Drinking With The Girls

Cherry Healy fronts a moderately entertaining documentary, if you can call it that, in which she seeks to discover ‘the real truth about women and booze’. She succeeded in finding out that women drink booze and little else, but still, this was a half-decent hours worth of entertainment from BBC Three. Better than My Life As An Animal or Snog, Marry, Avoid anyway. Mainly because it was this new Cherry Healy character fronting it and not that vain hair-do woman Dawn Porter the channel usually relies upon for insight-free docu-pieces.

Opening with a montage of Daily Mail headlines about bingeing and a few helpful shots of girls falling over onto tarmac, we also witnessed Cherry puking violently into a latrine, a roman-shower shot we’d ultimately see repeated a few times throughout the show’s runtime – sometimes from different angles so we could consume the deeper meaning inherent in the act.

Cherry outlined her quest: to go out boozing with female drinkers from different demographics.

20-Somethings
Hitting the road and arriving at Blackpool, Cherry meets Leanne and her pals, all slightly put-upon young women, Leanne a single mother with quite obvious signs of depression – that aspect of her dipsomania only covered in one three sentence interview. There was no time for it, as the Editor needed to kicked in with his procession of images framing what were once called ladettes throwing booze down their gullets, rubbing their groins against retarded males with manga haircuts and ultimately falling over car bonnets with their tutus round their ankles. The experience makes Cherry cry for a couple of seconds, then move on to her next night out.

Underage
14 year old Rio and her pal explain that they like to get pissed in the park after drinking heavily at home. Cherry joins them in Rio’s bedroom where they down what they’ve nicked from Mum’s cabinet through a straw. Impressively, they manage to quaff Lambrini, neat vodka, neat Bacardi and a glug of Baileys before asking Mum if they can make it home for half ten rather than the Draconian ten pm curfew that’s currently in place. Cherry explains that this is different to how she was at their age. The Lambrini would be Pinot Grigio and she’d buy it with money from her ample allowance, back in her day. I’m making presumptions there, as I have every right to do.

Students
Where’s that? Only Sheffield Hallam University! Your host Swine’s place of higher education and the scene of his worst period of alcohol abuse is where Cherry ends up next and horrible, cloudy memories surface in this viewer. To make it worse, Cherry was taken to Shag – an evening at the Sheffield Leadmill that seems to actively attempt to murder attendees with pints at 80p, double vodka and red bull at a quid and two-for-one alchopops. I was too busy trying to repress images of myself rolling around in my own vomit to actually absorb any of this part of the show.

30 Somethings
A civil partnership was the next destination of choice as Cherry went to a lesbian marriage between two tattooed ladies. A good time was had by all, because 30 somethings tend to know their limits a little better than those a decade younger.

Mums and Mid-lifers
Even more responsibly, the Mums in the next sequence managed to run functioning households before going out dancing and returning home slightly tipsy. The Editor must have been furious by now at the lack of upskirt shots he could throw in, accompanied by that song that goes ‘here come the girls!’
Single widow Ann was also well-behaved, despite drinking a hell of a lot of liquor and starting every day at 11.30 in the morning, but that’s because she’s old enough to pace herself.

Grannies
And finally, Cherry took a tipple with the Red Hat Ladies of Torquay. These old birds went on coach trips to taste wine and were less able to binge because of their need to spend a penny every five minutes. Jean, the ringleader, was an admirably batty old bird and more than likely the apple of many a Torquay-based older gent’s eye. And who can blame the silver foxes when there’s mature totty like Jean wandering around the UK’s South coast?

The documentary eventually wore itself out as it went along, parallel to how the advancing years of the participants caused their hunger for the grog to dissipate in time. From the outright chaos of kiddie-drinking to the measured, cheeky imbibing of the older generation, the process off slowing down was bound to happen before the show ground itself to a halt.

So, to keep the tempo up right to the bitter end, that shot of Cherry hawking her colon out of her mouth thanks to too many double vodka and cokes was distributed equally throughout the show to prick the interest when the ageing lushs got tiresome.

