Shock Therapy

Surprise Surprise was an ITV light entertainment show that ran through the late 80s and 90s, based on the premise of a single emotion. Other emotion based television programmes include Fear Factor, The Love Boat and of course Gogglebox, which doesn’t directly address the themes of sadness and disgust, but does induce them very effectively. Surprise Surprise ran for seventeen years, so I should at least be able to get one blog written about that same emotion. If not, then once and for all I’ll have to admit that I will never be as good as Cilla Black.

Word association leads us from ‘surprise’ to ‘party’, ‘surprise’ to ‘guest’ or as we’ve already discussed, ‘surprise’ to the word ‘surprise’ again, ironically the least surprising way to follow that word.
Surprise parties are a nice notion on the surface, but imagine if it was your birthday, and for at least two weeks leading up to it, all of your friends tell you they’re busy and can’t hang out with you on the day, to throw you off the scent. That’s a good amount of time to build up some legitimate and deserved resentment towards them, all because they think they can throw a better party than you. A party for which they give you no notice whatsoever, and therefore have to rely on the fact that after they’ve all apparently fobbed you off, you haven’t taken it upon yourself to make some other plans for your birthday, even if that’s just going to laser tag alone. Having never had a surprise party thrown for me, I have to assume the feeling of shock when your friends and/or family jump from behind furniture to shout at you as the culmination of a weeks long practical joke, must make up for the aforementioned feelings of betrayal. Sure, there’s the revelation that they cared about you all along, and have gone to the trouble to organise as many of your friends that were available into a room together for you, but it does set a precedent for any successive birthdays, especially if the next time a suspicious number of your friends are conveniently ‘busy’ when you try to organise another get-together. Also, it’s much more likely they actually will be busy next time; having remembered the hassle and lying they had to go through for your last birthday they’re probably glad to feel like they’re off the hook for at least five years. Then when your partner ‘forgets’ something back at the flat before you go off to dinner, you’ll just be walking into a dark, empty room, while the only thing that’s lurking behind the furniture is probably a wall, or another piece of furniture if your feng shui is off.

Surprise guests also sound nice, although for any kind of large, ticketed event, the guest must surely be someone whose actual name isn’t enough of a draw, so the mystery element encourages the assumption of someone much more famous than the real guest. And a surprise guest at your party would be, again, someone you invited who had to say no for the sake of surprise, or someone you didn’t invite at all, in which case you presumably don’t even want there. Just the fact that you had no prior knowledge of their attendance is no guarantee of quality. In the same way, not knowing what the toy is inside a Kinder Surprise doesn’t make you any less likely to choke on it and die.

Surprise attacks also spring to mind, which are of the course the most dangerous kind of surprise, or indeed attack. My experience with these is rather limited, having never seen any kind of armed combat aside from snowball/water balloon fights, or that time someone flicked a peanut at me from across a classroom, which given my deadly allergy, was the closest I’ve ever come to being taken out by a sniper. If memory serves, it hit me on the lip, so I panicked and ran to the bathroom to wash my mouth. To the sniper’s credit, he didn’t know I was allergic to peanuts, so was himself probably pleasantly surprised at the effectiveness of his flick, apparently causing me to flee in terror from the threat of his powerful fingers. When I returned to admonish him with information about my allergy, he was perhaps even more surprised at the incredible deadly accuracy and luck he stumbled upon in perfectly matching an allergy sufferer with the appropriate allergen. Imagine absent-mindedly playing with a small lump of Kryptonite in a room full of people, whereupon you flick it at a random stranger, only to find that he’s wearing an ‘S’ on his chest, an ‘S’ on his massive red cape, has a spit-curl in the shape of an ‘S’, and therefore instantly dies. Well it’s nothing like that, because Superman isn’t real, but I am, so keep your fucking nuts away.

Next time on the Bandwagon – The Sun, nature’s sunlamp.