Things we know – others we know nothing about

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a pub in Galway city that is packed to the rafters with punters on a Monday night – and it’s nothing to do with Sky Sports.

I know this because – although Monday night is normally spent at home in the house – I happened to drop in for a pint a while back, to be greeted by a premises full to the gills of quiet drinkers.

I knew there was no Premiership match on, but yet you could hear a pin drop as perhaps a hundred people sat glued to the cinema screen telly. And what were they watching? Game of Thrones. It is also on Sky, but that’s about all I know about it – other than that this pub wouldn’t have been any more packed if the Manchester derby was staged on a Monday night.

Myself and my buddy, who knew even less about Games of Thrones than me, had chosen this pub for a quiet pint. Little did we know that it would be so quiet we were only allowed to talk during the ad break.

Still, you had to admire the foresight of the publican to fill his pub on a football-free Monday night with a programme that appeared to be a combination of Sci-Fi and sex on a large screen.

Best of all, as the barman confided, they actually sold more beer during this medieval fantasy than they did for a Sky Sports night – simply because Game of Thrones has more ad breaks.

And every time it went into a break, the rush to the bar was like the half-time queue for the toilets in Croke Park…before everything returned to a silence of Poor Clare proportions.

This was a world I knew nothing of; people watching a programme I’d heard of but never seen. But then again there are many aspects of the world of which I’m entirely ignorant – I equally know nothing of the Hunger Games; I’ve never seen the Hobbit or Sleepy Hollow, Dungeons & Dragons or True Blood – in fact I’ve seen none of these Sci-fi fantasy spectaculars that seem to make up half of the available programmes on satellite TV.

I do remember the Twilight Zone which was about as scary as Tom and Jerry, surpassed only by Tales of the Unexpected where what happened was so unexpected that it simply made no sense. But then again, the world I know nothing of extends way beyond a handful of television programmes that, if truth be told, the makers would feel they’d failed at if I was their targeted audience.

I’ve never played Playstation or X’ed an X-Box; I don’t do Snapchat, Instagram or WhatsApp on the phone. In my ignorance I thought Ask.fm was a radio station.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.