And just when you thought it was all over, right at the end and before the closing credits…

The Hoff: When Scott Came To Stay

After passing by the gawping gaze of popular culture, certain products, people and artefacts are all but forgotten a couple of years down the line.

Tab Clear – anyone remember that?

Others endure and simply never go away, like the indestructible, muscular, maternal cyborg that is Madonna. Or Marmite. But then there are those that are reborn, years later either in a slightly different, updated guise, like when La Roux appeared from some musical time-travel laboratory sporting that bloke from The Flock of Seagulls’ haircut.

And finally there are those who are resurrected purely for irony’s sake. David Hasselhoff’s a strong and recent example of how the internet can regenerate a career through the power of net-based in-jokes, a backlog of toe-curlingly embarassing publicity shots, memories of idiosyncratic German superstardom, a silly name and heaps and heaps of misplaced nostalgia.

Characters who can succumb to this kind of webular renaissance – ask Rick Astley if you don’t believe me – have usually had a period in which they were taken seriously, followed by a slow or sudden decline. After the glory years of Knightrider, Hoff produced the kitsch tit-fest that was Baywatch and somewhere during its second series and despite its success, Mitch Buchanan’s sagging pecs turned the viewers off. The Hoff sank into the background while co-star Pamela thrust her bazonkas into the limelight. The love affair with Dave was over and The Hoff became an embarrassment – and a stark reminder of 80s and early 90s weirdness with it.

Then, cunningly latching onto the internet frenzy that erupted when pictures like this, this and this started being emailed back and forth in offices nationwide, Scott Mills got the whiff of a movement and set about capitalising on it. He encouraged the listeners to his Radio 1 show to buy Hasselhoff’s new release – Get Into My Car – a novelty single by any other name. And off the back of Mills’ ironic support, the single hit number three and put The Hoff back into the public domain – compounded by a stint on America’s Got Talent and some Youtube cheeseburgering.

So now we arrive post-regeneration and after a ton of bad press, at LivingTV’s The Hoff: When Scott Mills Came To Stay. Shot in the style of one of JLT’s Bring Back… shows, this time we were told that Mills has always been a massive fan of Dave’s, and that this has been an unwavering support that his lasted his lifetime. The suspicion is that this is something of a porky. Perhaps he loved Knightrider as a child, but I bet he jumped ship like the rest of us during Baywatch.

So the opening fifteen minutes are somewhat redundant but what follows is actually – and I say this despite myself – bloody entertaining. Even though there’re far too many Mills-to-camera moments in which Scott unnecessarily shares his feelings regarding being around his idol, Hasselhoff himself has veered so far into Los Angeles self parody that the neutral can simply sit back and wonder at quite how unhinged the great man is.

He calls his office his Hoffice. A cup of coffee becomes a cup of Hoffee. He has a TV room half filled with VHS cassettes featuring archive footage of… well, guess who?

He has a room for all his German and Austrian gold discs. He’s trying to have his daughters record a single under the name The Hoff Drops. He has Hoff gag T shirts all around the house. The Hoff-based theme in his own abode never seems to end.

It’s totally unclear as to whether he’s into the joke and complicitly understands the affectionate mockery or whether he’s a deluded egomaniac blinkered by past success. You have to assume it’s a wired, confused mixture of the two.

Throughout, he’s unrelentingly hyper and, the minute Mills arrives, takes him off jet-skiing as if to prove some misguided point. Inevitably as he’s in his late 50s, Hoff falls off during the man-on-man watersports action and shakes himself up a bit. But there’s no time for tears as Jeremy Jackson – Hobie from Baywatch, commands The Hoff to fly to Vegas for a party.

The evening is a complete mess of Hoff running from one party scene to the next, not stopping for breath and denying Mills any one-on-one time. The entire sequence is composed of one trying to catch up with the other until, eventually, Mills loses him. When Hoff asks why Mills ditched him the next day he asks if his guest ‘found a girl’, making it abundantly clear that he doesn’t even know Mills’ sexual preference – so as a getting-to-know-you piece, we’re floundering at the 45 minute mark.

