Let's go to the movies

It’s true, finally! Sex & the City has come to London with subtitles and I am very excited! Finally I will get to stuff my face with Minstrels and cry into my popcorn as the plot unfolds. But in the midst of all this mad excitement I can’t help feeling a little bit disappointed that as usual I am having to make do with the delayed hype and, that while everyone else rides on the crest of the ‘hype’ wave, I’m paddling along behind.

This is true in a lot of things in my life especially when someone announces good news. The first I know of it is the squeals of excitement as I have usually missed half of it as I wasn’t tuned in to begin with and the premature screaming from someone else obscured the last bit.

I then spend the next five minutes trying to find someone calm enough to tell me what on earth is going on but by then, I can’t squeal with excitement as everyone else has calmed down. For this reason, I feel a bit like an echo.

Another time I suffer from delayed hype is watching the news, or Big Brother, or any live show on TV – the subtitles are slower than a tanked-up snail and more often than not wholly inaccurate, too. I can only imagine what a nightmare it is watching TV with me.

Take the other day, Fab Friend was in the studio audience of Graham Norton so I tuned in with Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words to watch. Our evening went something like this – Dame Edna, Graham’s guest, made a joke, Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words laughed. Two minutes later the subtitles caught up and didn’t make any sense. Friend-Who-Knows-Big-Words had to tell me the joke, I laughed. And so it went on…

*sigh

And then, what do you know – the total opposite happens, usually on game shows. Old-Housemate-Who-Now-Lives-In-Cornwall used to refuse point blank to watch The Weakest Link with me if the subtitles were on as the answers were usually up before the question had even been asked and it was my turn to be ahead of the game for once.

But, this as it turns out, is just as lonely as paddling along behind the crest as no one wants to join you. I wonder how it’s possible to create robots that can iron and space rockets to take you to, um, Space, but not possible to create subtitles that allow me to ride the crest – to join in the hype, not be forced either in front or behind.

There must be someone I can write and complain to – I’m off to find out.