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The five stages of getting sucked into a really shit TV show

FROM slagging off your partner for watching it to staying up all night to finish the series, these are the stages of getting stupidly invested in a dreadful telly programme.

Taking the piss out of your partner for their viewing choices

You swan into the room after doing some self-improving activity like jogging to find that your partner is watching an episode of Selling Sunset, where tiny bald men and giant Amazonian women sell obscenely expensive houses and bitch about each other. You mock your partner viciously for being so trashy and basic.

Moving from the arm of the sofa to fully sitting down

Ten minutes in and you’ve somehow slid from the arm of the sofa where you’d loftily perched yourself to take the piss into a comfortable sitting position next to your partner. You’re going to get up in a minute, you tell yourself. You just want a moment more of being judgemental about these awful people who have enough money to buy an 8,000 square foot house you desperately wish you owned.

Not letting your partner change the channel

After a couple of episodes your partner mentions there’s something on in a few minutes that you both wanted to watch. Because you’re so invested in finding out whether Chrishell and Jason will get together or not you tell them not to worry about switching over. That’s what catch-up is for after all.

Continuing to watch when your partner goes to bed

At midnight your partner announces they’re going to bed and asks if you’re coming. You say you’ll be up in five minutes, before pausing the show and going to the kitchen to pour yourself another drink and make a nice big plate of cheese and crackers.

Getting to sleep at 4am hating yourself

Okay, so somehow you’re now halfway through the next season and even though you’re knackered and a bit pissed, you need to know whether Christine gets fired or not. And when you find out, it’s a huge anticlimax and you go to bed feeling hollow and somehow cheapened.

Seven topics of conversation you shouldn't get your arsehole colleagues started on

SMALL talk is the office go-to for a reason – it avoids you discovering the extent of your colleagues’ awful personalities. Broach these topics at your own risk.

Politics  

Think you can have a sensible political discussion? Hahahahaha. There’s bound to be someone who can’t focus on an actual issue and just goes ‘I suppose you’d prefer Corbyn?’ as if that’s the last word in any debate. Politics also includes immigration, so avoid unless you like hearing tabloid headlines repeated ad nauseum.

Conspiracy theories

Your heart will sink as you learn your union rep has a theory about the assassination of JFK involving holograms. Meanwhile your manager is convinced Area 51 has captured a ghost in a force field. Remember when you at least had professional respect for these dickheads? 

Favourite comedy

It’s unlikely you’re a massive Bernard Manning fan, so hardly controversial, surely? Not if they butcher your favourite sitcom so that when you watch an episode now, you just hear Jeff going ‘I can’t believe you like that rubbish’. You later discover he hasn’t actually seen it, the twat.

Lunch

Sounds innocent enough, but anything vegetarian will be viewed with suspicion, as if instead of ‘I might have the vegetarian lasagne’ you’d said ‘Did I tell you I like making bombs?’. With luck your colleagues will just inform you that whatever you’re eating is too filling, not filling enough, too boring, too exotic, too salty or too sweet, or somehow a combination of all of those. Despite the fact they don’t have to eat it. 

People in the workplace

Or ‘enemies’. No input required from you as they will deliver an unbroken monologue for 20 minutes about their cow of a department head. Unfortunately you’re now their eternal confidante who for some reason has to pick up the pieces after they start a blazing drunken row at the Christmas party.

Workplace crushes

It turns out the only thing worse than hearing about how much a co-worker wants to stab another is how much they want to shag them. There’s always too much detail, possibly down to individual sex acts, but what do you expect from a wanker who blabs this sort of stuff to a near-stranger?

Actual work

As horrendous as all of the above topics are, they’re preferable to doing actual work. So if you’re really bored with work discussions, ask whether they think Apollo 11 was a hoax or how they’d shag Tiffany from marketing – and what they’d eat from the office canteen afterwards.

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