Dead Seat Rôles
Ever since the first monkey picked up a stick to beat up another monkey, people have enjoyed competitions. We pay athletes incredible amounts of money to pick up ever more sticks to beat up their millionaire colleagues and go to tremendous lengths to see them do this live, in all types of depressing weather and death trap stadiums, where the drinks are tepid and expensive and the food, if available, tepid, expensive and quite frankly as disgusting as most footballers & their wives’ behaviour off the pitch.
As people keep inventing ever new ways to kill time before time kills them, ever more and ever weirder competitions see the light of day. There are contests for the oddest book title, beauty pageants for plague-carrying vermin and even one competition for the best church poster of the year. When it comes to ways of fighting ennui, the human race can get quite inventive – not to say demented.
However, there’s always room for yet another competition, so, without much further ado, let me invite you to take part in yet another variant of that old Throw momma off the train thing. I’ll call it the Dead Plane Seat Awards.
In a Times online article a British Airways spokesman claims that each year ten out of 36 million passengers die on board of planes. Planes that don’t crash, that is, but fly peacefully from point A to point B.
My idea would be that each year two Dead Seat Rôles should be given to representatives of those two most deserving of professional groups: politicians and TV news presenters. So, one newsreader would win a first class seat on the longest, non-stop commercial flight available, to go ask his or her most mind-bogglingly stupid question over and over again to the other winner: the dead body of the person chosen to be that year’s most vile and/or incompetent politician, now strapped in the seat next to that of the winning newsreader.
The selection and reading of the yearly shortlist of the nominated politicians and newsreaders could be done live on TV, in the manner of any Idols’ competition, while the actual selection of both winners, the ritual killing of that year’s chosen politician and highlights of the subsequent flight could be shown on a Pay Per View basis, the proceedings of which could go to the victims of – no, sorry, forget about that.
Just send the money to the one who thought of this new and wonderful form of entertainment first: me.
If you enjoyed this post, subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
