Girls and karaoke

Question - Does anyone know a straight bloke who'd ever suggest a karaoke night.

No, exactly.

A quiz night's acceptable, that can be done with minimal interference. It can also help to boost your reputation for the unbelievable retention of utter trivia. Manly qualities all. But karaoke, hell no it gets in the way of the drinking..

One of the girls in the office is leaving to go back to Oz and her chosen venue is a karaoke bar. I wouldn't mind if I wasn't likely to pick up the bill, but I am, so I'm grumpy.

I was talking to Nicky the other night about the demise of TOTP. As I've mentioned before it wasn't a big feature of my life, however it turns out that she and her sister used to spend Thursday night glued to the telly and then running upstairs when a new song came on to dress up as the pop star. They would then run down again and belt out the lyrics into a hair brush together. God know what they did when Marillion came on. I think I was trying to get more than a foot off the ground doing a jump on my 'Raleigh Whateveritwascalled' at the time.

And that's probably the cruxt of it, blokes tended not to stand in front of the mirror miming along to Holiday. Bit of Living on a Prayer air guitar maybe, but never dance moves. Nope dance moves were for girls, as is karaoke.

If you ever go to a karaoke bar, the evening will pan out thus. The first hour and a half is characterised by female group medleys. It'll normally be 4 girls singing along to Like a Virgin. Every once in a while, the male office junior in his ill fitting suit will get dragged up to sing with the typing pool and he'll get pointed and laughed at every time the chorus comes round 'Like a Virgin, touched for the very first time'. Note, at the end of the night he will be defiled by Debbie in accounts who uses her vast experience to steal his cherry while he tries to stay awake in a drunken stupor. The benefit of this is he gets to avoid Like a Virgin next time it comes on.

The next hour and a half is characterised by warblers. 80% of these are girls who think they can sing. They've sat there for an hour and a half scoffing at the groups, sniffily thinking 'I'll show them how to sing'. Typically they'll get up and sing massively challenging rangey tunes, like R Kelly's 'I believe I can fly'. Inevitably they'll miss all the high notes and wobble about in that annoying R&B warble and generally be absolutely shit, but think they're great. They'll then go back to all their mates who congratulate her for a fabulous rendition. You can't call these people true mates. If they were true mates they'd tell her it was shite and to give up not only R Kelly tunes, but any thought of attempting something by Mariah Carey and to sit down and shut up and stop going on about the upcoming X-Factor auditions.

Oddly during this time there will be two or three, blokes with long Bon Jovi c. 1987 hair and leather trousers who appear out of nowhere and more than likely sing one of three songs 'More than Words' by Extreme, 'Back in Black' by ACDC, or 'The Final Countdown' by Europe. They will then disappear from wherever they came not to be seen again for the rest of the evening.

The three hour mark is the point at which the blokes make their entrance. They're 6 pints, 2 aftershocks and 4 Smirnoff Ice's down and now is the time to 'Fight for your Right to paaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarty' and generally jump about and pull the mic out of the karaoke machine and be ushered out by security. Normally the group shouting hour will end with 'Jump Around' by House of Pain at which point management stop allowing any group of lads who look like they've seen alcohol in the past month putting their name down.

The fourth hour however, will have simply fuelled Tracy from the typing pool's loathing of men and she's first in to the wailing hour. And so proceeds the rest of the night with 'I will survive' and 'R.E.S.P.E.C.T' . shouted by increasingly angry, befuddled and drunk looking women, until it gets to a point where you know you should really leave before you get lynched for just being a man at all.

So. Next Tuesday we're there. I'm not singing bloody 'Like a Virgin' again.