TV Killing Kid

My Apprenticeship

2008-03-27T17:08:50+01:00

God, it’s dusty in this blog.

*wipes away cobwebs from TV screen and blows dust off the remote*

Let’s switch this TV blog back on.

*zaps blog into life*

Of the many wild notions I’ve had in life, becoming a TV critic was probably up there with, er, becoming a neuropsychologist. But for a few months or so the possibility of the former profession did cross my mind.

As I approached the end of my psychology degree, I needed a new outlet to continue contributing trashy articles to after I’d finished my prolific spell on the SU magazine. I thought becoming a telly addict could be a definite possibility.

My style in this respect was definitely influenced by Shelley (Jim rather Percy Bysshe). I used to read his Tapehead column like Osama reads the Koran. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen, and had no intention to see, the majority of the programs he reviewed. He made them seem far more entertaining than they were ever likely to be in reality.

And reading his columns made me realise one golden cathode rule.

Write the review in such a way that it doesn’t matter whether or not the reader has seen the program.

Esoteric stuff was out. Synopsis, then take the piss.

Having discovered the magic formula, I had to find an outlet beyond my own blog.

Now unless my Google searches are less than lateral, I struggled to find many online TV review sites I could submit my stuff do.

Apart from one.

I shan’t name it here, and it has (sadly) put itself into the deep freeze for the time being, but this site had it all: informative, knowledgeable, yet quite irreverent with it.It also had a formidable back catalogue of reviews.

I’d been reading it for a while and was desperate to see my name amongst the list of contributors. At the same time the standard was pretty high, and I was somewhat nervous at sending in my articles. However, I finally got round to submitting and attached a Hugh Grant-esque bumblingly diffident email with my first review.

And I got no reply.

A few more days and still no reply. My affection for the site bottomed out.

Then one day I came home and found my name on the front page with my submitted review. Admittedly it was spelt wrong, but it was my name they’d misspelled.

Over a few months I regularly contributed, including one review I’m particularly fond of. But as the last entry date on this blog will show, one day in December 2006 they came to an abrupt halt.

A couple of factors intervened, but the main one was the growing realisation of the critic’s lot in life.

The reality of being a critic of any kind is that, invariably, you have to spend your time watching / hearing an awful lot of bollocks (and, as a food critic, you may even have to literally eat bollocks).

I read an interview with a film critic and he said he probably watched over 500 films a year. Of those he thought maybe 30 of those would be any good; 250 of them would have him reaching for a revolver.

So much for a life of culture.

I also took up the guitar, and trying to practice for around three hours a day doesn’t leave time for much else (of the many wild notions I’ve had in life, becoming a good guitar player was probably up there with being a TV critic).

I also had no idea where else to start in order to get paid to do this. And watching an episode of Russell Brand’s chatshow made me realise I had to get paid to do this in future. So I stopped watching TV, apart from downloading episodes of The Wire and The Shield.

On trips back to my parents’ house in Wales I was shocked at some of the programs on during primetime hours. The One and Only, presented by that charmless cunt Graham Norton, was a cultural Auschwitz. Still, anything that namechecked a Chesney Hawkes song had to be shit.

It was going to take something special to get me watching and writing about TV again.

So thank God for the return of The Apprentice.

Seeing Sir Alan Stalin lumbering through the boardroom doors like undiagnosed Alzheimer’s in a pensioner’s brain was a joy.

Scanning through the contestants, I had the same sensation Daniel Plainview had in There Will Be Blood whenever he was about to rob a family of their oil deposits. Even after a cursory glance I spotted a Sugarbabe lookalike, at least two Young Conservatives, and plenty of cannon fodder.

That the first show of the series ended with the firing of an obnoxious chinless posho was just the icing on the cake.

For this new run of the Apprentice, I had to make a comeback.

So until the series finishes:

You’re unretired!

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Vanessa Feltz: MILF and proud of it

2006-12-21T13:34:16+01:00

Vanessa’s Real Lives: ITV1, 7 December 12.30 p.m.

Whereas some might consider Vanessa Feltz’s new daytime show to be exploitationist, could it actually be a forum for challenging and re-evaluating societal norms?

By providing a platform for some of Britain’s “most controversial personalities”, Vanessa’s Real Lives enables a consideration of taboo subjects and unconventional behaviour. The episode in question considered appropriate age limits for sexual relationships, what society considers a proper expression of maternal love and the untapped potential of alternative health products.

Granted this was done by bringing on Lucy “Miss Lust” Hayward, a former teacher who was jailed for sleeping with a fifteen-year old school-boy; Veronika “bitty”, Robinson, who breast-fed her two kids until the age of seven; and Jim Crawford, a man who’s elixir of youth is a phial of his own urine, but you can’t make an omelette without having a frank discussion with those eggs.

Hayward was first and gave an account of the relationship she’d started at thirty-one with a boy half her age.

Apparently, she’d been in an “oppressive relationship during her twenties” when she wasn’t allowed out much (I dare say the two kids she was supposed to be raising during this time may have limited her nightlife). When she moved to take a new job as an English teacher she starting socialising with younger people in the town who had “similar tastes in music”, and subsequently met the adolescent in question.

According to Hayward, he was a typical “Jack the lad, confident, cocky, a charming young man”, and in Vanessa’s treacly phrase “Cupid’s dart struck very heavily and [she] fell in love”.

Hayward rebutted any cradle-snatching accusations by reminding us that she’d been in an “oppressive relationship during her twenties”. He was “fifteen going on twenty-five”, and seeing as she was thirty-one going on fifteen then in one sense you could say he was older than her. She made him feel like a man and he took her back to the youth she’d ‘lost’.

However, societal disapproval of such relationships led to her being fired from her job, convicted of indecent assault, jailed for two years and placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for eight years. Because of this she now finds it extremely difficult to get work and resents being classified with paedophiles, especially considering the sexual abuse she’d suffered when young. She was the real victim here, and lest we forget she had been in an “oppressive relationship during her twenties”.

Well it would have been a nice story had it been true. However, while Hayward may resented being registered with paedophiles and claimed to be nothing like them, one characteristic they all share is a tendency to minimise their own actions.

What the show failed to mention was that Hayward had been jailed for cannabis possession at the time of the indecent assault conviction, having allowed her home to be used by other teenagers to have ‘pot parties’ at. And while she may have claimed the relationship developed out of “mutual respect and friendship” it ended with the boy running away from home before revealing the details of the tryst to his parents. They claimed his personality changed as a consequence of the affair and he become withdrawn and introverted (maybe he was worn out from using all the sex toys and videos found by the police at Hayward’s flat). Hardly the most responsible actions from someone whose job description entails a significant amount of in loco parentis.

Hayward was also recently exposed by the People newspaper to be working as a dominatrix and caning punters while wearing a mortarboard and gown: I guess this must be payback for that oppressive relationship she had in her twenties.

But her story at least started a discussion on this particular societal norm. Was she the victim in all of this? Had the young man been exploited and harmed by such a relationship? And is Vanessa Feltz really a MILF?

While there was general disapproval amongst the audience, most struggle to articulate exactly how Hayward had transgressed, although to be fair they hadn’t been given all the facts. One woman argues that “he was a young man with his life ahead of him”, as if he’d been killed in a road traffic accident. Another states that “he’s fifteen – not a man. You wouldn’t sleep with your own father and brother”. Hayward, perhaps understandably, retorts that it’s “not really the same thing”, and Feltz agrees that it’s a completely different topic (probably tomorrow’s).

Hayward further tries to excuse her lack of responsibility by claiming to have been “vulnerable” at the time of the affair due to the “oppressive relationship she’d had in her twenties”. Vanessa informs us that she was in her similar situation when her marriage had ended and one of her daughter’s friends informed her she was a “MILF” (‘mother I’d like to fuck‘- the more crude modern-day version of ‘oldie but goodie’), but despite her own “vulnerability” at the time she hadn’t taken advantage of the situation as she “couldn’t have faced his mother afterwards”.

But the MILF topic clearly strikes a chord in one young man of Mediterranean origin who seizes his opportunity to display his support for sexual generation games by kissing Vanessa’s hand, telling her: “You very gorgeous – I like mature women. Can I call you baby?”

Keen to act on his beliefs, the gigolo insists on dancing for Vanessa (“You are gorgeous – can I dance for you?”). While she takes his place in the audience, the young man stands with his arms above his head, gyrating his hips and thrusting his pelvis. He then crouches down and brings his head level with her waist, glides up along her torso and for good measure pokes his nose into her cleavage. As his closer, he lifts his shirt to expose his six-pack and nipples. Unfortunately, this does nothing for Vanessa (“I’m feeling hot – but only with embarrassment”), or Hayward. But then he was probably more than half her age.

Continuing the theme of matronly love was breast-feeding counsellor Veronika Robinson. Breast was most definitely best for her and her two children, who she’d breast-fed until the age of seven, having left the decision of when to wean to them.

The objections from the audience vary, beginning with practical issues (teething and biting). However, Robinson had used this to her advantage as a means to set parenting guidelines: “You put the baby down and you say ‘no!’, and they learn very, very quickly that if they want to breast feed they don’t put those teeth in.”

This lesson had been so well learnt that when one of her daughters was asked to write a list of what she wanted for her ninth birthday at the top she wrote ‘bitty’. Well she probably didn’t phrase it quite that way but ‘birthday bitty’ was what she’d got, and apparently “it made her day and she had a very special memory of it”. No doubt she’ll be recounting it to a psychotherapist in a few years time.

Shifting the issue, Robinson begins to argue that breastfeeding is a taboo in our culture, and one of the reasons people “have a problem is that they don’t see it”. However, as most of the mums in the audience are quick to point out, weaning is more associated with setting age-appropriate behaviour. One comments that you wouldn’t have your children using the potty at seven just because they still wanted to.

Being a breast-feeding counsellor means Robinson is bound to emphasise the nutritional benefits of mother’s milk, but as one woman points out, why not just give it to them in a cup? With the zeal of a convert, Robinson continues to fixate on what she perceives to be a cultural taboo over breastfeeding, coming to the bizarre conclusion that “We live in a culture where it’s fine to have a relationship with inanimate objects, yet we don’t want our kids to have one with human beings”.

Until this point the women were dominating the debate, so it was nice to hear the male perspective. Unfortunately, it came from the MILF-loving Mediterranean, who asks Robinson
“Do you know when you breast feed, do your boobs get bigger?” When this is confirmed he replies “that’s why you want to breast feed, because you want your boobs big, eh?” Rather than seeing breast feeding at such a late age as unnatural he is simply jealous at her actions (“The kid is seven years old – it’s unfair!”).

The final guest was Jim Crawford, keen to explain the health and well-being that can be obtained by drinking your own urine. Jim’s life had changed four years ago when a friend had recommended a book on the potential benefits of drinking your own. Apparently, out of the “hundreds” of people she knew he was one of only six people she considered “open-minded” enough to share the information with. Or maybe she just didn’t like him.

Jim argues that urine is misunderstood and is actually the most medically researched substance in the world, but on that basis blood can’t be too far behind and I’d like to see someone on daytime TV using this argument to defend drinking it. Urine is, according to Crawford, “your own way of making you healthy”, although I was always under the impression it accomplished this by an outward rather than inward flow.

But in case anyone thought Jim was taking the piss (and with the authenticity of guests on a Vanessa Feltz show always open to question), a quick necking of a flute of his own vintage proved beyond doubt that he literally was taking the piss.

If anyone is curious about the flavour then according to the connoisseur it has its own individual taste and changes according to gender. But how did he know this? Jim smirks rather too quickly for comfort in response to Vanessa’s query. It emerges that his girlfriend practices urine therapy on an “ad hoc basis when she fancies it”. It presents a lovely image in my mind, but as a picture tells a thousand words, for the purposes of space I’ll go no further.

Apart from the hitherto disregarded nutritional benefits, there’s also the opportunity to incorporate urine into your beauty regimen. Jim uses it to hydrate his skin, claiming it calms his skin after a shave “like nothing else”. To demonstrate this, and because he’s worth it, Jim smears a couple of droplets around his chin, informing his perturbed audience that “it will go straight through the skin and into it very quickly”.

Although informing him that he “smells like wee”, Vanessa was quick to sing the praises of his complexion. From a distance. And his skin does look relatively smooth and line free. But also unmistakeably yellow (just like his teeth), so I personally won’t be ditching the Clinique three-step system just yet.

As we return to an audience uniformly unimpressed by Jim’s urine therapy, he did have one supporter.

Unfortunately, it was Veronika.

Her mother also takes the piss and recommends it to her grandchildren as a “great hair conditioner”. However, it might have the unfortunate side-effect whereby your female offspring breastfeed for prolonged periods.

Taken together, the show’s deviant trio demonstrate how unexamined social norms sometimes are for some people. While it’s easy to recognise when they’re being contravened, it’s sometimes more difficult to define exactly what the deviance is about the behaviour in question, apart from the jarring unconventionality.

