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The Spudniks realise that they may be, unconsciously, living their lives like a television show.

I AM beginning to wonder if my entire lexicon is borrowed from the characters I watch almost day and night on television. Seriously. See, there’s one already. It started when the folks on medical drama Grey’s Anatomy started using the particular word to express practically every emotion they felt – by changing their tone, “seriously” could reflect incredulous disbelief (seriously???), to surprise (seriously?) to joy (seriously!). When my husband pointed out my overuse of the word, I was aghast. Well, at first I was annoyed and wanted to tell him to “eat my shorts” (guess where that line is from) but after a couple of minutes, the horror of what he said set in.

I mean, Grey’s Anatomy has long become oh-so-uncool – why am I still using phrases from the show? Could I be any more passe? Frak! – that’s a version of the “F” word used commonly on … wait for it … Battlestar Galactica.

The truth is, I find myself using phrases from TV shows all the time. Whether it’s from a game show – “Is that your final answer?”, a reality show – “The tribe has spoken”, a cartoon – “What’s up, doc?”/ “Oakley, dokley”, a seriously dope (now that’s a double whammy) science-fiction/mystery – “The truth is out there”, a really old sitcom – “What’chu talkin’ about, Willis?” or the infamous “Don’t make me angry ..” line from The Incredible Hulk series in the 1980s. (Could you guess where all these famous lines come from?)

But it isn’t just the vocabulary that I’ve picked up. Honestly, since I started tuning in to Community a few weeks ago, I kind of relate to the character Abed, who connects almost all real-life situations with TV plots. In a sticky situation, I quite often wonder what a particular favourite character would do or how they’d react. Living my life in fantasy? Perhaps. Is resistance really futile? Well, maybe it’s a great idea – after all, doesn’t everything always turn out right on TV, albeit after a couple of nail-biting cliffhangers?

Speaking of cliffhangers, the show with the most ludicrous cliffhangers has to be the aforementioned Grey’s Anatomy, right? Bombs in the ER, a gunman walking around the hospital, a deathly plane crash, a drowning incident, a ghost who comes back to woo his lover (they even make out ... eeew!)? Geez, let’s put a caveat on this mimicking-characters-on-TV business shall we? As long as we rule out all soaps or dramas masquerading as soaps, we should be safe. – SI

* I AM trying to think of something that I do that’s been influenced by TV. Like Indra, I do resort to saying a few phrases every now and again (like everyone else, I guess I have resorted to the occasional “The truth is out there” line at some point), but nothing has surreptitiously crept into my vocabulary and stayed there forever, I don’t think.

Now, if I divulge the next piece of information I’ll have to change all my passwords because for the longest time, my password was the same as one Fox Mulder’s (The X-Files) – I thought “TRUSTNO1” was just the coolest password ever, and no one would ever figure it out. Really, it’s the little things like that I think that end up weaving their way into my life.

Another example would be how I tried reading/listening to wise Zen sayings to try and calm myself every day or change my perspective on how I view things. This was all thanks to Damian Lewis’s character, Charlie Crews, on Life. Lewis apparently prepared himself for the role by listening to the tapes of Alan Watts, who wrote The Way Of Zen and became one of that sect’s most famous popularisers in the 1960s. In the show, Crews studied Zen Buddhism while he was in prison. He was such a testimony to his meditations on TV, that I was sure I would reap some good out of it, too! One of the things he used to say was “Maybe life is a dream and we wake up when we die?” I loved it!

I suppose some people, like Indra, will say that Ally McBeal had some clout over me too. Not only do I have meltdowns in the bathroom on a daily basis, I also have a penchant for miniskirts. Now if only I were as slim as Calista Flockhart.

The Wonder Years (which featured Kevin Arnold recalling how he grew up in the 1960s) also influenced me in a very pleasant way. I think Laura Ingalls of Little House On The Prairie did the same. These characters often narrated their tales in dairy-type fashion. And it intrigued me so much, I began penning down my own life stories. For years I kept a diary, detailing accounts, lifechanging moments, places and people I’d seen, and words that I relished. It almost felt like my own voice narrating the events of my life. Occasionally there’s an imaginary soundtrack too (this would be inspired more by movies rather than TV, I think, thanks to the likes of directors like Cameron Crowe and Quentin Tarantino).

One of the biggest impacts, however, had to be Ed Asner of Lou Grant fame. I couldn’t have been more than nine when I used to watch the newspaper drama on TV.

I have no idea what fascinated me about this old balding guy who worked at the Los Angeles Tribune daily newspaper as its city editor, but hooked I was. It made me decide right then at the age of nine that I wanted to be like him. And like him I am – old and balding, maybe, but also devoted to my job as a newspapergal for the last 22 years of my life. – AMC