feeling listless

TV I'm currently semi-addicted to a Freeview channel Price Drop TV. Not that I'd actually buy anything from them (it's mostly crap) but there are two elements which make it compulsive viewing.

Firstly, there is the gameshow element. When an item appears a guide price is offered, £250 for a set of golf clubs (which appear with some regularity). There are fifty items, and as someone calls them up and offers their plastic the price goes down. Except this seems to be an entirely random process. Whatever price the item is at when they're all sold is the price all of the customer's pay. Now I'm pretty naive so I assume nothing underhanded is going on. So on the few occasions that something actually quite good turns up I will the price to drop so low that all of commerce could implode in on itself.

The other allure are the presenters. Unlike QVC where they have to talk about the same item for hours on end, here the host(ess) only has about five minutes. The problem is, more often than not, they don't actually know anything about the item their selling away from the little description tag. At times it's a bit like me giving a football seminar ('Yes! They play two matches a season against each other. Home AND away. And there are two teams!') The other night I watched someone plug a different make of golf clubs to the ones on display for five minutes (they really do sell a lot of those) and then just shrug her shoulders and carry on as though they're all the same...

Rather like air hostesses they also seem to use the same pointy body language. I assume that like a call centre, they've had to do a month's course in on-air presentation. Some seem more comfortable at it than others. The brunette with gravelly voice who works all hours (seen her in the evening, seen her in the morning) is the most comfortable but even she looks ungainly pushing down on the giant button the channel has to hand to announce the next 'lot' (think massive Boggle).

It's on Sky somewhere I imagine as well, between that channel which sells tat for doing handycrafts and the God Channel. Be sure to catch it during one of their technical hitches when they broadcast no sound. One of these days I just know the presenter is going to resort to sign language and I can't wait to see what that looks like and how many fingers they've been trained to use.