This is well illustrated by the final comment from a member of the audience about Crawford’s urine drinking, with a young woman stating that “I feel like I’m gong to be sick. I just don’t get it! I understand you’re not hurting anyone by doing this, so fair play to you, but personally, I think it’s wrong!”

Societal norm pariahs or pioneers? Here’s to you, Mrs Robinson, Mr Crawford and Ms Hayward.

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Who says narcissists don’t do insight?

2006-12-12T16:23:45+01:00

The Russell Brand Show, C4, 24 November, 11.05

With an ego and media profile the size of Brand’s, the eponymously titled C4 chat show was inevitable.

But could The Russell Brand Show fare any better than the debacle that was Davina?

The choice of Dirty Pretty Things’ ‘Deadwood’ as the theme tune would prove to be an apposite summation of the next fifty minutes. After the opening titles segued into the obligatory camera pan round the audience (in case the viewer was curious as to how many people can fit in a television studio), on flounced Brand with trademark “blimeys!” and “‘citing!”, and wearing the same regulation outfit he’s always bedecked in (black open neck shirt and trousers and silver belt).

The line-up for his debut show was at least of a higher calibre than that managed on Davina (e.g. Tess Daly and Vernon Kay), with David Walliams and Matt Lucas (the only people in Britain more ubiquitous than Brand), and Amy Winehouse featuring. The latter was particularly promising after serving up the car-crash TV moment of the year only a few weeks earlier with her inebriated rendition of Beat It on The Charlotte Church Show.

Conforming to chat-show custom, the show opens with a topical monologue. In the news this week was Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes, although with the entire routine based on this topic you could be forgiven for thinking it was the only thing that had happened. However, Brand’s nervous delivery results in a stilted and monotonous routine, something you wouldn’t expect to see in someone who does stand-up for a living.

But maybe it was the material that affected Brand’s delivery. Jokes about Cruise’s height (was this the ‘adult’ humour we were warned of at the start?), allegedly wearing platform shoes, and his wedding being “all a bit ‘ollywood” (which is sort of what you’d expect from an ‘ollywood actor’s wedding) were just too obvious. And it’s a bit rich from someone with a persona based on mockneyisms, contrived linguistic archaisms and shag-pile hair to mock another man’s affectations.

Brand’s nervousness was compounded by the appearance of Walliams and Lucas, whose relaxed manner contrasts with his floundering (and flouncing). The interview kicks off with a set piece in which his guests have to bring him a present (Walliams: “that’s a good idea – for you”). Lucas’ present is Douglas Adams’ The Deeper Meaning of Liff, while Walliams’ gift was a top hat, which went so well with Brand’s outfit. Perched on top of his head like a mattress balancing on a bottle of wine he certainly looked, in Jim Royle parlance, like a ‘top hat’.

Brand returned the favour by giving Lucas a model of his (Lucas’s) head made out of chocolate, although it seemed a missed opportunity for no one to quip about Brand giving Lucas head. Maybe they thought it too obvious, sort of like making jokes about Tom Cruise being short. Brand’s gift to Walliams was a chocolate-shaped penis (Walliams: I’ve always wanted you to give me that”) and in case you’re curious, after getting his mouth around the end he did indeed swallow.

As the show progresses it becomes apparent that Brand and the Little Britain pair have inverted the traditional roles of host and guest, occasionally slipping into This is Your Life territory, such as Walliams’ wistful description of his first impressions on meeting Brand (“I hated you when I first met you, when you were on heroin [but] then you’d done yoga and you cleaned yourself up and we became really close friends”).

Intermittently remembering the host's traditional duties, Brand mentions the special Comic Relief Little Britain episode, although this only leads in to another opportunity to talk about himself, such as his very own appearance in the Comic Relief Little Britain episode, dressed up in ladies underwear (maybe the black shirt and trousers were at the dry cleaners that night).

After an unnecessary reference as to exactly why the duo were on the show (“you’re here to do something promotional”), we’re shown a extract from their live DVD, before returning to a sketch idea nicked from another source (Saturday Night Armistice), in which CCTV footage of lookalikes playing Walliams and Lucas are shown in their dressing room before the show. A runner comes in with a cup of tea for them and ‘Wallliams’ and ‘Lucas’ are shown humiliating him in various escalating ways, culminating in him dressed up as the hooded Iraqi Abu Ghraib prisoner (a visual joke that was done better on Arrested Development over two years ago, mainly because it was actually topical then).

The imminent commercial break (“to raise revenue and that”) prompts Brand into the first display of his Ted Rogers-esque 3-2-1 wrist movement, and promises are made that when we come back David and Matt will “reveal exclusive things about their private life”. Which will make a change from hearing about Brand’s.

After the ‘revenue raising’ the show resumes with a sketch featuring, you guessed it, Brand as Tom Cruise and more height jokes (maybe there would have been room for the head joke after all) and innuendo about Cruise’s sexuality. So we can pretty much assume Tom won’t be appearing on the show in the near future.

Back in the studio the host and guests have moved towards a bar area (with Lucas looking particularly uncomfortable while perched on a stool), and Brand continues his attempts to interview the pair. But is it possible to take anyone seriously as an interviewer (or person) who asks Walliams about his cross-Channel swim in the following way:

“Your real chance to shine, David, come when you done that swimming across the sea, what you done.”

After a clip showing Walliams beginning his cross-Channel swim (and falling off a rock at the end), the spotlight is soon back on Brand as he ponders whether “you can find redemption through these charitable acts” (Lucas: “You’d have to swim around the fuckin’ world, mate!”). A skit of Brand pretending to swim the Channel is shown, followed by unnecessary outtakes of him flouncing about in the sea (“Me fuckin’ snout’s gone out!”).

At this point Walliams and Lucas have been on for more than half the show and, as Brand notes, “I don’t know if you’ve told us anything yet that’s really, really intimate”. This is always going to be the critical factor in making a chat show interesting, although Walliams is pretty clear why this hasn’t happened so far (“Well you haven’t asked us anything – you’ve just talked about yourself”).

In the final section, after more revenue raising and wrist reflexes, the host and his guests return to the sofa for more chat, although it’s unfortunate - or depending on your opinion rather apt - that the chocolate penis is constantly in shot whenever the camera switches to Brand as he asks a question. He continues to elicit little of interest from the two with Walliams being slightly touchy over Brand’s questioning on whether he took his mother to the Baftas “to use her in a defence capacity” (Walliams: “No. I just took her because I knew she’d like to go”).

Finally, after 30 minutes of inconsequential chat (mainly about Brand), something vaguely intimate is revealed when we discover Matt and his partner are about to have a civil partnership, although any follow-up on this is lost as Brand worries what he’ll wear at the wedding (my money being on the black shirt, black trousers and silver belt combo).

It’s something of a relief when the show finally moves on from the pair to Winehouse, although it’s disappointing to find she’s not pissed. Well, “not yet” she isn’t. After an introduction by Brand which made me consider whether he’d fallen off the wagon (“Winehouse: do a record, you lunatic, sing it out of ya gob!”) she “does her record”. As the first time I’d heard her sing was on The Charlotte Church Show, it’s evident that alcohol doesn’t do much for her vocal range, although it has to be said she does sound an awful lot like Shirley Bassey done ‘in the club style’.

After ‘doing her record’ Winehouse accepts Brand’s invitation (“Oi! Winehouse! Come over ‘ere!”) to join him on the sofa with David and Matt. However, Winehouse doesn’t have a present for the host, which leads to an unintentionally amusing verbal squabble between the pair, who despite looking like a gothic his and hers tribute to Dusty Springfield sound exactly like Wayne and Waynetta Slob.

Possibly for this reason the show moves to its climax, with Brand relocating everyone in front of a shelf in order to “situate these glorious gifts up here on the mantelpiece”. Brand claims “these will stand here for all time”, although based on his debut show the likelihood is that his hat and book won’t be the only possessions of his shelved in the near future.

The show ends with a bemused-looking Winehouse (perhaps trying to remember where she’d left her drink) and an embarrassed looking Walliams and Lucas trying to stay in shot by the shelves for the closing credits. Lucas’ book falls off the shelf and narrowly misses Brand’s barnet (probably not the first time the deeper meaning has gone over his head), while he continues his demented Ted Rogers impressions as the credits roll.

Whatever the merits (or otherwise) of Brand’s concocted persona, if a chat show host’s interest is more in himself than his guests, there’s little to sustain interest once the host become tiresome. In thirty minutes of chat with the pair all Brand managed to elicit is they have a DVD out in time for Christmas, Lucas is gay and Walliams’ mother is still alive, and you didn’t need to watch the show to find that out.

It’s appropriate that the production company responsible for this 50-minute exercise in egomania is called Vanity Projects, with its corporate logo being of a scruffy-looking man holding onto his genitals.

Who says narcissists don’t do insight?

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"Get that on your fookin’ documentary!"

2006-11-29T17:18:07+01:00

MacIntyre’s Underworld. five, Tuesday 21 November, 11.00pm

As anyone who’s seen shirtless Newcastle supporters on a winter evening at St James’ Park will testify, Geordie men are made of hardy stock.

But the macho bravdo of Toon Army members pales in comparison to the actions of Geordie underworld veteran Paddy Conroy, the first figure profiled in MacIntyre’s Underworld.

Out on license from an eleven-year jail sentence for torture, kidnapping and escape, Conroy’s conditional release is complicated by a rival gangland family taking out a contract on his life. His re-appearance at a time of turf warfare between rival gangs threatens to worsen the fragile balance of power, due to his stated aim to re-establish his profile and reputation within the criminal fraternity.

Although now middle-aged and resembling a leaner Geoffrey Hughes, his eye patch (worn due to his eye haemorrhaging as a result of prison staff delaying necessary treatment for cataracts – or so he alleges) is a permanent reminder of the brigandish nature of his lifestyle.

The show starts with Paddy playing daddy to his two sons, Buster, eleven, and Jack, one. Long-suffering wife of thirty years Maureen also features in this homely sequence. However, as the couple recount the tale of how they met it’s further evidence of the roughness of their environment. Conroy used to mug Maureen and steal her pocket money; unsurprisingly, she didn’t fancy a date with him when he asked. But Paddy wouldn’t take no for an answer and one day, in his own words, he “grabbed her by the hair and took her home… You think I’m jokin’, don’t ya!”.

Maureen’s expression indicated he wasn’t.

Conroy’s father ran a criminal enterprise in which Paddy served his apprenticeship and would later inherit. This provides some insight into his almost nostalgic view of historic criminality. Of his youth he states that “the villain was just a part of life in those days, especially from the more deprived areas. It wasn’t considered a bad thing unless you did bad villainy, immoral things”. Conroy makes a distinction between “gangsters” and villains. To him, a villain is just a product of his environment and upbringing, whereas “a gangster lives in a world of his own, an imaginary world”.

Conroy denies MacIntrye’s contention he might be perceived as a dangerous man (“I don’t think so - if you don’t have problems with me. But if you come attack us, then I’ll be a dangerous man”), and understands the current underworld difficulties as resulting from the new breed – those operating outside accepted criminal codes: “there’s loads of families from our sort of background who are good people, but you get families who are villains with no morals and not fit to walk this FOOKIN’ earth!”

Paddy considers himself a protector in the local community, and it says much for his standing (or, perhaps, the fear he inspired) that when he was jailed for violence against the police in the 1980s thousands of people demonstrated on the streets for his release. Right-hand man Bullock even went to the extreme of climbing to the top of the Tyne Bridge to protest, but only managed four hours because “it was cold. Freezing, proper freezing”. Conroy chides Bullock for not staying up there longer, although the latter defends himself by saying “well, it wasn’t planned properly. Next time I’ll take a sleeping bag and a flask!”

But despite Conroy’s bravado and criminal heritage, he’s clearly feeling the pressure of the license conditions and the price on his head. Conroy wears a bullet proof vest in public, and his associates constantly monitor his surroundings. When the security lapses, as happens when Conroy returns from a night at the track, he starts to panic. After shouting “where the fook are ya?” repeatedly into his phone, he skulks in the lobby until his driver turns up, greeting him with “cunt! You cunt!”, before berating him further off mic.

Unable to retaliate in the way he had before his sentence, Conroy employs various means to deal with the tension, such as escaping to his country getaway thirty miles outside Newcastle. On his allotment he grows vegetables, and to MacIntyre’s surprise is particularly proud of the trophies he’s won for his prize leeks.

But even in his hideaway he has to be careful of his activities. As an example, his lifetime ban from using firearms means even a spot of rabbit hunting would result in an infringement of his license terms.

As Bullock, MacIntyre and Conroy chat in a shed, two associates bring in a couple of rabbits they’ve shot, and Bullock guts them by the riverbank. The shots of Bullock’s handiwork are intercut with MacIntyre asking Paddy if he’s religious (he’s not) and whether he thinks he’s going to heaven (he does). To those he think he’s going to Hell he retorts: “they can think what they like – it’s between me and the big fella!”

