You're in the pub having a pint with your mate talking about this and that. You glance around and notice everyone else's face is transfixed towards the television. So you also turn to that glowing box in the corner and, slowly but surely, your consciousness succumbs.
Yes, that's right, it's the hypnotic spell of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? The British TV show pioneered by Chris Tarrant, in which contestants go through a series of multiple-choice questions in a bid to win the ultimate million pound prize, has become a worldwide cultural phenomenon dominating viewing and conversations.
It's currently being broadcast in 35 countries. Viewers in the Republic will be able to tune in to the Irish version tonight with Gay Byrne coming out of retirement to host the show. Is it just a bit of harmless, popular fun or is there something more sinister about the phenomenon?
On the plus side, you have to hand it to the show's makers. The format is brilliantly simple, and no doubt will be entertainingly presented by Gaybo who, like Tarrant, will squeeze threatrically every second of tension from it. And a lot of ordinary people will leave several thousand pounds richer.
So what's the problem? The disturbing side is not the show itself, but its global prevalence and evident public success. It has a disturbing resemblance to the world depicted by George Orwell in his novel of totalitarian control, 1984, in which a lottery is the sole unifying social pur suit of the masses. This show suggests how receptive people have become to the most dumbed-down form of mental pursuit. And that's what is of concern.
All around the world, it seems, the one objective galvanising humanity is to get rich quick, to escape humdrum reality by an individual stroke of luck. The fundamental belief being inculcated is that life is nothing more than a lottery, where material success or failure is all down to luck rather than social conditions that could be altered through human endeavour and political action.
Need a hip replacement? Bad luck, you've pulled the short straw of a waiting list, or good luck, you can buy a private solution. People dying from hunger or floods? Ah well, too bad they live where they do.
With this lottery-type mentality, options such as building more hospitals, organising a more equitable world trading system or seriously addressing the economic structural causes of global warming are subtly, insidiously erased from the agenda of social action.
In the face of so many urgent challenges facing our world, the huge success of Tarrant's fatuous question in dominating our lives and mental horizons is more likely to be a sad reflection of the limited belief in technological and human potential to change the world for the common good.
Finian Cunningham is a journalist based in Belfast
