Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the longest station name in the country (note to self: check spelling on that. Might have missed an ‘l’ somewhere.) Every year, hundreds of train spotters turn up to be photographed in front of the station sign, as a little memento of the time they went to Wales. I don’t know why they do this.
A wet Sunday afternoon in Wales, standing on a platform with a ridiculous name while surrounded by anorak wearing, flask carrying trainspotters. Can there be a more depressing station than that?
Yes.
Babestation.
Babestation is the televisual version of those weird adverts in the back of magazines offering a genuine teacher who’ll talk to you over the phone while you knock one out.
It features a girl on screen rolling around in her pants, while telling lies about her turn-ons to an unheard caller. Adverts letting you know about the thousands of ways you can play along at home (I thank you) fill the bottom of the screen: Phone, text, MMS, 3G call, online. If something vaguely suggestive can be sent to you, you can pay £1.50 a minute for it.
Almost all of Babestation is performed in front of awful music, the generic repetitive stuff associated with lifts (although I’ve never heard music in a lift in real life.) It must be frustrating to be quite good at something, good enough to make a living from it but never to be successful. Like being able to sing well enough to warble “washing machines live longer with Calgon” on the TV, but not capable of getting to number one. How satisfying it must be to know that your tunes are being heard by literally thousands of masturbators each night.
The pumping tunes are occasionally interrupted by one of the Babestation Babes – using the broadest definition of the word babe – who breathlessly explains that she can’t wait to talk to you, and, in the most blatant lie of the show, that she wants to have a video chat to see what you’re up to at home. A middle aged man, sat in his pants with a beer in one hand and in the other… the TV remote. With the sound turned down in case his wife catches him. That’s what she wants to see. Is it really? Is it?
She’s obliged to read out the terms and conditions of calling, including the costs, which she continues to do in her sexy voice, meaning she sounds like she’s turned on by the prospect of you getting the billpayer’s permission.
If “smellyvision” had developed beyond cheap scratch-and-sniff cards, then Babestation would smell of cheap perfume and despair.
Being a bit of a Babestation connoisseur, I remember the glory days where the girls would talk to the camera and read out the texts from perverts. Can there be a more depressing existence than sitting in a grotty studio at 3 o’clock on Sunday morning while being bombarded with messages to show your bum or stroke your nipples? Where being told that a stranger has just come is an occupational hazard?
And what about mum and dad? “She’s doing fine” they tell their friends “she’s down in London working on the TV”. They can’t tell them the truth though, can they? That you’re just wank assistance, stroking your legs for the benefit of a drunk, horny idiot. That little girl that they dressed in her best clothes and packed off to school. They must be so proud.
So, if you’re turned on by moderately attractive girls wearing skimpy clothes while writhing around awkwardly to musak and waving a cordless phone around in the downtime between calls, then Babestation is the show for you.