Conroy also uses other methods to relax, having smoked cannabis since he was sixteen. The green-fingered approach he uses on his leeks also applies to his cannabinoids (“better to grow your own. See that? It’s fookin’ organic!”).

But the cannabis and leeks are insufficient to keep Conroy’s ferocity in check. When his family plot in the local cemetery was desecrated in 1994 by a rival gang, his inability to tolerate any affront to his reputation or control his anger led to him committing the acts that resulted in his eleven-year sentence.

When Billy Collier, a criminal who worked for a rival family, was allegedly heard boasting in a local pub he’d been paid £5,000 to dig up the grave, chop parts of the body up and put them through Conroy’s window, it was only a matter of time before Paddy and his henchmen exacted their revenge.

While the pain felt by Conroy after the graves had been attacked is understandable, with him unable to hold back tears as he recounts the story, the retaliation he had planned for those alleged to be responsible is chilling, issuing his threat head-on to the camera: “I would have killed the whole family. All their loved ones. I would have murdered every single one of them if any of them had done that to my family”.

Within days, with only the digging up the grave part of the alleged plan being carried out, Collier was kidnapped at gunpoint from a local shop and tortured. He was abandoned in a warehouse by his attackers after having his teeth pulled out with pliers. Conroy denies being behind the amateur dentistry (“I just beat him up. Hit him with a stick, pool cues, hit him with a gas bottle. He got a beating but not a great beating”), but admits to driving him 400 yards and leaving him at the location where Collier’s teeth would be torn out.

Conroy was arrested but managed to escape en route to court, and was on the run overseas before being caught by Interpol. Security was much tougher on his return: to be on the safe side, a seventeen-vehicle convoy, aeroplane, helicopter, snipers and a gunboat made sure he kept his court appearance.

However, his holidays in the sun did nothing to moderate his temperament, and Conroy cracked under pressure in court, attacking the prosecuting lawyer. As a result he was dragged out past the jury by four prison officers, which, as Conroy concedes, “didn’t help” his innocent plea. He was found guilty on all charges and sentenced to eleven years, although Maureen continues to accept Paddy’s version of the attack on Billy Collier.

Conroy struggles to process the changes made in the Newcastle landscape in the decade of his incarceration, and also finds unfamiliar the spectacle of a new godfather (John Henry Sayers) controlling his former patch (“they say they run Newcastle, but no one fookin rules me”). With the old-skool underworld against him, Paddy is forced to make new alliances with local Triad gangs (the ‘new breed’ which he had earlier railed against), and not without reason. A confrontation with 14 members of the Sayers gang led to Paddy having to endure a severe beating, in the knowledge that to fight back could have resulted in his death, and to involve the police (strictly against his criminal code) would have meant he’d contravened his license conditions.

The ongoing feuds and precarious situation cause Paddy to worry about his eldest son Buster, (“one day you will be the Bossman”) and that he’ll inherit the internecine feuds in the same way as he did with his own father. Buster is only now realising the extent of his father’s criminal lifestyle. His copy of Zoo magazine shows a pixellated snapshot of his father alongside a cover feature on ‘Britain’s deadliest gangs’ (‘Meet the men who run YOUR manor’). This side of his dad he finds hard to understand, with the additional implications of what it means for his own future.

One reason for Buster’s concern over his family’s criminal heritage may be the example of his cousin Dylan, who at 22 has already been jailed four times. Despite Paddy’s assertion that he’s a “good lad in general, just bored”, Dylan is back in jail within four days of being released from his latest sentence after brandishing two sawn-off shotguns.

Yet despite having a clear understanding of the reality of prison life (“everyone in there is depressed – whole prisons suffer from depression”), Paddy risks his license conditions being invoked after an unnecessary run-in with the police. During a raid on his sister’s house he allows himself to be drawn into a verbal confrontation with an officer and is charged with a public order offence. Unwilling to face court proceedings, Conroy goes on the run again, despite the knowledge that he risks a heavier sentence as a consequence. However, this proves to be unnecessary, and somewhat farcical, as his 72-day period in hiding turns out to be just to avoid a £130 penalty charge which is sent through the post to him after he avoided the initial court date.

Despite this good fortune, and the end of his license period meaning Conroy is a free man once again, he’s unable to shake off past events, particularly the feud with the Sayles family. Conroy interrupts his cooking of a celebratory family dinner to launch into an uninterrupted four-minute tirade, unintelligible in parts and incoherent in others, where he tries to piece together what may have been slights on his reputation and the intentions of his rivals (his perceptions and thought processes clearly affected by his cannabis use), leaving no doubt that he’ll retaliate at some point, “and it’s coming fookin’ shortly, believe you me”. His rant culminates in him shouting “get that on your fookin’ documentary!”, before resuming his preparation of the family meal.

At this point, just by giving its subject enough rope, the profile allows the true nature of Conroy to emerge, demonstrating that any performance by an actor of a ‘gangster’ role can never fully convey the menace of intent that an authentic criminal has. Despite certain sequences that humanised him (sequences with his family and on his allotment) and a refusal by MacIntyre to allow a caricature to develop - as would be likely in a Zoo feature – Conroy’s inherent brutality continually re-surfaces. His own need to distinguish between his own criminal acts and those of “gangsters” suggests that to some degree he is fully aware of the nature of his lifestyle and its implications, the essence of which it was essential MacIntyre captured in his “fookin’ documentary”.

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"Like a tall Orlando Bloom".

2006-11-22T12:58:54+01:00

ITV1, Dating the Enemy,19 November, 10.00 p.m.

Being honest, did we ever want the Blind Date couples to live happily ever after?

The bickering on the plane, tantrums on the veranda and the pre-mediated verbals on the sofa with Cilla, it was Cupid’s misses that made the show a hit, with the occasional happy ending only there to help maintain the illusion that we watched the show for these magic moments.

ITV1’s Dating the Enemy ditches the Blind Date pretence and gets straight down to business: a couple are deliberately mis-matched on the basis of their being the complete opposite of their stated ideal partners, and have to endure three days in each other’s company. The aim at the end of the 72 hours is to see if the wooing by one half of the couple is enough to convince the other to 'date the enemy'.

The show starts with "ambitious Chelsea socialite" Melanie, a cross somewhere between her namesake Melanie Griffith and Geri Halliwell. To illustrate her go-getting nature an Apprentice-esque sequence shows the hard-working girl’s lifestyle: conducting business in the back of a cab ("on my way to a very important meeting") on her Blackberry, being extremely professional with clients and, er, sniffing a bunch of roses at a flowerstall.

Melanie is candid about what she can't tolerate in a man: scruffiness, being dirty, lacking ambition, and not being a gentleman. However, while Melanie listed her beau no-nos, these were intercut with shots of her date-to-be waking up with three-day stubble, munching toast in the middle of the afternoon (and not using a plate, so doubtless getting crumbs over the carpet) and belching.

For "slacker and proud of it" Mark, knowledge, experience and love are the essentials of life, stating that "at the risk of sounding like an old hippie (and probably smelling like one), I would say that I can unashamedly defend why my way of life is the way of life to live".

So the successful Sloane and the scruffy slacker – surely the perfect match for a lorra, lorra laughs.

As Melanie made her way to Brighton (Blackberry constantly on the go), Mark ruminates on how he can convince her he’s more than just a slacker (having a shave would have been a good start). At 36, with "neither academic or career success", and working in a comic store, clearly he has his work cut out. Philosophising over his lack of occupational progress ("on paper I look like a bum, maybe, but to me it’s more a career of life than work") Mark decides on a back to basics approach to win over Melanie: a night of camping under the stars. After all, as the scruffy one notes, "what’s not to like about tenting under the sky – it’s all good". Well the potential for getting wet and dirty for one, things we discover Melanie will not tolerate ("I don’t want to go anywhere dirty").

The love train pulls in to Brighton, doubtlessly late as the service is operated by First Capital Connect. The odd couple meet, with Melanie confessing later in the show how gorgeous she found Mark to be ("he’s just like a tall Orlando Bloom"). Mark decides to reveal the evening’s plans by holding up the tent bags and asking "what are we going to do?", perhaps under the delusion that being such a hard-working city girl means Melanie has never seen a tent before.

After finding a suitable clearing, things don’t get off to the best start as Mark realises he can’t pitch his tent ("I’m absolutely buggered"). Fortunately Melanie, the novice to this camping game, is on hand to point out why he’s having such difficulties ("it’s inside out").

But three hours later, with the tent up and the campfire burning, the two swap notes on how their lifestyles contrast. Melanie always has a plan and her diary is constantly booked-up, with something on "every day, sometimes two things on at night". In contrast, Mark confesses he’s more "a sitter and a thinker than a mover and a shaker". But at least he looks like a tall Orlando Bloom while he’s lazing around.

After surviving the "coldest night’s sleep she’s ever had", Melanie travels with Mark to the Isle of Wight to meet the parents. Melanie is looking forward to meeting them, and over the dinner expects an insight into Mark and his background. On hearing the description of them as "aging hippies" she’s under the impression they’ll be "fun and light-hearted". But before she’s received her first course at the Horse & Groom this proves not to be the case.

After telling Mark’s dad she organises events and parties for a living and the next is a fashion event for the British Red Cross, he retorts with "so lots of anorexic young ladies walking up and down in overpriced clothes, with the odd celebrity turning up?"

Being a professional, Melanie takes this in her stride, and responds with an anodyne question to deflect the awkwardness ("why did you move to the Isle of Wight?"). However, I’m quite sure she wouldn’t have asked the question if she knew this was going to be the response:

"If you go to these new towns in the south of England, everyone aspires to the same boring shite. Not everyone’s aspiring to a four-wheel drive, and the availability of spirituality over here is more accessible, and I do like being away from the human species. I don’t like people very much. It’s a nice place and the trees are nice, but people are a bit revolting, ain’t they, don’t you find?"

While this made for great TV, it’s hardly polite dinner conversation.

The charm offensive continues (Melanie being charming and Mark’s father offensive), with Mark’s dad asking Melanie if his misanthropy has "given you an insight into maybe changing your perception of life?", although by the expression on her face the only thing she seems to want to change right now are her dinner companions.

Taking refuge in the ladies (or ‘fillies’ as daintily signed on the door), Melanie lets off steam about Mark’s dad and how he’s "quite rude to put me down and what I do", which is perfectly understandable. It’s one thing to question someone’s way of life, another to completely disrespect it. To add to the dining debacle, Mark confirms to Melanie that he share’s his dad’s views, which means he’s managed to be both dirty, scruffy and ungentlemanly within the first 24 hours of their date.

On their final day together, no doubt as a response to her treatment by Mark’s father, Melanie turns the tables on Mark, considering him to be "all talk and no action". Over lunch at a café (appropriately called Belchers) Melanie asks him if he has any plans to read some of his poetry at the poetry reading evening ("this is your moment to shine"). The mere thought of it has Mark blushing so much that he has to remove his jumper (Melanie: "are you feeling flushed because of the pressure?").

Melanie continues her probing as the pair engage in some pottery painting at a workshop. Melanie asks Mark if he’s prepared to display his porcelain Elvis in his house for people to see, and if so, why the difficulty in reading his poetry in public:

"I don’t get embarrassed about showing things I’m slightly able to do, but if it’s something I want to do…"
"Or you have more to lose?"
Yeah. "It’s difficult for me to expose the raw inner feelings, and that is what I put into the things I write..."

This becomes evident in the show’s climax at the poetry evening when Melanie meets some of Mark’s friends, purportedly along to offer support. Rather than challenge his preconceptions of how an audience may react they reinforce his negative views, with one opining on how "soul-destroying" a single heckle would be. Melanie proffers that she’d think the same but consider it a "risk worth taking", a phrase clearly unfamiliar to the men as they have to ask her to repeat it.

As Melanie is by now fully aware, Mark’s slacker ideals mask a basic lack of confidence and self-belief, reinforced by a lack of parental encouragement (he later admits that Melanie has given him the "verbal kick in the pants I needed sixteen years ago") and his friends’ meekness. His statements about ‘a career of life rather than work’ reveal a belief system that gives him reasons to get away from attempting new things or achieving anything. It’s not a case of him rejecting ambition, but being scared of it.

But after watching a reading by a relaxed poetess, Mark confounds his friends and Melanie to get up on stage and do a reading, and an accomplished one at that, of a "very well-known poem" (Desiderata by Max Ehrmann). This leaves Mark’s friends "gobsmacked", and Melanie taken aback ("after the last 24 hours I never expected him to do it"). In addition to this, the organiser of the Brighton Poetry Society encourages Mark to attend their next meeting, where he says he’ll "do one of mine". But has this minor show of ambition been enough to compensate for being dirty, scruffy and his early ungentlemanly conduct and convince Melanie to ‘date the enemy’?

Unfortunately, not.

