In Praise of… The Big Bang Theory

I used to hate the half.  The half, as it is called, is that mysterious moment thirty five minutes before a show goes up in a theatre, when stage management come onto the intercom and tell everyone to stop lounging around, get their boots on and generally start planning for a show.  Actors get into costumes; ushers start lining the doors of the auditorium; stage crew do one last sweep; stage electricians check that the lights are indeed still turning off and turning on appropriately, and no one’s left a floodlight plugged in somewhere foolish.

For the rest of us – follow spot operators and programmers who’s systems are already fully working – the half is that moment when you slump down into a sofa in the crew room, in full knowledge that there’s no point trying to start something new as, before you know it, it’ll be the quarter, then the five, then beginners, and then you’ll have to work for three hours of high drama.  And so, with little else to do, and already pretty worn out from the day, you turn on the TV and go searching for a program to watch whose duration is precisely half an hour, in the hope that by the time you have to grab your headtorch and go do that theatre thing, the final credits will just about be rolling.

And this is why I used to hate the half.  On good days, you’d get the Simpsons – which was fine by me.  But for months on end, it seemed that TV at the half was dominated by electricians watching Friends.  I don’t think anyone enjoyed it, I don’t think anyone got anything from the experience, but every day at 7 p.m., there it was, on the TV, the half hour long episode of shallow people leading uninteresting lives to the sound of tinned laughter, and I just hated it.  Although, if I thought Friends was bad, that was nothing compared to matinee shows where, god help us, at 2 p.m. every matinee day, the TV would be on for an episode of Doctors, a show of no discernible merit whatsoever.  Why, I wondered, but why oh why did I waste the thirty minutes before a show, sitting in a stupor on a sofa suffering in this way?  Why did I let it happen?  I tried reading, but it’s so hard to read over the sound of canned laughter.  I tried going elsewhere, but with the auditorium filling and the canteen closing, there’s really no where else to go, nor time to do much else than stomp down to the vending machine and get a cup of water.

And then… one perfectly ordinary day… a miracle struck.  Friends suddenly stopped, and The Big Bang Theory replaced it on the screens of the lighting department’s crew room.  I remember the first time I saw it, looking up from the book I’d been failing to read with a sudden moment of ‘good god, a joke about particle physics!’  I looked suspiciously round the room to see if anyone else had noticed this, and on the realisation that not only had my colleagues noticed, but they were chuckling, I finally glanced at the TV, expecting to be horrified by what I saw, and saw… well, not to put two fine a point on it, four men arguing about physics, food and Star Wars.

And it was funny.  More than funny – it was intelligent, witty, well-observed, funny.  It was a celebration of nerd, a rock concert in honour of geek, what Friends might have been if Friends had been set in a science fiction store.  So now, I no longer live in dread of the half.  The half, in fact, is a time of joy and relief for me, a great opportunity to sit down before a stressful show and enjoy half an hour of bottled scientific comedy, three words I never thought would ever really go together in a sentence.  The only problem left in my day, in fact, is this… can we push the opening of the play I’m working on back to 7.32 p.m. instead of 7.30?  I keep on missing the last two minutes of every episode I see…