subjected to daily reminders of just how worthless his life is. For a woman to be out of work, it’s like a holiday. There’s more TV shows about shoes and curtains than they can ever absorb, and I’m pretty sure they wake every morning with the giddy anticipation that only the early morning repeat of yesterdays ‘Afternoon Show’ can provide. Men meanwhile are best advised not to surface until 6.1 starts. Should they rise earlier they will have to either endure Dr Phil, Jeremy Kyle, multiple ‘How Clean is your house?’ and hours of programming subtly informing them how much of a loser they are. The rest of the listings, especially RTE2, is aimed towards children. Unless you live in Thailand, children are exempt from unemployment. Daytime, they should be in school, or down a mine, but not flicking through the channels.
All of this suggests that TV programming is all over the shop. Their target audience isn’t watching, Most home bound females will already be through their second bottle of Rosé by the time ‘Doctors’ has started it marathon afternoon run and the sort of children that don’t go to school will be up to their little necks in superglue down the park. That leaves men. Well, a casual flick of the remote will reveal nothing in the line of macho TV. No meaningful sport is aired on weekdays, no explosion filled blockbusters come on at breakfast and there’s little in the way of tits before Nationwide.
It’s no wonder that we all go to the Pub at 12.