Although Mark has gone up in her estimation due to his public performance, and that he no doubt looked like a tall Orlando Bloom as he read the poem, it wasn’t enough. Her verdict was that "on a piece of paper he’s perfect, but there’s a thing inside of him that won’t move him forward", which leads her to doubt that Mark will actually go through with the performance of his own work, despite his invitation for her to come back to Brighton to watch him.

But the show’s heart-warming moments came not from the potential of any romance between the two but seeing Mark’s personal development thanks to an infusion of Melanie’s carpe diem spirit ("there’s a Mark way of doing things and the slightly more effective way of doing things"). He didn’t get the girl, but he got some of his confidence back.

But as they part with a hug and a song by the appropriately named Embrace plays out over the credits, on reflection, maybe Mark should have chosen a different poem with which to enchant Melanie, as Ehrman’s lines clearly state to:

"Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass."

Comments

From the nanny state to the dominatrix dictatorship

2006-10-26T16:26:25+02:00

Your Money or Your Wife, C4, 25 October, 8.30 p.m.

Despite claims by some that Britain has become a nanny state, what we are in fact living under is a dominatrix dictatorship.

Just watch any terrestrial TV station for a couple of hours. It’s inevitable at some point you’ll encounter a stern-faced disciplinarian issuing a series of orders to some masochistic member of the public.

But as if Mistress McKeith, Mistress Frost et al aren’t enough, C4’s latest strict mistress is double-barrelled dominatrix Cesarina Holm-Kander, Your Money or Your Wife’s whip cracking financial trouble-shooter. Holm-Kander, the show's self-styled ‘Debt Buster’, aims to bring her boardroom expertise to the bedroom and help couples climb the debt mountain they’ve managed to accumulate; and with the average debt of the under 30s being £8,000, Holm-Kander won’t be short of victims.

First in the series was credit card queen Kerri, a 22-year old psychology student and model, who was definitely more model than student. Label lover Kerri (motto: life’s too short not to get everything you want) felt it was important to look good and live up to her expectations of life, but was unable to manage this on her alleged £40,000 salary, and had ran up a five-figure debt on credit cards.

It wasn’t difficult to see how this had happened. Kerri admitted to spending £3-4,000 a month on clothes, had two silver convertibles, and had undergone a £5,000 boob job in 2004, although it was perhaps appropriate that the latter should have been financed by plastic.

Amazingly, boyfriend James (motto: If you can’t afford it you shouldn’t get it) was unaware as to the full extent of Kerri’s spending, although you would have thought he couldn’t have missed the overnight breast enhancement and been curious as to how it was paid for. Maybe he was having too much fun.

Mistress Cesarina (motto: spending money you don’t have to achieve your dream is the recipe for a financial nightmare) certainly had some work to do as not only were the couple deep in debt but planning to go into business together and open a nightclub. Could she whip the profligate pair into equitable shape?

The first part of Cesarina’s master(card) class was to reveal the true extent of Kerri’s debts, not just to James, but to the debt diva herself. Kerri’s tenuous grip on her financial affairs was such that she was unaware of how much she was in arrears, although you’d have thought a model would have known a thing or two about figures.

Kerri told James she was “30-40 thousand” in debt, although Cesarina was quick to point out the exact figure was £41,000. If you were being generous you could say Kerri was only a thousand out, but it would perhaps be more accurate to state she was £11,000 out. James was surprised it was that much (“I thought it was half of that”), although Kerri at least had some idea where the money had gone (“I shouldn’t have bought all those shoes.”).

After Cesarina got financial and informed Kerri she was technically insolvent, then explained to her exactly what this phrase meant, the mistress got down to drawing-up a post-nup agreement and attempting to pass on the organisational skills needed to manage their debt. Being a financial expert, Cesarina reckoned she could knock off £9,000 of Kerri’s debts inside two weeks, although I wasn’t that impressed. Even though I’m a beginner at this financial advisor stuff, I could have knocked £41,000 off James’s debts inside two minutes with some simple advice: dump Kerri. However, James was determined to stand by his woman, insisting that they were “in this together”.

Despite this declared spirit of togetherness, he was strangely absent from the next part of Cesarina’s attempts to “dent the debt”, a spot of public shaming. As a psychology student Kerri should have understood the motivation here. Carrying a suitcase of £20 notes which contained the amount she was paying in interest on her debt each month, Kerri had to walk the streets and hand out to passers-by the money for thing, explaining to them as she did so why she was being so generous. Kerri thought this exercise was a waste, although as her mistress was quick to point out, this was what she was doing on a corporate basis by virtue of her interest payments each month.

But just in case the symbolic effect of the lesson wasn’t enough, James obeyed their mistress’s next set of instructions by cutting up all of Kerri’s cards. In addition to this was an enforced budget of £7 a day, with all their financial decisions having to be made together and Cesarina having access to their online accounts.

Following this was the inevitable asset-stripping which, understandably, had the Visa vixen feeling a little nervous, but while she was likely to lose the shirt off her back it was unlikely Cesarina was so strict she was going to take the implants from her chest. After going through her possessions and calling in an auctioneer, Cesarina was confident she could raise £2,000 by selling the tagged items, but James and Kerri resisted the proposed flogging by their monetary mistress.

James said he’d “rather get a job than sell this stuff” which in more than the way he’d meant revealed why the pair were so indebted. Kerri also refused to sell many of her ”investments”, such as the £900 bag she’d ‘invested’ in. But, as Cesarina pointed out, this wasn’t an investment, it was a debt in the shape of a £900 bag. This also applied to £34,000 debt in the shape of a BMW Beamer that was parked next to the other convertible that Kerri couldn’t part with as she wanted ‘the best of anything’. With an attitude and car like that, it was no surprise when Cesarina fitted Kerri with a tracking device so she could be monitored 24 hours a day.

The next stage in installing discipline in Kerri was an attempt to show the superficial and ultimately pointless nature of her desire for image. Kerri had to discern a designer bag from a high street one, which, unsurprisingly, she was unable to do – but then she wasn’t alone. When the bags were shown to people on the street (the people Kerri the ‘model’ was most likely to spend her time mixing with), they too were unable to tell the difference or which was the most expensive-looking. As Cesarina pointed out, many celebs wear high-street attire, and besides this try and blag as much free stuff as possible. Some of them probably even take advantage of the firm Holm-Kander mentioned that offered designer bags for a £30 monthly hire fee.

But the final test of Kerri’s newly found obedience was a spot of entrapment. Could she resist the ultimate accessory of the conspicuously consumptive: a pampered pooch as carried by the likes of Paris Hilton?

Knowing of Kerri’s desire for a £1000 pug puppy, Cesarina had a secret meeting with James (in the front of a parked car for added furtive authenticity) to inform him of her cunning plan. James was to take Kerri to her pedigree chum to see if he could use a pug to make a mug of her. Four hidden cameras were recording the occasion with James attempting to entice Kerri. However, she refused to take the bait, worrying that she didn’t want Cesarina to “lose respect for me or be told off”. Right on cue after this display of submission, Cesarina rang Kerri to congratulate her for not giving in to temptation.

By the end of the first month Cesarina had saved the couple £9845, although this sum was perhaps less impressive when taken into account the £7900 that had been saved by selling one of the cars. Much of the advice Holm-Kander had given (organise your bills, pay them on time) was the practical advice you’d expect a layman to offer, and when the financial expert told them that all they had to do to clear the remaining £31,155 was carry on with £7 a week budget for the next two years you had to wonder if it wasn’t just Kerri with the tenuous grip of financial reality.

But then this hadn’t all been about financial gains, and the experience had taught Kerri and James lessons about each other. The psychology student had learnt she can’t have everything she wants and James had learnt his woman can be tamed, but then what else would you expect a dominatrix to teach you?

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"A very high form of masturbation."

2006-10-11T15:09:38+02:00

Guys and Dolls: C5, 11pm, 10 October.

One of the best things about having a psychology degree is being able to watch cheap, exploitative television programs about sub-groups and doing so with a clean conscience.

Psychologists probably have a word for that type of behaviour.

They doubtless also have a term for the behaviour of the men featured in C5’s ‘extraordinary people’ series, which focussed on four men and their special relationships.

With life-size dolls.

But let’s not rush to mock these guys. Let’s take a leisurely approach and gradually poke fun over a 1500-word article.

As anyone who’s gone through a dry spell knows, finding that special partner can sometimes be tricky. So thank God for the Californian dream factory pimping out the pumped-up women for those fellas struggling to find love and companionship with ‘organic’ women.

The program focussed on a series of American men and their real-life Barbies but, before us Brits get too smug, they also had a Dorset local on there. Although the individual circumstances of each man were presented in turn, parallels could be drawn between all four: an almost morbid fear of being alone, issues over control and reliability in a relationship, and a perceived incapability of living up to the expectations of women.

The oddly named Davecat featured first. Davecat still lives with his parents, which he found a little embarrassing, unlike his predilection for his blow up beau Sidore. Being a mid-western American, Davecat’s father was obviously not tolerant enough to accept his son’s relationship with Polythene Pam and considered it ‘unnatural and strange’. Clashes would often occur and, as a consequence, Sidore spent 99.9% of her time in Davecat’s room. But then you wouldn’t think there’d be much point in Davecat’s mom setting her daughter-in-law a place at the dinner table.

Davecat’s plastic fetish had started at an early age after his mother had taken him to a downtown store and found him talking to a mannequin with a tennis skirt. He admired their "beauty and stoicism" and sense of being "incorruptible".

But that’s not to say he hadn’t had a bloody good go at corrupting his latest.

To start with, his relationship with Sidore had been "sex, sex, sex", but had tapered off to just laying close by and appreciating her. Davecat had made half-hearted attempts with ‘organic’ women but had been unable to tolerate the "lack of constancy", unlike his situation with Sidorie. She was like an anchor, unlike real women, which was not surprising as being an inanimate object means a plastic doll has a lot in common with other inanimate objects.

However, he faced an impending separation from his love as she needed repairs after going all loose and floppy over the years (it’ll happen to you at some point, Davecat). Sidore would be away for three weeks which was the longest they’d been apart. Being alone was something he didn’t want to think about, although if he known the man he’d entrusted his true love to then their time apart would be even more unsettling, although perhaps not as much as the "second honeymoon" he’d promised Sidore on her return...

As soon as the camera panned around 50-year old computer technician’s Evarard’s house, you could see he had a thing for models, and this was before we’d come face-to-face with his lovers. Model airplanes hung from the ceiling, demonstrating that the man was clearly a dab hand at patching things up with an Airfix kit.

The production team had obviously arrived early at Evarard’s house as ‘Virginia’ was sleeping when they got there, but this wasn’t too inconvenient once he changed her eyes from the sleeping set to the awake ones. Everard cooed as he described how she just lay there and was so "very static" and didn’t move at all, but that was unsurprising considering Virginia was made out of plastic. And she had her closed eyes in.

The nearest he’d got to a girlfriend was a wren from the Royal Navy who’d taken dance lessons and was "quite fit" although, ever the fetishist, he was disappointed she didn’t wear the uniform when he met her. Evarard didn’t go into the specifics as to why the wren had flown, but had some generalisations as to why women don’t flock to him. He considered attractive women to be "unattainable", perceived himself as an "outsider" and that all women reacted negatively to him before he’d even said anything. Which is just as well if decided to enter into a conversation about the tricky subject of his alternative lifestyle.

To counter the negative perceptions Everard had taken up hang-gliding to distinguish him from the common man on the street, with the expectation that women would be naturally attracted to guys who do exciting things, although this hadn’t worked out either. If you ask me, he was going about it the wrong way: if he wanted to demonstrate his alpha maleness he should have casually slipped into the conversation that he was currently living with a couple of beautiful models.

As with Davecat, Everard was keen to stress the companionship angle to his latex loves. His mother had died eleven years ago and he’d clearly been unable to grieve and move on from his loss. Admitting that it "doesn’t make sense when your mother dies" he said he’d "probably" prefer it if he had a real woman in his life, but "sooner the dolls than no female company at all".

As he poignantly, if a tad self-pityingly, put it:

"I’m 50 years old. Losing my hair. I’ll never get a real woman that would look like this [his model]. A real doll will love me, no matter what."

So despite the subject matter, the program had been able to engender some sympathy for these lost souls.

Until it came to Gordon.

If anyone in the program met most people’s stereotype of a sex-doll user it was him.

Although his issues over control and dependency were similar to the others, his was the most misogynistic attitude of the featured men, and considered sleeping with a woman who’d had the audacity to have intercourse with another man before him as "like going to a restaurant and being served regurgitated meat".

His biological father had left him after six months and he’d been raised by his mother in Virginia (the place, not Evarard’s partner). Perhaps as a consequence of this Gordon was quick to emphasise the transitory nature of human relationships ("how many friends do you have from when you’re five or six years old?") and how it influenced his preference for plastic.

