Drinking games for the modern world

Drinking games played while watching Eurovision are clichés now. It’s far too easy to knock back the schnapps or the grappa every time you think another singer will be killed by an angry mob when they return to their home country following the national embarrassment of their performance.  And Eurovision only comes once a year. We need some newer and more frequent opportunities to pretend we’re still in our early twenties.

As reality TV is now taking up 90% of the free-to-air TV time not already devoted to sport, it seems a sensible place to start.

Let’s start with home renovation competitions. Like most TV made for people so stupid that breathing is an exercise in concentration, there is a need for the producer to include little commentary moments wherein the competitors explain what just happened or make emotive yet vague statements about their motivations, at least those that can be expressed before the 9.30 watershed. You can drink when they pad out their required 60 seconds of commentary with a statement of the blindingly obvious:

Someone says, “I want to win”. Equivalent phrases include

• “We came here to win”;
• “I didn’t come here to lose”;
• “Winning my mortgage would just be a dream”; or
• “We’re not going home losers – well, any more of a loser than I already am.”

You can also drink when a contestant recognizes that they’re in a competition. Equivalent phrases include

• “The other teams are going to be working hard”;
• “We need to work hard to win this week”;
• “The other teams won’t be making it easy for us”; or
• ”Hey, I’ve just realized that the other people in this house aren’t helping me all that much,”

And you can drain the rest of the bottle in hair-tearing despair when one of the hosts explains, at about a word every three seconds, that, in this elimination style competition, one team will be eliminated as a result of the elimination process.  The key phrases here are “Someone’s dream will be over”, “One of the teams will be going home tonight” and “We’ll be saying goodbye to one of you”.  You can take a double shot on that rare occasion when the host forgets themselves and adds “and I hope it’s opinionated ditzy one that never shuts up and her hen-pecked husband” to the end of his or her remarks.

However, on reflection, I think the neo-Puritans of modern Australia – who seem to think that drinking so much as a shandy makes you a bad father and wife beater – might have a legitimate case against me if I set up that game. The entire country would be plastered 6 nights a week and productivity would plummet.

We need some fun without destroying the economy. Some of the more refined reality shows with lower audience numbers, then?

How about Antiques Roadshow?

You can take a good long swig every time someone comes up with an heirloom that is so Geordie Shore tasteless that:

1.   It’s a miracle anyone ever bought it;
2.  It’s even more of a miracle that the family has held onto it for all this time; and
3.  It’s a supreme miracle that someone is prepared to take it out in public and admit to owning it.

I always wonder about that. For every gaudy ceramic elephant that turned out to have belonged to the Maharaja of Luvakuri and to, therefore, be worth in the order of 50,000 pounds, there must be a thousand couples going home with their tails between their legs because grandma’s precious set of fire irons were cheap knock-offs bought from Woolworths and substituted for the real, ancient ones when times were a bit tough.

You could move on, gentile-ly from there and pick up Tony Robinson’s “Time Team” – you know the one in which Baldrick works with a team of local enthusiasts and digs up vast acres of the English countryside in search of a Roman villa or Saxon hill-fort?

If we limited the drinking to every time they found what they were looking for, you might as well be tee-total, so the rules are:

1.  Whenever they start a new trench, you can open a new bottle; 
2. Whenever it rains – you drink;
3. Whenever they cover their lack of discoveries with a 3D computer model of what they thought might have been there – you drink;
4. Whenever they find some pottery which might be Roman but is more likely to be buried dog bowl – you drink; and
5. When they finally give up, having found nothing despite having dug up three-quarters of the arable land in Herefordshire, you can drain the bottle in empathetic despair.

And wrap the night up with Kevin McLeod. There are so many disaster points in his shows that blotto is all but guaranteed.

Take Grand Designs. I think he goes out of his way to find people to mock. A couple – usually youngish – have saved a fortune and bought a barn in rural Shropshire that is a grade-2 listed disaster site, last occupied by cattle prior to Cromwell’s army using it as an ill-fated gunpowder depot during the civil wars of the 17^th century. And they want to turn it into a three bedroom designer dream at a cost so atronomical they’ll be lucky – even if it all goes to budget – to get out of with their shirts.

And it never goes to budget. The first drinking opportunity comes with a nip for every 1000 pounds they go over. On some of the more spectacular train-wrecks, you might need to make that 10,000 pounds so that you’re not too far gone before the first ad break.

Take another drink for every month of wet weather the family has to spend living in a tent on the worksite, cooking on a battery-operated lightbulb.

Grade the wife’s frustration from 1 (thinking he’s a bit silly but willing to back him) to 10 (thinking that his mutilated body might make a nice addition to the foundations) and, for every notch she goes up, have another drink.

Finally, divvy up what’s left of the alcohol based on how close you came to guessing the difference between the cost of the renovation and the market value of the finished product – or the market value of Windor Castle, whichever is the lesser.

And have one for me while you’re at it.