GAYS OF OUR LIVES - A Special Announcement   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------   As you all know Gays of Our Lives has recently gone through some changes, in part due to legal difficulties, including changing the show's title to Sunset Bitch in an attempt to re-inject some fresh ideas and, of course, in  the desparate search for yet another god-awful pun.  Sadly, on reviewing the last episode and realising that it was tired, forced, and pretty crap - how many ways can there still be to insult the same innocent people over and over? - the producers (that's ME) have come to a sad, but necessary decision.  As we all know every great and long running comedy becomes utter shite in it's last season before inevitably being ditched.  You saw it happen to Roseanne and you've been currently thinking just the same thing about Friends.  Don't deny it.  We do not want the same fate to befall our own much cherished soap. We want to go out in a blaze of mediocrity instead. And so, before the rot sets in any further, it is with great  sadness and not  a little pride that we announce that Gays Of Our Lives is to be cancelled.  Forever.     In our time we have broken new ground in the area of bitching about others, regardless - and indeed because of - class, age, race and religion.  Of this we are proud.  We've managed to be personally and unecessarily offensive about friends, acquaintances, strangers, lesbians, the effeminate, the obese, the women of Newcastle, the city of Manchester, Liverpudlians, Chester, the scots, the Welsh (!), the upper class,the middle class, the working class, the BBC, the Tate, , orphans, any number of drinking establishments, drag queens, Americans, Australians, jews, blacks, the French and..I seem to vaguely recall..Germans.         However, before we leave your computer screens for the last time I am aware that some of you are particularly easily confused.  I'm thinking especially of a certain RENNIE who not long ago, while swearing blind he really did read this stuff, asked me "Where do you get the ideas for your stories?"  Such devotion on the part of our readers deserves a reward.  If you too have suffered from the illusion that this really was a fictional drama (Dear God, the state of the Education system!) you will require closure and want to know what became of the "characters" you have come to know and..um..well, know.  So here is a round up of how unfinished storylines resolved themselves:     BEN and ALEX stayed together and moved to the Black Forest where they spent the rest of their days up a tree, so BEN could look down on people from a greater height than ever before, while ALEX drew up plans for invading Poland, where he hoped to round up illiterates and alcoholics into camps and lecture them about "Letter-a-tour" (that's Literature to you and me).  They finally killed themselves in a bunker - on a golf course in Spain.     ANDY disappeared never to be heard of again, shortly after telling GATTINO he'd give him a ring.  It was 8 months before suspicions were aroused. When they finally broke into his flat all they found was his grin and the faint whiff of Kebabs.       JAMES's descent into barking madness continued inexorably and he now lives out his days on a rocking chair on the front porch, sipping gin and shooting natives, while a young man in a turban fans him and calls him Major.  He has the moustache now to prove it.   DR.HUNK ROCKLEY/ATTILA has just announced his engagement to a Finnish Trolley-Dolly called Timo who is about to fly off to live in China (Nah - who'd believe that?  It's just too far fetched!).  Although not the first time Attila has had a stranger's ring on his finger, this final act of betrayal robbed our hero's life of all it's sexual tension.  Back in Australia and no longer surrounded by an absence of friends, he slipped inexorably back out of Gattino's life, this time for good.  The marriage does not last however and Attila grows old alone with only his sagging bosoms to remind him of the glory days.  At the age of 50 he has breast implants and eeks out an existence as a lap dancer in a freaky burlesque theatre.  His only pleasure remains, as it always was, feeling guilty about any number of things he has no intention of rectifying.     PHIL finally met and married an Accountant, and started up an accountancy business...for accountants.  In his spare time he likes to stare at strangers lovingly and count how many friends he's made today.     MARK  & SIMON also stayed together and lived many long years in perfect silence.  Tragically, after giving endless pleasure to anyone walking behind him, Simon died, suddenly, of embarrassment.  No-one could hear him scream.     DARREN, the Jude Law lookalike, moved out of shoes and into womens underwear, where he felt altogether more comfortable.     TROY 's ambition to have a starring role in GOOL was inevitably thwarted.  Realising he wasn't going to be written about and that he might actually still be expected to have that hot steamy sex scene with our hero, he suddenly found a dramatic reason not to attend the firework night do. Gattino never got to throw him a banger after all.  TROY does however find his real father and the astonishing secret behind the mysterious tattoo-shaped birthmark in the middle of his back...   And GATTINO? What became of our hero?  Well, perhaps we should leave that for you to decide.  Maybe he was discovered and became a world renowned writer.  Maybe someone other than himself spotted his true beauty and whisked him off to the life of fulfillment and sexual abandon he always dreamed of.  But the most popular theory is that after a wasted, unemployed and directionless life spent afraid of living he died a lonely, lonely little man.  But you knew that already, didn't you?   GAYS OF OUR LIVES (March 2000 - October 2000)