My name is TallRoo and this is the longest day of my life
or
How to survive a 24 hour TV marathon
Some friends and I talked for a long time about watching all 24 episodes of 24, back to back.
As rawden helpfully points out, if you take out the trailers each episode is only 45 minutes long.
Rather disappointingly, this means that a 24 marathon is only actually 18 hours of televisual entertainment.
To watch all 18 within one day leaves 6 hours of peeing and napping time.
An excellent plan. After all, if you're going to spend 24 hours of your life watching a TV series, you might as well
get it all over with in one day. It's an epic undertaking, and one which we
understood would involve plenty of planning and preparation.
Stage 0: How to watch the series.
Ideally, we'd start at midnight and follow Jack Bauer's
longest day in real time.
Wherever the adverts pause the action you could take a break until you are in sync again. This means
stopping every quarter of an hour, but only for about 5 minutes; a rather inflexible schedule.
Furthermore, finishing a 24 hour TV marathon at
midnight would be much
more painful than finishing at say, 8 or 9 pm and getting an early night.
We decided to aim to begin our marathon at about 9pm and play the episodes
back-to-back,
pausing to nap when we get really tired. In this manner we aimed to save up the 15 minutes worth of adverts for a few long breaks,
making watching Jack's 18 hour day within 24 hours perfectly feasible.
Stage 1: Preparation
Friday. 5pm.
It's
Friday, so we leave work early. Preparation begins. We hit the
supermarket first.
A good selection of food is important, and we realised that we'd want lots of liquid. Plenty of
carbohydrates would also be important.
For the three of us, we purchased
Stage 2: Set up
We pick the room in which we want to relax for the next day of our lives.
The living room, with its
TV, comfortable seating and ample floor space, seems
to be the best bet. We set up the room for maximum comfort by
turning down the lights, placing a
mattress on the floor and bringing in an extra
beanbag.
The three of us (my wife,
delFick and
I) now have a wide choice of places to relax.
We unpack the shopping. The drinks go straight into the refrigerator,
and most of the food is put straight onto the dining table. One long buffet seems
like the best way to eat during this marathon TV session.
Managing and controlling your own diet, while not easy, is a great way
to stay awake. Large meals take a lot of digestion, leaving you feeling sleepy
a while afterwards. Taking on small morsels whenever you feel hungry prevents this problem.
With the wide variety of foods we've got, controlling our sugar levels should be easy.
Stage 3: The marathon
Friday. 8:45 pm
Press play on tape. Umm.. media player. Whatever. We set up an 18 hour playlist and 24 begins.
9:30 pm
1 episode down, 23 to go. Great stuff.
I've already seen the first half of the series, so the first few hours are just a recap for me.
I spend the whole episode making notes in my laptop for a review of 24, doing an episode-by-episode overview thing.
10:15
No more typing. My arms are already tired and my wrists ache.
I decide it's impossible - however fun it sounds - to node for a whole day,
especially on a laptop, so I give up on that project.
Saturday. 1 am
24 is most exciting. For them it's 6 am already. That's ¼ of the way though.
We've just met Milo at the CTU. He's the suicide toe guy from 6 Feet Under!
We're all starting to fade. I've eaten too much, so I'm bloated and sick feeling.
It hasn't turned into tiredness yet, but I worry that it will do soon.
The Red Bull is calling me.
3:30 am
I just finished my first can of Red Bull, but the effect was not immediate.
Tiredness comes and goes. For the past hour my eyes have been closing.
Dry eyes. Perhaps I need more water.
I don't think I've slept, but I came pretty close.
Just went outside to look at the stars. It's a clear night. The coldness was refreshing and woke
me up. Perhaps the Red Bull is kicking in.
We've found we keep changing positions. After every episode it's good to stand up, walk around
and sit or lay down somewhere different. We've also noticed that, as nice as Coke is, it's
very sugary. Sugar crash is exactly what you don't need if you're trying to stay awake.
I've moved onto cold water. Others have been sensibly using diet fizzy drinks instead.
4:45 am
The others have been snoozing for a few minutes.
They've both seen this episode before, so they're not missing anything.
I think it's time to pause the action at the end of this episode and have a nap.
7:45 am
We slept for 2 hours.
We're still amused by how crazy our marathon is. We keep describing it as 'epic'.
Having woken up and breakfasted (grapefruit). Though tired, we continue at 11am Jack Time.
10:00 am
The past 2 hours have gone by very quickly.
We need to get air in our lungs, sun on our skin and infinity in the eyes.
We go for a walk. The morning sunlight reduces our melatonin levels and increases our wakefulness.
1:30 pm
Lunch. Nice to eat some bread and ham. Refreshing.
Not so tired now.
We're now ¾ of the way through the series, and we've given up counting the number of dead people.
It's becoming highly exciting and captivating.
4:30 pm
Last two episodes.
Very tired now. Blinks are becoming increasingly long.
We devise a 24 drinking game. Hysterical laughter at every suggestion.
Not concentrating hard enough on plot. More Red Bull.
5:15 pm
Wow! End of penultimate episode. Wuh? Big twist. How does this work? What will happen?
Suddenly awake and paying attention.
6:00 pm
Finish. Tired. Good series. Looking forward to the sequel. There's going to be a sequel, right?
They can't just end it there.
Watching 24 within 24 hours turned out to be easy enough. You get 6 hours off after all.
We actually only used about half of our allotted break time, so the next 2¾ hours we can relax, satisfied.
The 24 Drinking game
What could be harder than a 24 marathon? A 24 drinking game of course.
This beats the Star Wars drinking game hands down. It's on a different scale.
Even a new Star Wars drinking game, with extra rules, for all SIX episodes will not involve as
much drinking as the 24 drinking game. Anyone crazy enough to undertake this should
be congratulated.
Take a drink whenever...
- you see someone using one of the following three laptops: a Thinkpad, an iMac or a Powerbook
- someone closes a door in someone else's face
- someone in CTU uses the word "socket"
- Jack flips out and loses his cool
- Nina lies
- someone is killed. (If a plane is blown up, you only need take one drink)
- someone, who looked liked they were dead, turns out to be alive.
If later in the story, then do die, then drink again.
- any person, place or thing is described as being "compromised"
- someone in CTU says "line 2"
- someone refers to 'secret' 'private' love triangle between Jack, Nina and Toni
- someone tries to phone someone, and gets voicemail instead.
- someone reassures someone by saying they will "get through this"
- a character suddenly turns out to be untrustworthy and dangerous
- a new character is introduced.. and they have an East European accent
- someone in a governmental agency 'breaks protocol' or
goes against 'procedure' (examples include but are not limited to
hacking without a warrant, giving computer access to an unauthorized party, tranquilising a superior, ...)
- you notice a continuity error
- anyone uses the word 'patch', as in "Patch me through"
- someone mentions "The Balkans", "Bosnia" or "Kosovo"
- Jack says "Palm Pilot" when he means Handspring Visor
- you see one of the characters sleep, eat or go to the toilet.
- Jack is given, borrows, or otherwise obtains another mobile phone or ear-piece.
- Senator Palmer's wife uses the word "election"
- any character is handcuffed
NB: I have not attempted this game.
We designed it while watching the series to keep ourselves amused.
If you try it, make sure you first purchase copious quantities of alcohol. Going shopping half-way through playing this game is not advisable.
You'll look like shit and you'll be very, very drunk.