Trigger Happy TV is 25 years old this year. I don’t think there has been a single day in that time in which somebody hasn’t walked up to me and shouted “HELLO! I’M ON THE TRAIN.”
Little did I know, when I was first filmed shouting into my giant mobile phone on a train from London to Oxford, what a monster I had released.
I did the big mobile in other places — a church, a library, a restaurant, out jogging — but none captured the zeitgeist as well as the annoying telephone bore on public transport.
In 2000, it tapped into a fairly new irritant. Sadly, though, it did not kill off this antisocial narcissistic behaviour.
Things have got a lot worse over the past 25 years. Now, the phone is not only for communication. People blast out films, music and video games. They host conference calls, making others privy to meetings between boring people vying to say something even more inane about their dull businesses.
Back in 2000, I had a nagging suspicion that there was actually nobody on the other end of the line. I suspected that we were witnessing some awful “look at me, look at me” behaviour from people with low self-esteem.
But now, we know these people are real. They travel among us. They have zero self-awareness or respect for anybody else. Even their keypads are set to make loud, annoying “tap tap” sounds.
Enough is enough. We must rise up against these social pollutants. They must be stopped. They must be confronted. They must be made aware of how much we all loathe them.
Maybe we should fight back, read our newspapers and books out loud. Whatever, we have to do something or I’m going be forced to get my big mobile out of the display cabinet.
The Trigger Happy TV — LIVE 25th anniversary shows start in October, visit domjoly.TV