I was browsing on You Tube the other day and they had a thing called "geek week" and on this particular day, a show I used to watch and love as a child was part of this "geek week". It was a show called Knightmare.
If you have never seen it, it is basically a team of 4 people and one of the team members (the dungeoneer) has to put on a helmet (the helmet of justice) where he/she can only see what is directly below them and the other 3 members of the team act as his/her guide through medieval environments with puzzles, obstacles and other characters that they may meet along the way. The dungeoneer would also have a knapsack in which throughout the quest, food must be placed in to "preserve their life force". The quest that they go through is all done by blue casting chroma key and virtual reality giving backgrounds and images like it would be in a computer game.
It sounds cheesy but it was absolutely incredible and at the time VERY scary. One amazing show that was one of the best things of many childrens' childhoods.
Unfortunately, this group of idiots, a couple of them who made me want to throw something hard at my computer screen but who for some reason are stupidly popular on You Tube (they literally just put videos of themselves up being fucking annoying) did a one-off Knightmare special. They were just pathetic, attention seeking jackasses. They were laughing and pissing about and generally making the show look shit. They were cheapening it and the only reason why they were chosen to go on there for this one-off special is because they were popular on You Tube and I guess the producers of Knightmare just wanted as many views as possible. Unfortunately, all the pathetic losers who are their followers, only commented on the actual people. Not the show. Many of the idiots probably don't even know/remember or weren't even born when the show was on TV. So the comments were things along the lines of "lol classic Dan" or "you look good in that shirt Phil" or something like "hey Dan, liked your other vid you put about about how much gel you put on your hair."
I am not even joking there.
The actual team were just frigging everything that is wrong with the internet. It made me wonder why the producers of Knightmare were so desperate for so many views? Why cheapen themselves like that?
Maria Sharapova wanted to change her name to Maria Sugarpova for The US Open.
She has a brand of sweets apparently under that name which she wanted to promote.
I've never really liked her anyway. This made me like her even less. She got injured before The US Open got underway. What a shame. But I don't understand why someone would do this? Change her name just for one tournament to promote sweets? Insanity. Would the commentators, the umpire, the interviewers have all had to call her "Sugarpova"?? She is a very good tennis player. But again, why cheapen yourself like that?
I could go on and on about giving examples of people cheapening themselves or cheapening great things. For some reason off the top of my head my college days came back to me and in particular a couple of things.
One was where in my HND Theatre Studies class, our last project of the first year was that as a group, we can put on ANY kind of performance we wanted. Obviously as an actor, this is really exciting as the possibilities are endless. I wanted to dress up as Death and walk through the town centre just to see what kind of reaction I would get. What would happen afterwards and what would the consequences would be? I was a Drama student, so I was pretty sure I wouldn't be put in prison. Even if I was, I would just touch people and then they would be dead. Anyway, one of the tutors said this was the best idea she had heard and was excited by it. Unfortunately the main tutor disagreed and wouldn't let me. And any ideas I did come up with to push some boundaries (I loved and still love pushing boundaries) were always shut down. It ended up me and the whole group dressing up as ladies and wandering around college and sometimes in a ladies' bathing suit. The men had to, the ladies did sod all and didn't have to dress up as men or in ladies' bathing suits. I think it was because one of the ladies had breasts so big, they would enter the room 15 minutes before the actual owner of them did.
Remember, this was a class full of potential acting geniuses doing something so frigging tacky that I didn't want to do or choose to do. At the time I felt like I was cheapening myself. I refused to do it after the first day and my argument was that we weren't pushing boundaries or doing anything that would make people think. We were just being pathetic and the whole thing was pointless (I had already had to dress up as a woman for Commedia Del Arte which is where pantomime originated from). I wasn't learning anything and so I left the course and didn't want to come back for the second year. I DID end up coming back after a few months after an hour long talk with the tutor about how I thought Drama should be taught.
The second thing was a band called Limp Bizkit who "sold out" after doing "commercial" songs just to make money. For some reason, the "alternative" scene were outraged that they chose to cheapen themselves. Personally for me, I always thought that they were a bunch of twats who had always played shit music so it had no effect on me whatsoever.
My whole point is a lot of people do cheapen themselves whether it be for attention, a few laughs, for money or for whatever. The best advice I can give is just to ignore those fuckers and be true to YOURself.
