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Authors: James Donaghy

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BOOK: Television Can Blow Me
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Most Unjustly Culled Show: Bodies, BBC3

Life is unfair and TV is never less than an accurate reflection of life. Take Paul McCartney - about to get abandoned and taken for 40 squllion in the inevitable divorce by his lunatic wife. Yes. Paul McCartney - faithful and loyal to Linda for 30 years despite being the pretty one out of The Beatles (and therefore having the proverbial key to the pie shop whenever he damn well pleases).

Then on the other hand there’s the serial womaniser, wife beating smackhead John Lennon. Whose dick do you think women were women trying to suck? Was it the loyal, prettier faithful Paul? Fuck out of here.

And Bodies doesn’t get a third series. Try ‘splaining that.

Documentary tards
:
deviants, wackjobs and Peaches Geldof

What should be the flickering screened embodiment of television's duty to inform and entertain - the documentary - is too often a playground for mentally subnormal parasitic attention seekers of all hue. Trying to fathom the depths of vacuity within Peaches Geldof and sending in professional cabbage Fearne Cotton led us into dark territory but it was Fix My Fat Head that really took the soggy biscuit for stupid, slobby, worthless journalism with a hog for a host, subject and narrator.

The bottom line is that there is a surplus of documentaries and not enough authentic subjects to justify them. Narcissist tools need to be targeted, neutralised and asphyxiated - then we can hear the grown-ups talk.

My Penis And I

We all have our demons and our ways of dealing with them. Film-maker Lawrence Barraclough has dealt with his tiny penis by making a film about it and broadcasting it to 1.5 million people. I think that takes big balls (or maybe they just look big next to his wiener?)

Whether
My Penis and I
shows a remarkable faith in his fellow man or a need to be the centre of attention is unclear. Either way, he's certainly putting it on the chopping block with this high-risk strategy. Would you really want every girl in Britain knowing your secret?

That's not an immediate issue for Lawrence as some lucky lady has already snapped him up. They've been together for nine years but the girl in question takes some persuading to appear in the film. “I don’t want be thought of as the girlfriend of the guy with the small dick.” she explains. I forget her name as she wasn’t sexually attractive. Let’s just call her “the girlfriend of the guy with the small dick”.

Lawrence wonders what it is about penis size that so obsesses men. “So, I’m going to Birmingham to talk with my dad about his penis”. There’s a sentence I hope I never have to say again.

He first approaches his mother and there’s a very strange creepy scene where he talks to her about his father’s penis. “What did you think when you first saw it?” His mother replies “That’s personal”. I should bloody think so too. The Oedipal complications of this scene would require a sturdier stomach than mine to untangle.

Mammy proudly informs him that he comes from a long line of small cocks, so he quizzes his father about his experiences in the army, changing in front of his well-hung comrades. “My dong wasn’t as big as some of the guys there” dad reveals. Thus, the film brilliantly establishes early on that Some Boys Are Bigger Than Others.

Lawrence’s investigations then takes him uptown - doing the nightlife with five girls who all tell him it’s all in his head, it’s what you do with it that counts and other fatuous phoney baloney. Then he meets two pissed scuttlers, unaware of his film-making, who proudly tell him “of COURSE it matters”. There’s always someone.

The girlfriend of the guy with the small dick finally allows herself to be filmed and she takes a phlegmatic “there there” approach to the issue. You can tell she really wants to be dicked down by the type of monster that Aerial Telly be packing but she’d want to get those teeth sorted out before that happens.

A trip to visit Cynthia Plastercaster (the famous groupie who takes plaster-casts of rock stars erect penises) sees her take a cast of Lawrence’s flaccid penis in one of the most pointless scenes I can remember. The suspicion that Lawrence just likes travelling around and talking about himself is difficult to shift.

He returns to school where he was bullied for his schlong deficiency. There didn’t seem to be much point to this outing and the school changing room door seemed to agree, refusing to admit him entry. So there we stood in mute contemplation outside the door of the location where some of the cruellest jibes may have been thrown. Not quite the Berlin Wall footage is it?

He finds some kind of closure by visiting a Manhattan support group for men with small penises. Once he knows he’s not alone, cooped up in an ivory tower of needle-dickdom he perks up a hell of a lot. The girlfriend of the guy with the small dick is happy because he’s happy. Their relationship improves because he learns to love himself.

And yet she seems kind of bored with the whole thing. I know the feeling.

The verdict on My Penis And I:
Like jumping over buses, brave but ultimately pointless.

