staying power!
This week on Sneaky Dragon: get frantic; snowbound; bird names; human names; mid-period Saturday Night Live thoughts; let’s talk about Eddie Murphy; not for Dave; no Hart; coming out; we need undismissable athletes; not funny; fun with psychosis; they’re called deadlines for a reason; Ian likes jerks; no power; process; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; more horror musicals; TV recommendations; motion carried; hexes in Texas; strangely popular; and, finally, all done.
Question of the Week: What is the tiredest you’ve ever been and why did you need to push the limits?
Thanks for listening.
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No need to read this “on air” – just popping in to say Press Gang was an ITV show from the UK running in 1989 -1993. It starred Julia Sawalha (Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous) as a straight-A, overachieving student who convinces the principal she can start a student newspaper only to find out he’s using it as a dumping ground for all the school’s idiots and slackers as their last chance before expulsion.
It was incredibly witty and first, a comedy, but the episodes almost always had a mystery of some kind and they occasionally dipped in to more serious fare with episodes on sexual assault, gun violence and there was an even a two-part story about a gunman holding the paper hostage because the boss printed an op-ed calling out gun owners as weak & pathetic (it still found space for plenty of humour in that.)
I imagine you can only get it on region 2 or region 4 (Australian) discs. There’s plenty of clips on youtube, but I have to say it builds kind of slowly. My wife couldn’t get past one episode (but she watches mostly drab, gritty crime drama and true crime anyway) but the characters are very eccentric and flawed, with a pretty compelling will-they-won’t-they couple to rival the greats.
I might be viewing it all through nostalgia glasses but Steven Moffat has said no matter what he makes, when he’s at social gatherings, people will always bring up Press Gang to him.
Thanks Caanan, I’ll check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34uFSajf3co
I listened to David’s story of sleep deprivation with a sense of impending dread, waiting for “and that’s when I fell asleep behind the wheel” or something like that. I’m glad he’s OK. Get more sleep, eh!
To answer the question of the week: The tiredest I’ve ever been was unintentional. A couple of years ago, I started falling behind on my sleep during the work week. I’d catch up on Saturday, but by the next Tuesday or Wednesday I’d be tired again. Then I started falling asleep watching TV on Sunday afternoons, which is really weird for me. Then I started showing up for work late — thankfully, my hours are flexible, so it wasn’t a huge deal, but it also meant I’d stay late to make up time. My evenings became less and less productive. My work weeks became marathons of working and sleeping, with no productive personal time until the weekends. Then one Saturday I was out of it and headachey all day, and I finally realized that something was seriously wrong and getting progressively worse.
So I went to a clinic and got a referral to a doctor who specializes in sleep disorders. He gave me a device that clamped onto the end of a finger and magically tracked my oxygen levels while I slept. The next day he pulled the data off it and printed me a chart of my blood oxygen levels during the night. It’s supposed to be a steady line near 100%, but mine looked like the teeth of a comb, jumping back and forth between 100% and 70%. Apparently I spent the entire night choking, waking up enough to breathe, and falling back asleep. Which doesn’t really count as sleep.
So with the diagnosis of sleep apnea, he sent me to a store that does CPAP machines. It was life changing. That first night I passed out instantly, and slept so deeply that when I woke up I felt like I’d been buried alive. I’ve used it pretty much every night since, and honestly I’m kinda terrified of sleeping without it.
Cheers!
RIP Terry Jones…
Another vote for Press Gang! I clearly didn’t watch it as much as Nigel, as apart from Julie Sawalha as a hyper-achieving student running a school paper, I don’t remember any of the plot arc he mentions. I must watch it again. But I do remember watching it and thinking it was great. And also recognizing Saffy some years later in Ab-Fab.
In response to your earlier question, I will admit to occasionally dropping out from Sneaky Dragon (sorry) for a week or two. For an analogy, I occasionally re-discover a favourite band and will binge-listen to them for weeks, and then find that I’ve filled that need and will not listen to them again for ages. Similarly, sometimes there are so many podcasts in my feed that I feel I’ll never get to them all, and once there are a few SD episodes there, that can be a lot of listening time! I’ve just spent the last few days catching up on your episodes since early December, and am fully back on board. Hope that’s ok. It feels like catching up on an old friend you haven’t heard from in a while.
One podcast I completely stopped listening to was a former favourite of mine, the Shabby Road Record Show. It’s basically two guys playing vinyl and talking about music, with a third person cueing the records and very occasionally (and partly off-mic) chipping in a comment. The original third person left and was replaced by another that didn’t have the same charm, but that was fine. But then the third person started to become much more part of the show and the whole balance was thrown out for me. The crunch came one episode when they were discussing the weather and I heard the third person mutter ‘Climate change, my ass’, and that was just the final straw. Seems petty, but it was the culmination of a whole bunch of things. I occasionally miss it, but not enough to give it another try.
Anyway, glad Dave’s had some sleep now. Looking forward to Sparks! II.
About two years ago, our company took us all to Las Vegas for a weekend. The trip started with me waking at 3:00 am to get to the airport in time for the Vegas flight, after we landed it was one thing after another after another until we had dinner at one of those hedonistically huge buffets in the casino. After dinner we went to see The Beatles LOVE show performed by the Circus de Soleil at the Mirage Hotel and Casino, then we gambled until I think I had been awake for over 24 hours. The next day was more eating and gambling and visiting the neon graveyard until we were back on the plane towards Dallas. I felt like I’d been running and eating constantly up until we arrived well after midnight and we were expected to be in the office the next day at 9:00 am. On my way to work that morning I pulled over in a parking lot and threw up all over the ground due to my body’s rebellion against the previous two days.
If you’re wondering whether that was worth it or not, it was…if only for that Beatles LOVE show. If you haven’t seen it, it was one of best fucking experiences of my life and worth vomiting over.