I LOVE TV.............AM I SHALLOW? HELL YES!

After 2 days of blogging on politics I have decided to return to my shallow roots and discuss 'something less boring instead'..............that's right TV.
Joy of joys Shameless is back and still one of the funniest shows on TV and yes it still reminds me of where I live. Mostly because it is filmed on an estate in Manchester that is similar to our estate, though our estate is smaller of course. It is constructed on the Radburn type estate which originated in the USA

Radburn was founded in 1929 as "a town for the motor age" Its planners, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, and its landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley aimed to incorporate modern planning principles, which were then being introduced into England's Garden Cities, following ideas advocated by urban planners Ebenezer Howard and Sir Patrick Geddes.
Radburn was explicitly designed to separate traffic by mode with a pedestrian path system that does not cross any major roads at grade. Radburn introduced the largely residential "superblock" and is credited with incorporating some of the earliest cul-de-sacs in the United States.

So what does that mean? It means that people come and go through your back door because that is where the road is and councils up and down the UK are now re-designing the estates to incorporate pavements on the outsides of the estates. We live in what locals call a back-to-front house and you do not answer the front door because it is only people selling things!
Rumor has it that drug dealers live in the flats, of course we have the 'burglar boys' in the flats behind us but for them I think it is really a part-time hobby as they are really not that good at being burglars.
Like 'Shameless' we do have funny moments on the estate, we have one resident who chases cars like a dog when he is drunk and he also goes to the local garage which is also a 24 hour shop and picks up what food he wants and walks out without paying for it! Neighbors regularly call the ambulance to come and get him as he is lying comatose in the road. Apart from that he is no trouble really.
When husband number 2 died we were leaving for the funeral and the people at the end of the road were having a fight in the road, the wife could see the funeral cars coming but not the husband who continued to shout and scream . The poor wife looked as if she wanted the road to open up and swallow her. However, I think husband number two would have found the situation highly amusing.........most definitely!

Shameless saw the return of Monica, Frank's real wife. Marty shows up with a baby that Kev and Veronica have bought in an Eastern European country and the Maguires move into Kev and Veronicas house(imagine living next to the Maguires)...........oh yes and the Maguires give Lip a silver knuckle duster for his 18(19) birthday!
And scarily I find this funny.

We also watched a show called The Baby Borrowers it is a reality show where youngsters who want more independence are given a house for a month to see how they will cope with house keeping, jobs, babies, toddlers, pre-teens, teens and finally seniors. One girl had previously looked after a pretend baby as part of a school project, when the baby wouldn't stop crying she put it in her wardrobe under clothes to keep it quiet! Funnily enough the pretend baby died BUT the girl got 33% for the project! What the FLIP! I call a dead baby a 0%, a FAIL even if the baby is pretend. She was very proud of her achievement. In the show she started arguing with the baby(a bit one sided I know) because the baby would not stop crying. Thankfully the mother, who was watching on CCTV , stepped in and explained the correct way to deal with the situation.
Sam on the show bosses her boyfriend around constantly and does as little as possible and is always having a paddy and walking off , Fisnik is a male chauvinist pig and is constantly telling his girlfriend what to do and is always having a paddy and walking off(see a pattern forming).
Compared to these youngsters my 15 year old is a star, she is brilliant at multi-tasking. She can clean(sometimes without being asked), watch her 6 year old sister Beauty who is autistic and will even change nappies(not poop ones though-I am the official 'poop checker'). Beauty and Fiona are best friends but I don't know how long it will last as they now compete for computer time. Yes that's right, a 6 year old and a 15 year old fighting over a computer(guess who always wins!).