Inopportune!

There are some situations that happen in real life by default and not design that are so surreal that the best team of scriptwriters couldn't have come up with them.

I preface what follows with the statement that all events mentioned are 100 per cent true and centre around music played at the most inopportune times.

A few years back, I used to work as a producer on a music TV show in London. The format of the show was the usual: VJ host plays audience requests. My job was to pre-produce the running order of pop videos that were topping the charts at the time. There was also a sprinkling of rap videos that were always in the line-up because, quite frankly, I just love to hear them.

Anyway, this day was like any other and the show was rolling along as usual, when we had to break for a news report at the top of the hour. Within this news bulletin was a breaking story about a massive earthquake that had just hit San Francisco. We sat watching live images from the scene showing bridges shaking and buildings falling. We were all set to go straight back on air with our pre-set line-up of music.

So, back from the break, we rolled our next video and discussed what would follow: a couple of live callers were lined up and we had a few letters to read. However, as the song played, we came to realise the perverse irony of what we were transmitting on our airwaves after the earthquake story it was I Feel The Earth Move Under My Feet by Martika! This cruel coincidence created sudden mad panic and much scrambling, and we cut it off with a breezy host announce, hoping that nobody had spotted it, or worse, thought that we were making light of a disaster!

I noticed a similar surreal situation recently with all the news coverage of Michael Jackson's death. The global networks rushed to start airing their speculative reports on his passing. To accompany their hastily produced segments, they intercut their panels of so-called 'experts' with clips from Michael's classic videos, to remind us of his work. Surely I'm not the only one who realises that of all the videos to play, Thriller was the one to steer clear of. The man had just died, so it wasn't the best time to see Mike looking like a zombie dancing in a graveyard! It was such a mixed message. "MJ is dead... now see him as the undead!"

I also need to share my recent experience at the dentist with you. I mentioned a few articles back how I broke a tooth (once again biting off more than I could chew), so I needed treatment pretty quick. It's ironic enough that my dentist is called Dr Joy, an absolutely wonderful professional who has the most incongruous name to match her profession. I mean no one experiences anything near 'joy' at the dentist!

I get to the clinic where the whole ambience is designed to calm the patients so that stress and anxiety are kept to a minimum. To achieve this, the staff are friendly and mellow, all instruments of tooth-torture are kept under wraps until they are required for their intended purpose, and all the while a completely inoffensive soundtrack of old '90s pop music is piped into the rooms. As I lie back in the chair preparing myself for my procedure, I become aware that REM's Everybody Hurts is wafting from the speakers. I would have laughed, if only I could.

If that wasn't inopportune enough, the very next track was Every Breath You Take by the Police. Every breath I was taking was incredibly difficult because Dr Joy was elbow deep in my mouth, drilling away!

It's the stuff comedy series writers dream of... but for me, it's just real life!

Sound Track out of Whack-ingly Yours