The boringest thing ever
Over dinner, two friends of mine spent an enter evening arguing over which was the most boring thing in the world: watching paint dry or watching grass grow.
What a ridiculous waste of time! Everyone knows the answer is watching CCTV7.
Show regular viewers of CCTV7 some grass growing, and the excitement would probably give them heart attacks.
No, wait. CCTV7 is a government of China channel with a special brief to attract people in the agriculture area, so they probably already have shows like that: "Exclusive 24-hour TV marathon: LIVE outside broadcast of grass growing."
You want boring TV? A guy sitting at the next table said he'd watched a live telecast of a fishing competition where no one caught anything. A new low in the history of the small screen?
Surprisingly not. His wife claimed that she had read that an "all-accountancy" TV channel was about to be launched. Whoa! End of argument.
The following morning I conducted detailed research on the subject (that is, I typed "accountancy TV" into Google) and found she was right.
It's curious how accountancy has become a theme of this column recently. Not only that, but your humble narrator briefly emerged from book-writing isolation for a single event on Friday last week, and it was a party thrown by the accountants institute of Hong Kong, sponsors of my latest children's book.
Anyway, producers at UK-based Accountancy TV say they will take popular ideas from regular TV and give them a spin to make them relevant to financial professionals.
At the time of writing, no draft listings have been published, so here are some ideas of what the schedule of Accountancy TV could look like.
The X Files: An accountant keeps his bottom drawer locked.
Big Brother: Attractive accountants (oops, oxymoron) share a house where hidden cameras catch them peeking at each other's balance sheets.
Late Night With David Letterman: An accountant advises a philandering TV host on how to make his blackmail payments tax-deductable.
The World's Next Top Model: We're talking about business models, of course, and the hot new one involves bankers declaring their main income while channeling their bonuses to tax havens.
Baywatch: A group of accountants in swimsuits practice their math while waiting to rescue companies which start to sink.
Friends: Five buddies sharing an apartment get into amusing tangles trying to work out how to divide up the household budget.
Home Improvement: A do-it-yourself expert delivers household tips while his accountant buddy calculates the depreciation caused by amateur remodeling work.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A high school cheerleader is assigned by higher powers to cleanse the world of darkness. In other words, she's an auditor.
Desperate Housewives: The week before taxes are due to be filed, a group of women discuss how they can cover up the fact that they have thrown away all their husbands' receipts.
The Flintstones: Fred Flintstone works in an office carving profit and loss sheets into chunks of rock and gets into trouble when he loses his chisel.
Spongebob Squarepants: In a town at the bottom of the sea, a talking sponge does the accounts for The Krusty Krab restaurant. "Mr Krab, this business is under water," he tells his boss.
America's Funniest Home Videos: An on-stage TV presenter shows clips of accountants making minor errors in calculations, causing a studio audience of auditors to laugh hysterically.
Well, the above list is only a guess.
But if that's what they do decide to show, I know what I am going to do.
Switch to CCTV7 and wait for "Grass Growing 2: The Sequel."
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