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Imagine me, eight years old, sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, eager to watch the first episode of this new show called Clarissa Explains It All. I had so many questions and so many things that needed explaining. Finally, someone was going to give me the answers.

But here's what the first episode was about:

After Clarissa gets her first training bra, she tries to exact revenge on her brother for showing her bra at school, using a plan involving putting him into a straitjacket and having her friend Sam attach large helium balloons to him to carry him into the sky. Meanwhile, Sam wants to get out of the school football team. Her plan fails when Sam is lifted in the sky while holding the balloons, and crashes into a nearby tree. They burst and he falls to the ground, injuring his arm - meaning that he cannot play football.

What the fuck? Getting carried off by helium balloons isn't even realistic.

And all the episodes were like this. Clarissa explained fuck-all.

Clarissa broke a promise. A promise she made in the title of her show, Clarissa Explains It All. She broke the sacred trust between the viewer and the performer because Clarissa, in fact, did not explain it all.

Things Clarissa didn't explain

Here are some things that Clarissa didn’t explain.

• The Bermuda Triangle
• Why the BMI furniture sale never ends
• UFO sightings
• How Argos were able to give away huge thick catalogues for free yet my local print shop charges me a pound to print a single A4 page in colour
• Mary Celeste
• Where babies come from
• Why my neighbour feels the need to wake me up at 5 a.m. every morning by driving off in his van

• How to eat 60 freddos in one go without feeling sick

• What happened to all those AOL CDs with free hours of internet on them and also, can I still use them for free internet

• Who Mr Blobby is under his mask. I reckon it was Bruce Wayne

• Whether Sabrina the Teenage Witch is a sequel to Clarissa Explains It All or a prequel or what

• When is Half-Life three going to come out

• Why good people die of cancer yet Jeremy Beadle gets his own TV show

• Why my poo is green sometimes

• Why no one has found the body I buried in my garden yet

Sam

Maybe she would have gotten around to explaining everything but there was this guy called Sam who kept interrupting Clarissa by entering her bedroom through her window (always accompanied by a chord of guitar music).

He always used a ladder to get up to Clarissa’s bedroom. Did he carry the ladder with him from his house? Or did he find one lying around? Or did he always have a ladder on him at all times, just in case, and the kids called him "The Ladder Man" and sang songs like "Beware of The Ladder Man"?

He wasn’t Clarissa's boyfriend, I know that. Clarissa friend-zoned him so hard that he broke through the back of the friend zone and landed in the relative zone, which is the zone for parents, siblings and other family members. There is no chance for romance in the relative zone, unless you’re a redneck called Cleatus.

Clarissa novel

There is a novel called Things I Can't Explain: A Clarissa Novel about Clarissa in her 20s, unemployed and broke.

Things I Can’t Explain? Does that mean that Clarissa finally admits that she was a liar all this time? She promised me that she would explain it all, but now she admits there are things that she can’t explain. So she admits she was lying. At least now, finally, I have some closure.