But leaving aside Gordon’s early attachment difficulties, his experiences in adult life had reinforced his preference for inanimate companions. He’d met a woman at a party and despite his perceived unattractiveness ("bad skin, bad teeth") had gotten talking to her and passed on his number. A couple of weeks later she called to ask him over to her place. To babysit while she went out with another man. Wicked, wicked woman!

Gordon had taken this rather hard, although he was at least able to look on the bright side by reflecting on the money he’d save at Christmas by not having to buy her any presents.

Perturbed by the unpredictability of human relationships, Gordon no longer had to worry about "lies and deceit" with his dolls, which gave him peace of mind.

Plus there were the obvious sexual advantages (no pregnancy or disease), although at least with real-life women you don’t have to take a puncture-repair kit on a date. Unless you know they cycled there.

As Jean-Luc Godard once quipped about movies, all you need is a girl and a gun, and Gordon had two of the former and three of the latter, which coupled with his Astroglide lubricant and two-handed broadsword made him his "own God" in his fantasy world. His dolls were worth everything to him, to the point he was planning on having them buried with him, although for the sake of a relatively dignified service I hope he chooses to leave his sword outside of the coffin when the time arrives.

The valley of the dolls responsible for all this latex love was situated in California, who ship around seven dolls a week worldwide. Even by their standards they had various unnatural requests to deal with, such as pregnant dolls (Gordon clearly hadn’t placed that order) or an eighty-year old doll (maybe Evarard was looking for a substitute for his mother). One had even asked for pubic hair going up to the belly button and the lower back, although they’d refused this request on the grounds they "had to draw the line somewhere". However, that didn’t stop them from sending the customer the pubic hair necessary for some DIY doll-work.

Doll creator Matt was flattered his creations were able to fill such an emotional space in the lives of his customers, considering the dolls to function like insoles function in shoes. For those guys incapable of talking to girls, opined Matt, "sex with a rubber doll is better than never having sex at all". Which all us guys would agree with. Wouldn’t we?!

Sharing a similar tenuous grip on reality was Slade, who was the maintenance man when the dolls needed their annual service. Some of Slade’s work were minor things such as replacing teeth. Or vaginal lips. In fact the model he was working on at that moment had what looked like to him as a "destroyed vagina". Of particular concern to Davecat, considering he was repairing Sidore, was Slade’s confession that he’d had sex with a couple of the dolls entrusted to his care. The bounder!

But just to prove the show was giving an equal platform for both men and women to demonstrate their psychological flaws, on came Slade’s girlfriend Rebecca. Unbelievably, she had been jealous of the dolls when she first started dating him, feeling intimidated by what she perceived to be their "physical perfection". However, as time passed she had gotten over this jealous phase, seeing the dolls as just "a very high form of masturbation".

Which is where Mike came in.

As the only man featured who was bridging the gap between fantasy and reality by having sexual contact with a real life woman, and perhaps not coincidentally, Mike was pretty upfront about his dolls functioning as an outlet for his 3am hard-ons. Unlike other guys who had Harleys, sex was his hobby, and the dolls provided sexual outlets for Mike, the latex Lou Bega, who even had his own eight-woman harem of individually named honeys:

A little bit of Wendy in his life
A little bit of Sandy by his side
A little bit of Misty’s all he’d need
A little bit of Christy’s what he see
A little bit of Jazzy in the sun
A little bit of Lexy, his number 1.

Trumpet!

Complicating matters for Mike was his burgeoning relationship with Texan lovely Jodie and the realisation that although sex with the dolls "can be awesome, [they] provide zero companionship". Jodie seemed admirably open-minded about Mike’s activities, but as she had met him via the Internet and he turned out not to be a serial killer then she’d probably consider his doll fetish as a bit of a result.

Mike saw the possibility of wedding bells and used his birthday as an opportunity for Jodie to ‘meet the prosthetics’ leading to a particularly memorable exchange as Jodie met his harem for the first time:

Jodie: Do you use all eight?
Mike: No. Just one at a time!
Jodie: I need a beer!

Jodie liked the fact that he’d opened up to her and took his doll fetish as just being a part of who he is, but if she ever found out he preferred sex with dolls over women she’d "break it off" (I don't think she was referring to his penis..." as she requires more at this point in her life.

So a happy ending. Or perhaps not.

A week after the birthday surprise, Jodie decided to end it. But then she’d probably found out the truth about the kind of man who has sex with inflatable dolls.

They’re notorious for letting their women down.

Comments

"I'm still the reigning International Mastermind champion."

2006-09-29T14:01:53+02:00

Eggheads, BBC2, 6.00 pm, 15 September 2006.

If there’s one thing the television producer and the psychologist have in common it’s a chequered history in defining exactly what ‘intelligence’ is. Any standard introductory psychology textbook will detail the problems psychometric testers have had in attempting to measure intelligence, and the over-valued status attached to IQ tests (the only thing the tests are guaranteed to measure reliably is an individual’s ability at taking IQ tests).

As an example of the meaninglessness of IQ scores, take the following example. Madonna is reputed to have an IQ of 140 (the average is 100), yet this didn’t prevent her from marrying Guy Ritchie, choosing to star in the career-ending shocker that was Swept Away or recording that bloody awful cover version of American Pie.

In televisual terms, intelligence seems to come down to nothing more than rote memory recall, the ability to use semantic memory (the memory of facts and concepts) to remember all sorts of pointless information such as the capital city of Venezuela being Caracas. Now unless you’re in Venezuela and need to get to your country’s embassy as a matter of urgency, knowing this simple fact will not be of much use to you, nor knowing another several thousand similar useless facts. Yet, in TV terms, knowing the scores of all the FA Cup finals somehow equates to being Einstein.

Still, the quiz show is the staple food of television producers, mainly because they’re cheap and fast to film with multiple episodes being recorded back-to-back. They’re also relatively amusing to watch with the family, as various members take turns to make idiots of themselves by blurting out the wrong answer to such questions as what the capital city of Venezuela is.

Currently running in the ‘unbuckle the jeans and let the dinner go down’ timeslot on BBC2 at 6pm is Eggheads, featuring "the most formidable quiz team in Britain" or, as they’re described in the TKK household, the least charismatic quiz team in Britain (and that’s saying something). The team are so dull that I’ve given them ~~insulting~~ comedic nicknames just to liven them up.

First up is Judith Keppel (‘Posh’), the first winner on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Her main distinguishing feature is that she pulls a face like a constipated owl whenever she has to think hard about a question.

Next is Kevin Ashman (‘Bus-driver’), a former winner of Mastermind and a man so nondescript he could live in your house for seven years before you noticed him.

After Busdriver is CJ De Mooi (‘Boss-eye’), whose one distinguishing feature is being the weakest link on the team and the Egghead the opposing teams relentlessly go far, sensing easy meat. And he’s not sensitive about it all. Not one little bit.

The penultimate member of the team is Daphne Fowler (‘Dentures’), two time winner of Fifteen to One, and whose distinguishing feature is not having one.

The final member is the unofficial daddy of the team, Christopher Hughes (Amos Brealy as designed by Frank Oz), whose distinguishing feature is his catchphrase "I’m still the reigning International Mastermind champion", which epitomises the smug condescension that oozes from him like sweat from a builder’s arse-crack. Just for the record, there hasn’t been another International Mastermind since 1983 and he isn’t being the least bit self-aware when he says it.

The format is as follows: five-person quiz teams "pit their wits" against the Eggheads. There are initially four rounds before the fifth and final round. In the first four rounds the challenging team are informed of the theme the questions for the round will be on (e.g. sport, history). They select one person from their team to answer the questions, who then chooses a member of the Eggheads to compete against on an individual basis. No conferring is allowed and the loser is ruled out of the final round, in which the remaining members of each team compete on a group basis and are allowed to confer. Each contestant and Egghead has three questions to answer, with a forced choice between three possible answers. If the scores are tied at the end of the round the questions go to sudden death, but with no answers provided.

Before going onto the rollercoaster ride that was the quiz, a word about the competing team for the episode I watched. It takes a lot to make the Eggheads look charismatic, but Black Country boys the ‘Lump-hammers’ managed it in style. Their names alone are enough to suggest the boys’ blandness: Paul, Tony, Gary, Ken, Graham (Did their parents have some form of allergy to syllables?).

The team also committed the cardinal sin of quiz by having such a shit name for their team. Anyone who’s taken part in a pub quiz knows the aim is to have give your team the most ridiculous name possible, so the compere looks like a complete arse when he has to read the scores at the end of each round:

"The Blue Team have 4, The Red Team have 6, and The Urine is Running Uncontrollably Down My Leg Team have no points and no chance of winning whatsoever."

Trust me: after a couple of drinks it’s a hoot an’ a holler.

The first subject is geography and the Egghead was Posh.

Sample question:

The tower called the Scot monument is the feature of which British city?

a) Edinburgh
b) Cardiff
c) Belfast

And no, it’s not a trick question. It really was that insultingly easy.

With questions like the above, it was no surprise all were answered correctly and the scores were tied at 3-3, meaning the round went into sudden death. With no clues as to the answer, the contestants now have to recall rather than recognise the answer. This really sorts out the eggs from the Eggheads.

But Posh loses and, like her namesake, she won’t be seen anywhere when it comes to the grand final.

The next round was arts and books, so step forward Big Daddy Amos to flex the mental muscle.

Sample question:

Which member of the Beatles in 1997 released a symphonic work called Standing Stone?

a) George Harrison
b) Paul McCartney
c) Ringo Starr

Hilariously, the smug twat got the answer wrong with his unnecessarily prefaced answer of "the late George Harrison" (just in case anyone wasn’t aware George died five years ago).

Unfortunately, the Lumphammers fail to take advantages of Amos’s cock-up, and they too had lost a member for the final.

As the quiz progresses, what becomes evident is that for a significant proportion of the time the Eggheads don’t instantly know the answer. Taking advantage of the forced choice format, they tend to go through the answers and eliminate the ones they know are wrong, before arriving at an answer they think is correct, rather than know for certain.

The next round was entertainment, and step forward Mr Bus-driver to entertain you.

Sample question:

Who played the role of Danny Zuko in the stage musical of Greece the first time?

a) Jeff Bridges
b) Al Pacino
c) Richard Gere

Again, Bus-driver wasn’t 100% sure what the answer was, but revealingly commented that "the only name [I have] associated with Greece is Richard Gere". Again the ‘intelligence’ on display was simple associations rather than knowledge.

Bus-driver ran his opponent over, and the Lumphammers (or ‘Lumps’ for short) had lost another man for the final.

The penultimate round was history, and being a history graduate I was looking forward to pitting my wits at home against Dentures. Fat chance.

Sample question:

Which criminal of the Old West was shot by Pat Garrett?

a) Doc Holliday
b) Jesse James
c) Billy the Kid

I didn’t need my history degree for this one; having watched Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was sufficient to give me the answer. As Dentures is around 86, she clearly had an advantage when it came to history and defeated her opponent. That meant there were just two Lumps left for the final.

In the final round the topic is general knowledge, with four Eggs competing against two Lumps. At this point the numerical advantage should come into play, but not with questions as straightforward as the following example:

Which member of the royal family was engaged to Koo Stark?

a) Edward
b) Charles
c) Andrew

Unsurprisingly, again, there were no wrong answers until it came to the final question with the scores at two apiece. For the deciding question the teams were given a line taken from a nursery rhyme:

"Lady bird, lady bird, who hides under the pan?"

To have a chance of beating the Eggheads, the Lumps had to guess who hid under the pan. Was it:

a) Anne
b) Agnes
c) Alison

As nursery rhymes were clearly not their forte, and neither was lateral thinking, the team was completely stumped, but they still had a one in three chance of guessing correctly.

They chose Alison.

Falsehood!

The correct answer was Anne, as the Eggheads successfully guessed. But the reasons as to why they chose their answer revealed the secret of their success: Anne had been chosen because it rhymes with pan, which, being as it was taken from a nursery rhyme, was a common sense logical deduction.

So, as for many of the questions, the Eggheads hadn’t displayed awe-inspiring mental gymnastics but simply used common sense.

And with their nailbiting 3-2 win the Eggheads stretched their winning sequence to 15 unbeaten matches.

And Amos is STILL International Mastermind Champion.

Amongst other things.

Comments

“They enjoy having a smack – it’s like a buzz for them.”

2006-09-25T12:21:25+02:00

I Smack and I'm Proud, ITV, 9pm, 21 September 2006.

TKK’s parents didn’t practice corporal punishment, which makes his subsequent development of a spanking fetish in adulthood somewhat hard to fathom. Maybe, deep down, I feel missed out on something in my childhood which I’m now trying to experience in adulthood.

Or perhaps I’m just a great big strumpin’ perv.

ITV ‘documentary’ I Smack and I’m Proud detailed a series of families who had no qualms about spanking their kids and were prepared to do so on camera. The show opened with the usual clichés about why it’s ok to smack kids:

"I think it hurt me more than it hurt him." Well if that’s the case then why is your child the only one crying?

