Fangs for the memory

Oh, I had to. Such a shit pun but whatevers, it was calling me in a siren voice and I followed with my keyboard-friendly fingers.

The reason for such bad journalism (well, I wouldn’t call this journalism but at least I can string a sentence together, unlike anyone who writes for The Sun) is also the reason I’ve been rushing home to curl up with my laptop and spend 74 minutes – well, Megavideo is ruthless after all – curled up and glued to The Vampire Diaries.

Since Twilight is so monstrously crap (yes, I said it… bring on the hate) and True Blood made me yawn after the first series, it was warily that I approached this one. Another high school setting, another blood-celibate boy vamp meets brunette girl and, in Dracula style, she looks like his long lost love…

Much to the surprise of my brain and the clapping of my hands, TVD breaks away from the other vamp TV shows by simply being sharp as a tack.  It isn’t over-sexed to the point where if you see another rutting couple you’ll commit yourself to a monastary and the vampires are a sassy nasty bunch sans the ya ya dahlin accents and cyber-goth/Renaissance man attire. Even tortured Stefan Salvatore, played by Paul Wesley doing his best James Dean impression, manages to avoid being as pathetically wet as RPatz’s Edward. Bloodsucking brother, Damon Salvatore (Ian Somerhalder) is thoroughly fun. Times about ten. He gets the girls, has the moral code of roadkill and hangs drained bodies in trees. Bite me!

Kevin Williamson is the king of script here. He’s best known for Scream and the dictionary-friendly dialogue of Dawson’s Creek but in TVD he eschews the tongue tangling pondering of Capeside teens and gives the characters some zinging lines (though you can spot a ‘hey, we’re down with the kidz’ line a mile off). Even better, the show contains some great ‘jumps’. Who would’ve thought a raven could be such a threat? The Vampire Diaries started 1 Feb on ITV2 here in the UK. If you can’t wait week by week, then you know what to do, all you little internet monkeys…

All this viscous excitement was an alleviation from seeing the tangerine human steroid, Alex Reid, gurn victoriously at winning Celebrity Big Brother. It was like seeing the actual decline of UK brain power, like watching from space as an electrical grid fails. The British pride themselves on the tall poppy syndrome, helping the underdog whilst hacking the successful at the knee.

Alex Reid winning CBB

Yet even as the nation decided Reid was such a pathetic fuck that we needed to celebrate his diminishing ability to speak without dribbling, it also was indicative of how sublimely and ridiculously brainless the UK is becoming. I’m not asking that we all suction our eyeballs to QI every night, after all, Stephen Fry has always been pitched at the other end of the spectrum as an annoying know-it-all you’d want to thump if you had to play Trivial Pursuit with. And is actually beginning to fulfill that role (see his take on the internet on the new BBC2 series).

We need a fix of gossip. I suggest Michael K‘s D-Listed simply because the man is a genius of bile. But seriously, instead of picking up Now or Heat or anything that involves one woman, a spatula and a chav burglar, pick up a book.  Fuck the iPad. There’s nothing like cracking the spine of a book and inhaling. It’s like catnip. Read. Horror, sci-fi, romance, thriller… it will kill off the need for Katie Price. For whichever moronic soapstar got thin by hurling up her intestines and getting a crack habit. It might even catch on to some of those little bastards that insist on lighting fires in my stairwell of a weekend.

Last weekend, I think, nope, weekend before, I went to play with mah friend CVH and we hungovered in a North London pub where we met Sam, the black haired bartender, and he told us about his band. Which used to be called something bad up until about a month ago and has now got the much better name of Tres Calaveras (www.myspace.com/trescalaveras). They play some dirty rock and he gave us a nice pic. The end. Time to go to the Barfly and check out Irish band, WOUNDS.

xx taylor