Pizzicato abuse

Desperate Housewives - have you seen it? Elf watches it occasionally and I love to hate it. Even being in the same room with it, I find it offensive. Since our living area is just one big room, I sometimes resort to headphones to get away from it.

The synopsis is: affluent neighbourhood full of people stealing each other's money, adulterising and plotting to murder each other. Pretty standard really, pretty Melrose Place. Except - every time someone is up to no good, looking in someone else's rubbish bin or slipping off their wedding ring on their way into a bar, there is a little 8 bar vamp of pizzicato strings. Someone has asked themselves "what is the sneakiest music there is?" and that's what they came up with.

I put myself in the shoes of the session violinists. Granted, some of them may believe that the end justifies the means. Some of them may be proud of having slept their way to the top in the incidental strings world. Some of them may believe everything is relative, you've got to look out for number one, and there's no free lunch.

But what about that one straight-edge, clean living, upright citizen, who turns up at the office with his viola every day, plays the sheet music he is handed, with care, energy and brio - perhaps he's a pizzicato specialist, flown in to LA from the East Coast for a big job lot of pizzicato work. Calls his wife and kids every day while he's away. Dedicated. Caring. A moral beacon in this increasingly Paris Hiltonised world.

How is he going to feel when he sits down to watch Housewives and realises that his dedicated plucking is the soundtrack to ugly suburban depravity?

Fun Fact: In Vietnam the show is just called Những bà nội trợ kiểu Mỹ - American Housewives.