"It didn’t do me any harm." Apart from turning you into a psychotic disciplinarian-obsessed control freak.

"Spare the rod and you spoil the child." Because a child that grows up without being physically beaten is being spoilt otherwise.

"You have to be a brave parent to admit you smack your child." For sure. It takes real courage to admit to hitting someone who’s less than two feet tall.

The program focused on a series of families: Angela Davies and her three children Marcella, Aaron and Lorenzo; Gary and Tracy Wall (the Wayne and Waynetta Slob of parenting) and their six children; Martyn and Amanda Ayers and their two kids; Denise Williams (who thinks her kids get a ‘buzz’ from being smacked) and her two daughters; plus Jenny and Mark Flanders (not their real surname), who believed they had a God-given right to go forth and (in)breed, and then spank their breed.

Interspersed between the families were brief comments from an almost exclusively lower-class derived sample of pro-smacking parents (surely some of the middle-classes still spank?), the usual talking head snippets (e.g. Dr Miriam Stoppard) and the obligatory superfluous comment from celebrities. Both Ulrika Jonsson and Fiona Phillips were adamant they didn’t smack their kids and I totally believed them (they probably get nanny to smack the kids for them).

The families demonstrated all the inconsistencies and distorted logic which informed their smacking practices, starting with the Davies family.

"I say my piece: you don’t listen, you get wacked."

Angela had clearly graduated from the Tony Soprano school of parenting and was clear as to the reasoning behind her reign of terror: "I love them, that’s why I discipline them. I don’t want them to take drugs or get pregnant; I don’t want them to hurt another child."

Maybe demonstrating to your kids the fine art of assault with kitchen utensils might not be the best way of achieving that.

Davies stated that "I rule this house, I’m in control", but she wasn’t in control of either her temper or the children. In the twelve days the family was filmed she struck her kids twenty times on camera, so one can only imagine what the family home was like when the film-makers left.

"When Tracy smacks ‘em they know it."

Although the Walls had six kids to smack, the focus was on problem-child Aaron, a seven-year old with a mouth like a pissed-up docker. Aaron had a four-year behavioural history of tantrums and swearing, and you didn’t have to be a social learning theorist to see where it came from. While administering a smacking, Tracey and Gary would argue and swear at each other, which goes to show the parenting classes they’d claimed to attended had not worked.

Gary and Tracey had "tried everything" with Aaron, including the "old-fashioned" method of putting curry powder in his mouth. To those who thought soap was the old-fashioned way, they’d tried that as well. But neither of these two methods had worked, unlike pepper, which really did the job (where had they been for these parenting classes? Guantanamo Bay?).

Maybe it wasn’t a surprise Aaron called his dad a "prick", "bastard" and "fuckin’ idiot" if this was the treatment he was receiving. The battle of wills between father and son led to Aaron running away at one point, not that the Slobs noticed: they’d probably have had another couple of kids before realising he’d gone.

"We woz bringing him up wrong."

Martyn and Amanda Ayers had a more clearly delineated problem with their son Mitchell, who had suffered a severe case of dethroning with the birth of his brother Spencer. The Ayers had planned originally for Mitchell to be their only child and had consequently “spoilt and mollycoddled” him. The birth of Spencer and the resulting loss of attention had clearly affected Mitchell’s behaviour, and six months after Spencer’s birth Martyn decided on a zero tolerance policy:

"One day he wound me up and wound me up and then I hit him. He cried for 10-15 minutes and was shocked and then was perfect for 15 minutes after. I thought: ‘blimey, is this what it takes?’"

Martyn had extended this hardline approach to the evening meal, bawling at Mitchell "keep your fucking legs forward" whenever he turned round. Martyn complained at not being to concentrate when at home and wanting a period of quiet reflection after work, which went some way to explaining the real reason his son was being hit so often. Perhaps if he cooled down after work before interacting with his family then there would have been less need for Mitchell to be hit so often.

The most uncomfortable moment was seeing Martyn ask son: "Do you hate me for smacking you?" Mitchell said no, which absolved Martyn of everything.

"The Bible says it’s ok to discipline our children."

Christian couple Jenny and Mark Flanders had five children and looked so inbred that, to steal the old Bill Hicks joke, their eyes were so close together the right eye was in the left socket and vice versa. The Flanders had the authority of the Bible to back up their disciplinarian actions, the Fifth Commandment being such a flexible tool.

The example of daughter Eloise being punished after drawing on the living room floor gave the Flanders the chance to explain their approach. Whenever one of their kids does something wrong they take them into a room and explain what they’ve done wrong. Then smack them. And, like other parents, a mixed message is thrown in when they give their kids a cuddle afterwards. So the child does something the adult considers ‘wrong’, is smacked and is then cuddled afterwards. Now who’d be confused by behaviour as consistent as that?

Demonstrating the strong vein of rationality informing his decision making Mark stated that it’s important "children learn to respond to their parents rather than receiving a beating by a copper ten years later."

Er, right. I see the connection. Still, you wouldn’t expect the strongest demonstration of logical thinking to come from a Christian.

"My daughters are a pain in the arse."

The final family was Denise (I smack, therefore I am) Williams and her two daughters Page and Charley. Mum would smack for such heinous crimes as not being able to open the door because her daughters’ room was messy. In Denise’s history were features similar to Angela’s: a father from the army who practiced a strict regime of punishment ("his belt would be undone if I wasn’t in by nine") who one day punched his daughter in the mouth after she contravened his oppressive rules.

Was it effective? Well Denise didn’t sleep with anyone until she was 20, although later in life stole money from a service station in Pontypool and threatened the cashier (an old lady) with a hammer, for which she received six months imprisonment. She’s also served time for fraud (three months) and another few weeks for assault. So a successful disciplinarian upbringing there.

An almost complete inability to see links between their childhood experiences and subsequent behaviour as adults was evident in the closing sequences where Harley Street psychologist Dr Lucy Atcheson met the parents. Angela grew up in Singapore where her father was in the British Army. She said he was a "strict disciplinarian" who "didn’t know how to love" and "treated me like one of his soldiers".

Sound familiar?

Rather than recognising she’d become a clone of my father and respond to the psychologist’s suggestion she be more demonstrative in her loving, Angela responded that she [the psychologist] was "going on like a broken tape-recorder". Well, at least she didn’t wack her on this occasion.

When the good doctor went to Devon to visit Martyn and Amanda there was slightly more insight (or guilt) and a contrast in results. On viewing the footage for the first time Martyn looked visibly uncomfortable, especially the extract where Mitchell was told to "keep your fuckin’ legs forward". As Lucy pointed out, Mitchell was simply curious at to what his dad was doing and turned around to watch him. Partly as a consequence of seeing his own behaviour Martyn had decided to stop smacking his eldest son, although it’s inevitable in these type of programs there has to be a 'happy' ending in the narrative, no matter how contrived.

The vast majority of the parents featured were unaware of the change in the law in 2005 which states that if the inflicted punishment leads to more than an actual passing mark the parent could face up to five years imprisonment; I’m not sure what the sentencing options are for putting pepper in your kid’s mouth. As was pointed out by the health professionals, small children are often unable to see the connection between the smack and the misdemeanour, and become increasingly desensitized to the physical punishment. They also tend to be focus more on the punishment received rather than what they are told they’ve done wrong.

With the ending of corporal punishment in state and private schools and the outlawing of the practice in the family other European countries (and a subsequent reduction in juvenile violence) it’s probably only a matter of time before a bill is introduced before Parliament, which will end the techniques employed by the appropriately named Andria Bowes-Adolfess, using smacking to show "wrong from right".

Little Hitlers, one and all.

Comments

Coo! Coo! Mark Fowler

2006-09-22T12:29:01+02:00

Loose Women, ITV, 12.30 p.m. 20 September 2006.

Despite the best efforts of the Government to conceal the true casualty figures, British troops are struggling to cope with the ferocity of Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. However, I have a cunning plan with which to undermine the fighting ability of the Taliban shock troops. I’d sit down with Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Mohammad Omar and make him watch ITV’s Loose Women, because by the time we’d got to the loose morals section I’m quite sure he would recognise the need to reverse the Taliban’s opposition to educating women and insist all Afghanistani women are educated to at least doctorate level.

As part of the lightweight TV programming which makes up ITV schedules from today’s GMTV to tomorrow’s, Loose Women aims to transfer to TV the blend of features found within the magazines my mother is so fond of purchasing when she does the shopping: a bit of diet info (“lose 10 pounds while sitting on your arse eating chocolate!”); some celeb fluff (“Peter Andre on his best buy coffee machine!”); a real life story (“My son learnt maths by selling drugs!”); and, my favourite part, the problem page (“My Man keeps badgering me to have a threesome – should I?”). The answer to the latter is a definite yes, as long as it’s another woman he’s talking about bringing to the conjugal bed.

The show is reasonably anchored by main host Kaye Adams, although holed below sea level by crewmates Coleen Nolan (ex-Nolan sister and ex-Mrs Shane Ritchie), Carol McGiffin (Chris Evans’s wife before Billie Piper) and Denise Welch (ex-Corrie). What use an anchor is to a sinking ship is a moot point as, despite Adams’ best efforts to avoid icebergs, her crew is set on a constant collision course with icebergs due to their constant internecine bitching.

The show kicked off with some diet chat as Coleen talked about her non-solids diet, which was rather apposite considering the last time her BMI was in reasonable shape was during her pre-solids days. Coleen wittered on about changing her relationship to food, although you’d think the human-food relationship is pretty one way: you eat it; it doesn’t eat you. Unless it’s some form of GM killer tomato.

Rarely able to focus on a topic for long when the co-hosts fill time, the conversation set sail for distant shores. Coleen, apparently, is big in Japan, although judging by the size of her arse she’d be big in any country she chooses to visit.

With the show shipping water fast, and this being ITV, the show moved onto its premium line competition plug, with the following challenging question to win £2000:

Albert Square is the setting for which soap:

(a) Neighbours.

(b) Emmerdale.

I thought the government was supposed to be taking action against these kind of no-brainer £1 a minute quiz lines? It’s completely obvious to everyone that the answer to the question is Emmerdale.

Just in case the above question was a little taxing, on came first guest Todd Carty (ex-Eastenders) to jog your memory. At this point I began to wonder if Carty’s microphone was playing up as I was unable to hear anything he said due to his low-talking. To summarise, I think the conversation went something like this:

Loose women: Coo! Coo! Tucker Jenkins!
Todd Carty: Mmm, hmm, hmm, mmm.
Loose women: Coo! Coo! Mark Fowler!
Todd Carty: Mmm, hmm, hmm, mmm.

Carty was asked about his views on corporal punishment, serving as a none too subtle plug for ITV’s forthcoming ‘documentary’ I Smack and I’m Proud, which gave the girls a chance to extemporise wildly about their own personal experiences. Both Colleen and Denise were in favour of kids and smack; Carol doesn’t smack her kids, although that’s because she doesn’t have any (well not since her divorce). At this point the tension between the women re-emerged as Carol’s liberal stance was defensively met by cries of ‘you don’t have kids so you don’t know what it’s like!” With such sisterly solidarity is it any wonder the patriarchy survives?

With Carty gone and another plug for the competition, the show moved onto its version of the problem page with its loose morals segment. Neil from Manchester had written to the show as he was worried his girlfriend was a bit of a lush due to her aggressive and abusive behaviour when on the grog. How should he broach the subject with her?

Rather than an attempt at empathy, Carol, Denise and Coleen became instantly defensive as if their own drunken antics were on trial. Carol gave the advice you’d expect from an ex-wife of Chris Evans: she suggested he get inebriated with his woman so he didn’t notice her behaviour (two drunks always being better than one). She also added it was a bit much of a man to criticise his beau’s behaviour just because it "changes after a couple of drinks”. At this point the show sunk further under the weight of the hosts’ bitching, with Carol once again being the group scapegoat. Kaye accused Carol of being “stroppy and deluded” when drunk; Colleen told her she never felt concerned about leaving her “in many a gutter”; Denise, having quit the grog due to her own embarrassing behaviour, said she hates being around drunks and pretty much accused Carol of being an alcoholic (Carol: “I’m not ill.” Kaye: but you are defensive.”).

With the lifeboats at the ready, on came Monarch of the Glen actor Hamish Clark (no, me neither), so the girls could inevitably ask him about his kilt and “which part of it he wore out” on set (Denise). Clark was about as coherent as Carol on the lash, although she at least has alcohol as an excuse.

With the show a wreck on its way to Davy Jones’ locker, there was just enough time to plug the competition again with the promise that the answer would be revealed the next day, as if this was necessary. Emmerdale was so obviously the answer!

Womens’ magazines perform a valuable function, providing housebound WAGS mental relief from the interminable rounds of hoovering, doing the washing-up and getting the dinner ready for their subjugating partner. However, a live TV equivalent includes the gormless fuckwittery that a Now! editor would prevent from going to the typesetters. When the regular sections (e.g. soap star interviews) fail, the segments where the girls ~~bitch~~ chat amongst themselves are like watching a crew firing a cannon at its own deck.