Marks out of 10:
6

Fix My Fat Head

In the end, the self-pity always comes through. Once the self-deprecation, tales of previous diets and bad observational stand-up culled from 45 abortive open mic nights are over, the whining will begin. Every single documentary about a fat person who apparently can’t lose weight is inevitably drawn into a whirlpool of ‘poor me’. And man alive does this tub of guts know how to whine? Hannah Jones, 36 years and 22 stones of wobbly narcissism writes a column about being fat. Not that she is self obsessed or anything but she believes that her gunt is so fucking important that in addition to her weekly first person waaaah-waaaah shtick she has spent six months investigating psychological treatment for obesity. Fix My Fat Head she cries. Because it just has to be psychological.

Like all fat people, Hannah is a slob. She looks like shit, feels like it, acts like it but is too lazy to do anything about it. Every effort she makes is a token one. She’s a never-ending source of feeble excuses. We should get one thing clear from the off: fat people feel no more hunger than the rest of us. They’ve just adopted the strategy of talking about it more.

Hannah has tried every diet going. Well hasn’t every fat bastard you’ve ever met? They’ve tried Atkins, good carb, low-fat, Cambridge, Beverly Hills, cabbage soup, Dr Phil, Rosemary Conley and Aerial Telly’s personal favourite Neanderthin, a diet based around that of Palaeolithic man (Hannah passed this when she heard woolly mammoth was not on the menu). Yes, she’s tried every diet going. Tell you what though, chubby: you ever tried the consuming fewer calories than you burn off diet? It’s got a 100% success rate. No? Colour me stunned.

As is often the case, Orca has a slim borefriend who is half decent looking, who could certainly do a lot better than her. She’s not even got a good face and the rest of her is shite. Whatever, this chump supports her as she tries Lighter Life, a weight-loss programme that focuses on the dieter’s emotional relationship with food; Susan Hepburn, hypnotherapist to the stars who aided Lily Allen’s crash diet that saw her plummet from a size 14 to a size 12 and a psychotherapist who finds out she was sometimes lonely as a child and that food was her very best friend. Bombshell.

So the six months come to a close and Hannah proves beyond all reasonable doubt that the psychological approach is the only humane and effective way for people who are addicted to food (because it is an addiction, it really is) by shedding literally stones of weight. Oh wait, no she doesn’t. Because the abysmal pleb has actually
put on
weight during her self-pity orgy. One semicircuit of the Sun to waste our time and eat more pies offering no insight, no closure and no weight loss.

Hannah has once again “tried” everything. But the stumbling block is always the eating less part. The moment she realises the current program she’s on involves being less of a hog she pulls a face like Les Dawson’s Ada Sidebottom and wobbles out of the room, jowls a-judder. “OK, I haven’t lost any weight” she says breezily “but maybe, just maybe - I’m finally on the right track”. And thus finishes one of the most worthless documentaries ever commissioned. It monumentally fails in everything it set out to do. It is catastrophically stupid and lazy. But seriously: what you expect when you employ a fat bastard? That’s what they do, that’s what they are.

Successful living is about sacrifice. You can’t have your pie and eat it. Grown-ups understand this. But people like Fat Hannah think they’re entitled to everything without any effort. She plays lip service to the idea of self-denial but she never had any intention of going without fatty food, reducing her portions or exercising more. Not for a heartbeat, never in a million years, even with cameras following her every move. Because this is not about weight loss, it’s about Hannah being a self obsessed twat. It’s about her being acknowledged as the brave, plucky, self-deprecating, have-a-go hero she’s categorically not. This is a flabby documentary about a flatulent fraud with an insatiable hunger to talk about herself. She can fuck right off.

The verdict on Fix My Fat Head:
As futile as buying a gym membership.

Marks out of 10:
4

Guys And Dolls

The commodification of human intimacy is an inevitable by-product of advanced capitalism. Everything has a price tag after all. And with most jobs and lifestyles being bereft of fulfilment, joy or any prospect of emotional connection with your fellow man, it’s a wonder we’re not all on the game. The existence of the real doll subculture should therefore only come as a surprise to those head-in-the-sand Pollyannas who think there’s a boy out there for every gal and a gal for every boy. All you suckers out there need to know just one thing: there IS a girl out there for you. The trouble is she’s already slept with Aerial Telly and the prospect of dating a man like you is one too awful for her to contemplate. She’s had Prime Beef and now you’re going to try and feed her Quorn substitute? What kind of “man” are you?

Five’s Guys And Dolls gave us a glimpse into the lives of some doll fuckers and was commendably matter-of-fact about it. Perhaps feeling that the subject matter was strange enough and not in need of sensationalising, they gave their subjects a fair run at explaining themselves without sneaky editing, phoney set-ups and other such documentary dirty tricks. For those of you who missed the Real Dolls memo God sent (and you’re in good company there) they are lifelike rubber replicas of attractive young women who are purchased, dressed and fucked by slightly less lifelike men

BOOK: Television Can Blow Me
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