Thursday 13: Things I Learned From The A-Team

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This week, thirteen things I learned from watching The A-Team:

1. If you look like George Peppard there's no point in trying to disguise yourself, because you'll still end up looking just like George Peppard (albeit George Peppard wearing a bad disguise).

2. Mental illness is fun; you get to be wacky and fly planes.

3. If you've got a friend who's afraid of flying, just give them a drugged glass of milk before their fllight; they'll fall for it every time.

4. The corollary to #3. If you're ever confronted in a dark alley by a big black blinged-up dude, be sure to be carrying a drugged glass of milk; works every time.

5. "War is stupid and people are stupid," sang Boy George, a guest star in one of the episodes, and of course he has a point. There's no point sacrificing soldiers and unleashing your most powerful weapons to win a war, when, as we saw week after week, all you need to defeat the enemy and win any battle, no matter what the size, is a set of tools and the contents of a garden shed (or if McGuyver's on hand, any three random household items will suffice).

6. Statistics say that flying is the safest form of transport, but statistics can be misleading, and you only have to watch a few A-Teams to realise that the safest form of transport is undoubtedly a crashing vehicle. It doesn't matter how it crashes, how many times it rolls over, or the number of ensuing explosions, the occupants will inevitably still walk away from it unharmed.

7. There are all kinds of love, from platonic to puppy, from true to tainted, but surely the greatest love of all, the love that stands the test of time, is the love of a plan coming together.

8. If you're a fugitive from justice, don't worry. You can star in movies like Hannibal, you can wear jewelry like B.A., you can keep driving the same black van all the time, and you'll still be able to blend in and go unnoticed.

9. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. To be fair this lesson came from the military who kept chasing the A-Team, kept failing, but finally managed to capture them in the last series.

10. Fools should be pitied.

11. At the very end, after the credits, the writer Stephen J Cannell was seen pulling a page out of a typewriter and throwing it into the air. This is clearly how all writers work, and ever since then, hoping to be a writer someday, whenever I've finished writing something I throw it up in the air (although when I switched to writing things on my laptop, this definitely caused a few headaches).

12. If you've got a dull name like John Smith, change it to something a bit more Carthaginian like Hannibal. Then again, you might prefer to meet Pocahontas, or shoot a presidential candidate (like Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone), or become an angel (like Jonathan Smith in Highway To Heaven). Hey, you might even decide to call yourself John Smith like The Doctor or the android superhero Red Tornado. Wow, I'm glad my name's not John Smith or I'd be really conflicted.

13. If you want to be cool, wear lots of bling and use your initials (like BA). The whole of rap is built on this premise (Ice-T even stole Mr. T's surname).

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