But that’s not to say the Loose Women format doesn’t have potential: shifted to a post-watershed timeslot and with the girls allowed to get loaded in the green room before the show starts, the inevitable drunken catfight that would erupt would be preferable to the watery death the show suffers at its current midday scheduling. Until this time, in shipping terminology, if the show was a deck it would most definitely be the poop.

Comments

Ann Widdecombe's designer vagina

2006-09-14T13:47:29+02:00

Don’t Get Me Started. Five: 7.15 pm. Tuesday 12 September.

I know this might sound strange, but I feel a tad sorry for Ann Widdecombe, MP. Like many backbench Tory MPs, Widdecombe is clearly out of place in modern society, which makes her (and their) influence on the laws of the land an uncomfortable notion.

On Five’s Don’t Get Me Started, Widdecombe squeezed into the pulpit and delivered her modern life is rubbish sermon: people today are far too obsessed with worshipping the false god that is the physical (or the “outer crust” in Ann’s winning phrase), infatuated with celebs, diets and image in a society where “stick thin twiglets reign supreme”.

Course they do. Only the other day Kate Moss was introducing legislation to tackle social exclusion while sentencing a couple of paparazzi to death by stoning.

In case we think it hypocritical of the recently blond dyed Ms Celebrity Fatclub to lecture on the dangers of physical vanity, Widdecombe preempts this by informing us her participation in the show was “all for health” reasons, although it’s somewhat more difficult to defend dying your hair blond on that basis.

Widdecombe trod the increasingly familiar path of current health and lifestyle issues, leading to a superficial examination of the £2 billion diet industry, the negative perceptions people have of fat people (their perceived laziness and slovenliness), “health establishment” scaremongering over clinical obesity (or being “mildly overweight” as Ann prefers), alleged collaboration between the “health establishment” and the slimming industry, cosmetic surgery and spa treatments, plus the obligatory facile observations from media commentators and clueless Joe Publics.

Personally, I would have preferred to hear a cardiologist detail the detrimental effects of a build up of fatty deposits on the heart rather than hear a vacuous psychotherapist publicise his half-baked theory (the “Adonis syndrome”) about the significance of body-image in Western society. There was also a total absence of a discussion of the implications of a population developing increasing rates of diabetes and other ailments as a consequence of obesity levels, but Ann would no doubt accuse me of being too fixated on the physical.

Widdecombe waddled around completely unable to grasp why some people might be so fixated on body-image, as might be expected from someone who’s never had to try and get laid in life. This made for uncomfortable viewing when seeing her interview an unfortunate woman whose plastic surgery had gone wrong, Widdecombe barely able to contain her ‘I told you so!’ expression. Her later confrontation with a cosmetic surgeon (“you trade in vanity!) was almost as memorable as her incredulity at “designer vaginas!” (Me too. It’s hard to believe that some women are going for the Kidman nose and the Widdecombe snatch.)

Granted, the continued pursuit of an unobtainable physical ideal is not the most rational course for people to pursue but, being a fully paid-up member of the God squad, Widdecombe should be more aware than most of how the irrational can inform people’s beliefs.

But getting underneath the ‘outer crust’ of the program, Widdecombe’s real concern is not there’s too much fat in your diet or too many glossy magazines on your coffee table but that there's not enough God. “As a Roman Catholic” (well she was Church of England until they ordained women) Ann turns “to the church for the meaning of life”, with “this life not the be all and end all”.

Well she’s rather fucked (for once) if it actually is.

So bring on Father Christopher Jamison, Abbot of Wirth, for a smug and conceited chat over whether life is “pointless” for the great unwashed trapped in a consumerist lifestyle and whether they’ve “lost direction”.

Well based on falling church congregations they’ve certainly lost the directions to certain places.

Apparently, “modern life does not provide the moral framework – it’s all about me, me, me”.

This from a member of the Conservative party?

Both Father Jamison and Ann concur that there’s a “big hole in too many people’s lives” (yes Ann: it’s called their mouths and is the reason they’re getting so fat), as if re-introducing the influence of the church into people’s lives would resolve everything.

Widdecombe probably would have been happier being born around several hundred years ago when religious clerics and their superstitious dogmas influenced the decisions of the day, and in the absence of modern sewerage systems would stick their corpulent backsides out of the privy window and defecate onto the street.

The fluidity of modern life and the bewildering array of lifestyle choices filling the void since the collapse of religious institutions have perplexed many, as displayed by Ann in her challenge to a spa therapist as to “how a hand massage raises your spiritual awareness?” The therapist’s answer of “we’re all different and that’s the beauty of life” was more worthy of an Amen than Ann’s intolerant approach to views she doesn’t share (i.e. the majority of the population’s).

But, to humour Ann for a moment, I thought I’d post a couple of before and after photos to emphasise the dangers in concentrating too much on the ‘outer crust’:

Before makeover

After makeover

So people today aren't focussing enough on inner beauty? Methinks the lady protests too much.

Comments

"Marrakech – Just like Camden Market."

2006-09-07T12:26:04+02:00

Peaches Geldof's Beginner's Guide to Islam.
C4. 11.00 pm. Tuesday 5 September.

If anyone needs their beauty sleep then it’s TKK. But if C4 thought they’d escape a TV Tanning for Peaches Geldof’s Beginners Guide to Islam by sticking her on at 11pm they were much mistaken. So face-pack applied and Horlicks at the ready I parked myself in front of the box to watch her address the defining spiritual question of our age: shopping or praying – which is best?

Before I start whipping Peaches (minus the cream), I have to mention something I didn’t think possible: a likeable Geldof. The real star of the program was Pixie, sadly only featured very briefly at the start. Despite looking (and sounding) like a young Ann Widdecombe, in those brief on-screen moments she managed to convey a charm that suggests having the surname of Geldof doesn’t automatically mean you empty a room just by ~~booking a concert in it~~ walking into it.

Unfortunately, it seems the next generation Geldof we’re going to be throwing shoes at the telly whenever they’re on is Peaches, as this is now the third show she’s fronted, which means she’ll be doing Newsnight before we know it.

Peaches, at least momentarily, showed herself to be in touch with the viewer by noting “I’m probably the last person in the world you’d expect to be presenting something like this”. Well apart from the Pope, or Nick Griffin, she’s correct in that respect: having a wannabe Sloane ranger to present a guide to Islam is not the most obvious choice. What next? Abu Hamza’s guide to nightclubbing?

Rather than Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, Peaches takes the Marrakech express, which she informs us is “just like Camden market”. Well not really, at least not if you’re trying to score opium in a hurry. The first twenty minutes of the program were spent getting right to the heart of the Islamic experience with devout eighteen-year old Nadira, which boiled down to Nadira trying to find a jilbāb in the market that Peaches will actually wear. It was somewhat rich for her to be sneering at what was on offer considering this is someone who’ll wear green leggings to a party and allow herself to be photographed in them.

Eventually she finds something to wear, but not without complaining how oppressed she feels wearing something so unfashionable, and how baggy and shapeless the ~~program~~ jilbāb is making her look. Sorry, Peaches, but it appears there’s a dresscode for paradise as well as for parties. However, this doesn’t stop the Marrakech men from shouting “Fatima” (or was it “fatous”?) as she walked by. Despite being informed by Nadira that Fatima was a wife of Mohammed, Peaches is unable to take the cultural compliment adding it was all “nice, but just a tiny bit pervy”. Maybe she’d have felt more at home if they’d wolf-whistled and bellowed “tits out” instead?

After junking the jilbāb (with an aside to the camera of “do I have to wear this for long” – yes, if you don’t want a bloody good stoning), Peaches is off to check out an arranged marriage, where the Muslim women are dressed more to her taste and “shaking their booty”. Hilariously, Peaches’ critique of arranged marriages leads to her being ejected from the party, much to her chagrin. Sadly they didn’t show the bit where she must have bawled “do you know who I am?! My dad organised Live fuckin’ Aid!" TKK’s advice: get used to it luv: I can see this experience being the first of many.

Peaches is clearly ignorant of the custom that, at any wedding, even if the bride looks like a bag of spanners and the bridegroom is trying to bed a bridesmaid, you err on the side of tact and shut up about contentious conjugal issues. I don’t blame the 38-year old bridegroom from ejecting Geldof considering she was trying to put ideas into his bride’s head (about twenty years his junior) about the feasibility of arranged marriages. Considering the divorce rate in the Western world maybe we’re not the best society to lecture on what makes a stable marriage, and considering her parents’ activities she certainly isn’t.

The remainder of the program sees Peaches failing to appreciate the more ascetic side of the spiritually devout, whinging about having get up at six o’clock and observing that “to be a good Muslim it helps if you’re a morning person”. Yes, it also helps if you have to work for a living as well. We get a dose of her singing Elvis with a taxi driver, proving she’s inherited her father’s singing talent (i.e. she’s shit). She also proves a more appropriate presenter than, say, Jeremy Paxman (or “Jezza” as Peaches calls him) by asking a trainee Imam if there were any “sexy Fatimas” about the place he fancied. That really was the question we all wanted her to ask. Not that Peaches seemed to be convinced by his lifestyle, judging “four years learning the Koran (to be) a waste of your life”, especially when you can just read Islam For Dummies, which she does later on.

A trip for some mountain meditation is Peaches’ “worst nightmare” as she’s “scared of heights but we’re on a fuckin’ mountain”. When asked what she meditated about she was at least honest enough to confirm what we’d already guessed: shopping. Later on she finds the ceremonial slaughter of a ram contrary to her ethics as a vegetarian, although if it was being killed to make a nice handbag she’d probably not whine as much. Her deep concern for animals is later shown as she asks whether their “donkeys had sex with horses”.

And, as in all these culture-clash programmes, there has to be a lesson learnt at the end. Peaches has discovered that “not all Muslims are psychotic fundamentalists” (er, does this mean before filming she’d assumed they all were?) and “it was nice to get somewhere spiritual and think about my life. (pause) That was deep.” Well at least for you it. It’s quite ironic that the daughter of Bob “gimme your money so I can save ~~my career~~ the Third World” Geldof is such a spiritually vacuous consumerist bore. And being a teenager doesn’t excuse her either.

Having an egotistical sulky seventeen-year old present a program inevitably leads to a superficial slant on any topic, not that C4 were exactly taking it seriously seeing as they had an advert from Nuts in the middle of it. Who it was aimed at I’m not certain, apart from smart-ass reviewers in the mood for harpooning a whale stuck in a swimming pool. If this was aimed at other ignorant teenagers then surely it should have been on earlier in the evening, and it was hardly the most comprehensive introduction to the subject, bordering on the stereotypical at times. The only thing that scares me more than another Peaches presented programme is one being made by an Islamic TV company who film her going about her daily London life, leading their viewers to the conclusion that the average Western citizen is this spiritually bankrupt and shallow.

Or maybe they could just show horses fucking donkeys instead.

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Bring back the pornographer-in-chief

2006-08-24T12:44:02+02:00

Looks like the space-hopping creative types at C4 and ITV have been going into air slamdunking overdrive based on their upcoming autumn schedules. ITV are promising to revive their ~~ad revenues~~ fortunes by rolling out the ‘stars’, namely Ant & Dec, Simon Cowell and Helen Mirren. Now I can’t think where they might have plucked those names from. C4 is promising such highlights as Ian Wright’s Supersize Kids, where he attempts to get fat kids to stop stuffing and start huffing and puffing themselves into shape (un-supersize me, anyone?); they also have the mouth-watering Star Stories, which promises to take the piss out of such stars as Jude Law, Boy George and George Michael. Completely unnecessary programming, seeing as just by continuing to exist these three are already taking the piss out of themselves on a second by second basis.

Granted, this could possibly be BBC bias in revealing their rivals’ schedules to be bereft of ideas and, frankly, complete dog shit, but based on the evident idea re-tread you can’t blame the Beeb for bias.

ITV has been the televisual equivalent of the frontal lobotomy for as long as I can remember, but what the fuck has happened to C4? I don’t know if it’s just me, but C4 seems to have lost its edge ever since Mary Whitehouse snuffed it in 2001 and watched her last ever Polish arthouse documentary about existential meanderings and societal contradictions, which managed to pack in a surprisingly large amount of female nipples considering its philosophical premise.

It’s bad enough that the channel is ever more like the UK arm of HBO due to its dependence on American imports for peaktime programming, without thinking how long the next Big Brother series will run for next year. If the next one is as drawn out as BB7 then it risks there being more people who’ve been in the BB household than actually watch it on TV.

Reading through some of the planned programs for this autumn it’s hard to believe that C4’s original remit was to provide an alternative to mainstream viewing. The market for obscure Polish arthouse documentaries may well have bottomed out now teenage boys can readily access the Internet and get their knuckle-shuffle material elsewhere, but ever more celebrity programming masquerading as irreverence or lifestyle/health TV is about as welcome as bringing back TFI Friday, having Jim Davidson as co-host and making it four hours long.

