Television and movies are having to evolve to meet the change in consumer demands. Some people would like to see a female Sherlock Holmes, others would like to see a female Doctor Who. Me, I'd settle for just once seeing a realistic portrayal of someone drinking Whiskey. Whiskey drinking, particularly on soap operas, normally centres around a man sitting in a dimly lit front room, chain smoking, knocking back glass after glass of whiskey because he's depressed as he's just been sacked for calling his manager a twat. And not at any time is there any indication of heartburn. You never see anyone drop to the floor clutching their chest like John Hurt in Alien before running to the fridge to find the nearest alkali product they can get their hands on. It's normally milk, I'm sure there's others in the fridge (Artichoke Terrine?) but milk is the best known one. It seems that no one ever in tv land gets heartburn, they probably have Gaviscon inplants the lucky bastards.
I sip shots of Tequila, not because I am less of a man or I am trying to avoid getting my round in but because I have a burgeoning stomach ulcer , developed on the back of the belief in the 1990's that "Eating is Cheating" and when I did eat it was normally kebabs . And pickled onions. I did for some time consider the possibility that the ulcer may have nothing to do with the kebabs (they contain salad after all) and more to do with drinking alcohol. But then I thought about tramps. When was the last time you saw a tramp in a park drinking pints of milk and eating steamed fish? Never is the answer. So following this scientific study I concluded that the ulcer is nothing to do with drinking and not eating but solely the symptom of eating kebabs. So the moral of this story is don't eat kebabs but carry on drinking in the afternoon on an empty stomach and getting sacked.
But who in their right mind has booze hanging around the house for the very day you get sacked. It must be a bit of a running joke everytime you go the supermarket to stock up; "Going to shag the bosses' wife again?" says the cashier as you load the crate of Glenfiddich onto the conveyor belt. I buy booze and I pretty much drink it there and then. If I came home depressed I'd spend the next hour hunting high and low for some left over cooking sherry and maybe a bottle of Smirnoff Ice that fell out of the shopping bag and rolled under the vegetable rack last Christmas. Certainly not enough to get you hammered. The only person I know who collects booze is my dad who had decanters full of whiskey that had so much sediment they began to look like specimen jars in a serial killer's cellar. And yet despite the fact that no one ever drunk this Whiskey, offering a guest a glass was normally considered the most heinous crime of the century. "Don't give them the good stuff" my dad would say. The good stuff? There's a fucking tongue swimming in it.
