Of High Culture and Small Wonders

Having lived in foreign climes for some time now I've become quite accustomed to the fact the foreign telly is infinitely rubbisher than good old homegrown British broadcasting. My heart truly swells with pride whenever I think of the genius and insight that went into producing The Jeremy Kyle Show, My Family, Cash In the Attic and Hollyoaks. Having grown up surrounded by all this cultural richness it has no come as no suprise to me that Chilean TV is lamer than a one-legged arthritic duck.

My induction to it was flabbergasting, for want of a better word. In the 7 minutes of "Noche De Comedia" I watched before trying to claw out my own eyeballs I witnessed:

A midget dressed as an elephant, telling jokes about termites and breakdancing and
A labrador in a skirt and his owner performing a typical Chilean dance which incorporated the worst aspects of morris dancing and flamenco.

So after those traumatic minutes I've tried to give the telly a wide berth. This has, however, been near impossible at the hogar where the girls sit in front of the box in a soma-induced state for hours at a time. Now, I'm well aware that I work with teenage girls. I'm not expecting them to want to watch documentaries about Schiller or the latest interpretation of the Ring Cycle.

But what they do watch sears the retinas and temazipams the brain. There are big, sprawling 2-hour long soaps that make Neighbours seem like high art, there are horrendous MTV formats adopted for the local market but there are mostly lots of shows involving girls in bikinis, many a fine mullet, excessive amounts of reggaeton (any amount of reggaeton is excessive) and cameramen with vertigo.

And the girls at the residencia are happier than bi-phallic canines watching this fecal extract for hours and hours on end.

And this is where Vamos A Leer comes in. It's basically a reading project that tries to encourage the girls to do something more productive than pull each others hair out and gives them something more stimulating than Chilean Next.

I went into it with low expectations, everyone knows that reading is fome and the girls had to take a book, whether they wanted to or not. Then there were the books the titles we offered covered such classics of literature as "The Artic Tern" and "At last Susannah, you've got teeth!".

So when I handed the books I expected nothing more than supplying another form of weaponry to the girls armoury. I don't know if you've ever been hit by the spine of a book but it fucking hurts.

But then, something miraculous happened. The hogar descended into total silence, the TV was off, there were no cries of pain, no escape plans being hatched and most importantly no reggaeton. There were 30 girls reading books so quickly than some have already finished, given me synopsii (?) of such great depths I almost fell asleep and they started demanding "The Artic Tern: Part II" and "Oh My, Susannah! You've got some more teeth". (There's a whole series, there, I really recommend the wisdom teeth years),

Maybe I should have been less cynical and there's probably a lesson to be learned from this, but let's not get too deep. All I can say is it's been a lovely, really affecting week and I can't ask for any more than that. That's All!