Question: What do Big Brother and the Boom Town Rats have in common?
Answer: Nothing as far as I know, but they've both set me thinking this weekend!

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I'm not a particular Big Brother fan. I tend to turn it on when there's nothing much else on to television. Last night's culmination to 'fake week' was entertaining though, for two reasons.

Firstly, I have to give the people behind the programme top marks for manipulation and coming up with new twists for the viewers. Last week, unbeknown to the housemates at the time but very much known to the audience, was fake week. This included introducing a fake housemate, supposedly from Oz but really a Swindon actress, giving them fake tasks to do and a fake eviction. The fakely evicted hosuemate was shown footage of other housemates mouthing off about her, given a chance to mouth off about them and then told it was a fake eviction and she was going back into the house with said housemates. Sadistic or what?! She took it all quite well, but I'm not quite so sure about some of the other hosuemates...

At risk of sounding like an intellectual snob, the other amusing thing for me (the footage I assume cruelly picked out to make one laugh at the housemates' expense)was some of the things some housemates come out with. Indeed, it's hard to believe the following comments aren't somehow scripted!!!

There appeared to be a general consensus that prudish meant picky and was not a comment on one of the housemates not wanting to put out on national T.V.!

A number of them also seemed to have had/have the impression that when people talked about 'the economy' in political terms, this was something to do with food (because of supermarket economy brands eg economy biscuits etc)!

The housemates were also asked to make a televised English peace campaign appeal and then repeat it a foreign language. Of course, what most of them were given to say was not actually a translation of what they had said in English, but a phrase(s) designed to make the audience laugh. Anyway, one of them waas asked to speak in Nepalese. She asked where Nepalese was spoken. On being told "Nepal", she commented that was in Poland, wasn't it? (Or something to that affect!)

of course, to be fair, I should point that many of the housemates seemed quite happy to laugh themselves at their own ignorance. And I have to admit, that I myself would not win any prizes in a gneral knowledge quiz, particularly if it had anything to do with celebrities or pop stars.

It was, in fact, only recently that my husband explained to me the true story behind the Boom Town Rats' I don't like Mondays. I had always taken the song to be talking about: "Tell me why I don't like Mondays" (with the slight pause after why being to do with the tune or a chance for the singer to breathe). It came as a shock to find out that the song was actually about a school/college student being killed by a fellow student, the words being a dialogue: "Tell me why. - I don't like Mondays!" I have to say this knowledge has changed my feelings towards the song, which I'd always completely enjoyed, but now makes me feel slightly uneasy.

However, as a poet, this is a very strong reminder and example of the important roles both punctuation and pauses can play, and how they can be used to create certain effects. The song is, in my opinion anyway, very carefully, cleverly and skillfully constructed to allow this double meaning.