I never thought I’d say this, but I find myself agreeing with Mary Whitehouse about C4’s offensive content, although if she was still alive I think we’d disagree over which programmes could be more accurately labelled a ‘wankfest’…

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Who doesn’t want to be a millionaire?

2006-08-22T12:04:25+02:00

The National Lottery Show - BBC1

A reliable indicator that something is rotten in the House of TKK is when I start buying lottery tickets. That I’ve signed up online for a standing order for the rest of the year says a lot about my current ~~overdraft~~ mood.

Now there’s no shortage of killjoys warning of the inevitable socioeconomic dislocation that results from the sudden influx of millions of pounds into the bank account. Fuck ‘em. I can appreciate the social alienation if you’re in your mid 50s and have been working the factory line all your life, but being a lottery winner at 30 seems the perfect time to hit the jackpot.

The opportunity while young to disown your family, go out with Kate Moss for a week, hang out on Roman Abramovich’s yacht and turn up to the school reunion in a suit made of gold is too much of a dream to pass on. Not to mention that with my newly acquired millions I’d be able to fulfil my ambition of being a backbench MP in a safe Tory seat, and being a thoroughly disreputable old cad to boot.

A far more compelling argument against the Lottery is the undeserving causes some of the money goes to, and after watching BBC 1’s Saturday night lottery show I have to agree. I’m totally supportive when I hear about a group of 30something women being funded by the Lottery so they can exhibit their placenta artwork, but I draw the line at the National Lottery benefiting the likes of Dale Winton.

The show itself is a complete wasted opportunity and hardly the Dionysian spectacle it deserves to be. After all, we are marking the moment when some lucky bastard becomes a multi-millionaire. The show could be lines of dancing girls, Ant & Dec juggling swords, pyrotechnics galore. Instead we get a piss-poor quiz show presented by Dale Winton. Which drags on and on. I’m all for a bit of foreplay, but this is nothing less than gratuitous prick-teasing. Just get to the goddamn money shot! If I want to see a lameass quiz show with a camp host I’d watch the Camp Quiz Network on Sky Channel 7494442.

Finally, the main draw started, and fuck me if the first two numbers didn’t happen to be from my own sextet. At this point my heart pounded as I visualised myself as the tweed wearing Member of Parliament for Buckinghamshire-on-the-Foxhunt, whipping animal rights campaigners at the weekends and siring a whole horde of bastard children with the downstairs cooks.

Unfortunately for my future constituents, the next five numbers were not ones I’d chosen. If I’d had a ticket I would have ripped it up at this point, but as I’d purchased it online I had to make do with ripping up my degree certificate.

And when you’ve just missed out on your ultimate fantasy, the last thing you want to see is Dale Winton’s fat face grinning at you from your TV. I must make a point of releasing the hounds should I ever see him at one of my future country parties…

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Trisha – God save the underclass

2006-08-10T14:53:30+02:00

Television these days seems to be the next stage in the war against the terrors. Police, Parliament, the press and now TV have united in the campaign to install RESPECT! into the feckless bastards. If the underclass thought having a kosher TV license meant they could watch the box in peace then think again.

Years of watching Rikki, Jeremy, Jerry, Montel et al have led to my becoming desensitised with the plight of the underclass, although occasionally I wipe away the odd ~~biscuit crumb~~ tear when watching from the comfort of my bed. Continually railed against for representing all that’s fucked in society, it’s worth remembering that the underclass are not responsible for Enron, the Poll Tax, the Iraq war, al-Queda, the congestion charge, arms to Israel, arms to Hezbollah, or the Beatles splitting up.

Eerily in step with the present Government’s surveillance culture, Trisha excels in the mish-mash of the scientific and the psychobabble these shows love: polygraphs (lie ‘detectors’) DNA tests and a body language ‘expert’ are now as prominently featured on the show as the bad teeth and trackie bottoms.

Apart from the DNA test, (always worth checking to see if the DNA in question is of human origin), why such dubious methods as the polygraph are employed is beyond me. When you have an episode called "Loverat partner shagged my sister and she fuckin’ loved it!", then you don’t need a polygraph to tell you that the bloke on stage might well be a two-timing wanker.

Most of the real life dilemmas on Trisha are depressingly similar, although one I recently saw had me reaching for the antidepressants.

Sister B wanted a drop a sprog, but didn’t appear to have a regular partner(s) to help her out. Sister A generously suggested a sperm donation from her partner to help Sister B get pregnant, which seemed like the sisterly thing to do. There was just one problem with the arrangement:

The delivery method employed to transfer the sperm from Sister A’s partner to Sister B.

Rather than a five knuckle shuffle, a petri dish and a turkey baster, Sister A’s partner had decided on the conventional route to impregnating Sister B. And who could blame him: ejaculating onto a petri dish is just so degrading for a man.

Now Sister A must have been either incredibly confident of her partner’s virility, or a bit thick, because she didn’t have a problem with this as she assumed Sister B would be up the duff after just one session in their caravan.

Surprisingly enough, 20+ times later Sister B still didn’t seem to be any closer to getting pregnant. But practice does make perfect.

Now the men on Trisha always merit a description, if only for further evidence of the sheer injustice in the world today. Here I am going through a sexual drought which I can only attribute to global warming, and some bastard is leaving his lawn sprinkler on overnight on not just one but two sisters. They really should impose a hose-pipe ban on these people.

To totally rub it in, the Romeo in question looked like Hulk Hogan, minus the steroids and the suntan. Now if there was a part of the Hulkster I was going to emulate, it probably wouldn’t be the haircut. Yes to the cocaine habit, the tan and the yellow wrestling pants, but a definite no to the haircut.

Just as I thought I had enough diazepam to get me through the show, on came the Hulkster’s daughter (did I mention he was twice as old as the sisters he was screwing?). If Sister A wanted another good reason why her partner was not the best person as the sperm donor, besides the fact it might complicate her relationships with her partner and sister, Daughter of Hulk was it.

Amazingly, Daughter of Hulk (or DOH for short) defended her feckless dad. I know he gave her life, but that was twenty years ago.

As ever, Trish thought a healthy dose of psychobabble would save the day and started talking about the Hulkster needing to respect ‘boundaries’ between the two sisters. Frankly, it wasn’t boundaries they needed between them all but borders.

As I cracked open another Tenants Super, in a moment of clarity, I remembered that this was someone’s real life and that after the credits rolled, for these people, if not for me, the five inch roots, poor dentition, hurt, secrets and lies would continue.

But as the producers of these shows say, they will be counselled after the show. Well, they’ll get their taxi fare home.

You don’t need to be a psychology graduate to see these people need more than that. They need Prozac, Valium, FSH, CBT, ECT, DLA, an NHS dentist and their roots done. Possibly a more equal society would help a bit as well.

And not to mention a little bit more ‘respect’ from the rest of us.

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No more Heroes any more

2006-08-08T10:54:10+02:00

My Hero. BBC 1. Friday August 4. 8.30 pm.

Anyone who’s read my blog on a regular, or even infrequent, basis would be of the opinion that being cynical and disliking stuff comes natural to me. Which it does. But, occasionally, there are some people who I find it hard to whip up much enmity for, even though they probably merit it. Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis are good examples of this, ‘comedians’ who’d I’d normally want to despatch with rapier-like putdowns or even a rapier, if I hadn’t handed mine in at the last knives amnesty.

But the truth is, until now, I just haven’t had the heart to do it. Whenever I see them it’s like they metamorphasize into puppies in a pet shop window, and I’m compelled to give them a doggy biscuit and pat them on the head.

However, after watching the latest episode of My Hero, not only do I feel more than ready to put them down, but I could probably ‘put down’ a few pups while I’m at it.

For this series Ardal O’Hanlon has been replaced by James Dreyfus, a casting choice that Father Dougal would acknowledge could only have been made by a feckin’ eejit. I appreciate that Dreyfus might not want to get typecast in roles playing an incredibly camp gay man but, let’s be honest, it’s the kind of performance that does seem to come quite naturally to him. I don’t think Dreyfus could do straight even after he snuffs it and rigor mortis set in. But taking this casting decision a little further, does this mean that Robson Green and Gary Kemp are going to feel they are being typecast as always playing white men in TV and start auditioning for Jamaican Yardies in The Bill? If they did decide to shake up their typical script choices they’d manage this ethnicity transition more convincingly than Dreyfus does playing it straight. Rock Hudson he ain’t.

But the choice of casting wouldn’t be such a problem for the episode if it’s central theme didn’t revolve around Dreyfus’s character’s attempts to pick up a woman. Having no success with the woman (a case of art imitating life), he notices that his object of desire likes cats and is a big pussy lover (unlike Dreyfus) and decides that if you can’t beat ‘em, then join then, and drinks a serum another character has devised which allows him to develop cat-like tendencies.

Therefore, the entire episode revolved around setups where a human does stereotypical cat behaviours, which, of course, are automatically funnee, like coughing up furballs, bringing in dead birds in his mouth and licking his posterior. Actually, the latter didn’t happen as it was pre-watershed, but you get the picture. It’s a pretty lazy plot device for getting laughs, much like the assumption that watching a celebrity do mundane things (like riding a horse) makes it automatically entertaining because a celebrity is doing it. Maybe if the woman had been a dog lover then the premise might have had more legs (so to speak), what with dogs being natural entertainers (unlike cats), but cats are just not funny. Unless they’re in microwaves.

Anyhow, the episode was predictable stuff: Dreyfus gets initial success with his pussy-esque nature until he goes too far with the dose of cat serum and ends up living in the house of an old spinster. Actually, I made the last bit up, but when you do chase after women who like cats then that’s the type of woman you end up with (real straight men know this to be the case).

But what does all this have to do with Punt & Dennis? Well, just as I thought the lame cat concept couldn’t get worse, for some inexplicable reason Hugh Dennis made an appearance in the episode dressed up in drag, because when a man dresses up in drag its automatically funnee. Unless Hugh Dennis does it, at which point no man again can ever do a drag act again and be funny as it’ll only give me flashbacks of Hugh Dennis dressed up in tights and makeup. *Shudders*

So, essentially, the entire episode had a floridly camp gay man playing a straight character pretending to be a cat to get a woman and is treated for his pussy-addiction by a man dressed in drag. Only Dreyfus and Dennis could take this material and render it so bland and unfunnee. The Beeb really does need to put My Hero out of its misery, because right now the only thing they’re succeeding in doing with this show is putting its Friday night audience to sleep.

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Love Island – where celebrity (not literally) eats itself.

2006-08-07T09:38:43+02:00

Celeb fetishism: how low can we go? Pretty far down, it would seem.

Being 30, I might not be totally down with the kids, but who the fuck are these people? And I’m talking about the presenters as well as the contestants.

Initially, I thought Les Dennis had had a stroke due to his funny accent and not so funny quips, until I checked my TV Times and found out it wasn’t Les but someone called Patrick Kielty.

Like I said, who the fuck are these people?

As for Fearne Cotton, I thought nobody could be more of an inane fuckwit than Jo Whiley.

Ms Whiley, I owe you an apology.

I realise Ant and Dec can’t present every show on ITV, but if there ever was an argument for human cloning it’s watching Kielty and Cotton in full effect. I assume that one is supposed to be funny and the other a looker, but which one? I’ve tried all possible combinations without getting a match. Is Fearne related to Dot Cotton? Based on her skin the answer would appear to be yes. If she ever needs a skin graft, Madonna's hands should provide a perfect match.

ITV may think they’re saving a format from ridicule by dropping the word ‘celebrity’ from the show’s title, but they shouldn’t have stopped there. Based on the contestants’ lecherous activities, ITV could have safely dropped the word 'love' as well as 'celebrity' from the title. Love may be an infectious disease, but so is chlamydia, and that’s more likely to be going round the contestants than anything Cupid would approve of.

But getting a fitting sobriquet for the show would also require the letters ‘sland’ being dropped from 'island', leaving a much more fitting title based on the egomania of the contestants: I (as in me, myself and).

The idle rich used to be classy. Now they’re just emotionally and intellectually-arrested buffoons. And we can’t have poor people being deprived of their role in society. Maybe the idle rich need the threat of higher taxes/estate death duties hanging over their heads (or a guillotine) to make them behave in a more entertaining fashion. Watching adults bicker like kids is as irritating as watching kids bicker like, er, kids. At least children can be ~~smacked and sent to bed~~ made to sit on the naughty step and not have any tea, which got me thinking as to how the Love Island concept could redeem itself.

Taking advantage of the fact that no one seems to know who these people are (therefore they won’t be noticed when they go missing) and they’re on an island, I would suggest livening things up by gradually fading out their food rations until they’re forced to turn on each other in a cannibalistic frenzy worthy of 1930s Soviet Russia, until there is just one contestant left to supervise the barby.

That way, if celebrity is going to eat itself, it really will be in a literal way.

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