It would be so easy to sneer, but the fact of the matter is that “Liz on line one, calling from Amersham” sounds like a perfectly sane woman. So much so, in fact, that I’m made to question some of my own prejudices. Why shouldn’t a perfectly sane person find themselves watching QVC at 11 o’clock in the morning? After all, why am I watching QVC at that time? As it happens, our reasons are eerily similar. Liz hadn’t been feeling very well; sapped of all energy, she is seeking some means of stimulation. Me? I’ve got a cold. The sort of cold where you cough a lot, your temperature shoots up in the middle of the night and a lone couplet from a random pop song — in this case Nik Kershaw’s Wide Boy — soundtracks your half-waking state.
Anyway, it turns out that Liz has ordered the card-making kit (with rubber stamps and paints) and has got so into it that she’s thinking of starting a small business. So yes, it’s easy to sneer, but I can’t say I’m not slightly jealous of her life. For a start, her house is quiet. The kids are at school and her husband is at work. And if she had enough money to make impulse purchases on TV Shop, then there’s every chance that getting the tea ready is a matter of putting two separate M&S trays in the double-decker microwave recently advertised on The Shopping Channel. With all this free time available, the gift shops of Amersham are her oyster. And all because of the illness that led her to buy glue and coloured bits of cards off QVC.
Happy as I am about Liz’s epiphany, my intake of Covonia is turning Nik Kershaw into a sort of speeded-up Marilyn Manson. I flip to the other shopping channels, but a brief look at the competition serves merely to underscore the fact that QVC offers an altogether superior class of waffle. I can only assume that this is down to the training offered to new applicants, in which the head of personnel dangles them over an open trapdoor and orders them to talk about a Rowenta steam iron continuously for half an hour. Pause for more than two seconds and 10st of TV presenting potential is turned into shark meat. Indeed, I think that the presenters might even be able to see live shark footage from where they’re standing, possibly on a huge video screen behind the boom lights. If nothing else, that would certainly explain the look of barely suppressed panic in the eyes presenters Charlie and Beverley during a programme which wasn’t — but should have been — called How Long Do You Think We Can Talk About This Telly?
Now, if you think that programmes such as this are boring, there’s every chance that you’ve never watched them for long enough. Me? Well, I’ve always felt that prolonged exposure to any situation will eventually make it fascinating. Take Brian Keenan and John McCarthy. After a week manacled together in a dark and smelly cell, the two were tired and demoralised. After a year, they were entertaining each other with fantasies about yak herding expeditions in the Andes. Yes, very well — I’m being flippant, but watching QVC isn’t that different. In fact, it’s a bit like listening to Just a Minute on vast quantities of cake, Chris Morris’s time-stretching, made-up drug. Fifteen minutes in, you begin to wonder just how long these people can keep talking about a 28in flat-screen TV. Charlie — a consummate pro — rarely breaks into a sweat. He remembers the golden rule of presenting on QVC. If you run out of words: (a) just conflate a couple of old ones to form a new one (“We feel submersed in the picture”); (b) bang on about the brand name until something else occurs to you (“You cannot fail. You’ll always win with JVC”).
By contrast, Beverley often allows the pressure to get to her. With ten minutes still remaining, she decides that her best policy is to slag off bulgy-screened TVs: “They just look awful and rather offensive,” she rages, before turning to her amazed co-presenter for help. “Um, as I said,” he hazards, “JVC. They invented the VHS tape, so clearly a name you can trust.” I’ve tuned in since, just to check they haven’t fed her to the sharks, but I fear the worst. Which is why I’m leaving my sick bed to post this — even though I do say it myself — rather quaint home-made condolence card.