As the time runs down, we have the closest thing to a personal conversation we’re going to get as some acupuncture needles pierce the two of them during a heart to heart. But then it slowly becomes apparent that this is going to be a series.

An hour in the dizzying company of this enigmatic mess is one thing – but an entire series revolving around The Hoff and his life in Bel Air?

Surely that’s too much to ask of anyone?

Horizon: Why Do We Dream?

I woke up this morning in a cold film of panic. The second I awoke, I realised absolutely nothing had happening in the preceding dream that was in any way ultraviolent or depraved.

Usually I can set my clock by the fact that my dreamscape will involve outright butchery and gore-smashing  as I wander through it like a blood-spattered droid – all alongside a morally bankrupt attitude to libidinous activities. It keeps me grounded and acts as a counterweight to my conscious life – the bloodshed and perviness brilliantly balancing the mundanity of reality. So this sudden overnight change is disturbing.

Perhaps this means I’m bound for a murderous rampage? Maybe I’m going to wander down the street later today, my conscious mind tasked with getting me the papers whilst my subconscious is bent on carnage. I’ll probably end up slaughtering a puppy with my end flopping out of my fly. They’ll take me away, peel my scalp off and do experiments on my brain.

So – why do we dream?

Time for Horizon to ask ‘science’ again, despite the fact it couldn’t answer Why Thin People Aren’t Fat and couldn’t make its mind up (probably stoned) as to whether cannabis is the Evil Weed.

Puny science.

I always thought William Golding was right – that “sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind”. It’s just a load of fear, insecurity and desire coming out in a slew of meaningless, dirty thoughts. And it seems science isn’t much further ahead in its thinking. Despite people being hooked up to those neuro-sensors that look like sticky-tape and string attached all over a swimming trunked body, they haven’t got much further than the fact that we have nightmares at certain times of night and get depressed if we we wake up at certain times. And they pay scientists for this rubbish.

If I may, I suggest that this lack of a decent conclusion across the scientific board on Horizon so far this series is down to inaccuracies in the testing methodology. It seems ludicrous that we’re trying to work out if skunk is addictive by feeding it to mice – and we’re not likely to learn which bit of our grey-matter triggers wet dreams by sticking a chimp in a brain scanner.

So let us test on humans, damn it!

I’m not suggesting we round up volunteers. Only a moron would stick his hand up when asked if he fancied having a lobe-probe. And obviously it wouldn’t be fair to test on the underclasses – both from a humanitarian point of view and also pragamtically, considering they’re all preoccupied by drinking lager and raising staffordshire bull terriers and, as such, would provide uselessly biased responses.

Therefore, I conclude the only decent subjects are the supposed great and good. We could get Will Self and Stephen Fry strapped to chairs in isolation booths and stick metal sticks in their ears to see how certain words twist up their vocab glands. We could test spatial awareness by looking up Andy Murray’s mechanically dilated nose whilst giving him cumulatively more and more powerful electric shocks. We could test the very notion of celebrity by culling Calum Best, Chico and Vanessa Feltz and measuring the amount of tears the public weep.

Let us stride forward into a new age of scientific boundary – with fiendish grins on our faces, devilish murder in our hearts and metal sticks gripped in our fists.

The World’s Most Enhanced Woman And Me

Mark Dolan first arrived in the public eye on the Richard Taylor Interviews – a slightly amusing Channel 4 comedy stunt show in which he posed as the MD of a fictional company, then put hopeful interview candidates through a gruelling process of humiliating tasks. It was designed, I think, to prove that management speak was a load of guff – featuring footage of these upstarts in the days before The Apprentice discussing just how 110% they are, followed by the satisfying sight of yet another young pretender to the corporate throne making a right royal tit of themselves in the desperate hope of landing a £30k management team leader ‘role’.

So, a decent start to his TV career. But then things started to descend – as anyone who’s seen Balls of Steel will attest. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to do anything other than mention the title and remind folk that it was Dolan who gleefully presented it to get your gag-reflexes swinging.

After that, a stint sitting beside Nick Ferrari in the LBC studio, a punishment in itself, one would imagine. And now he bafflingly finds himself involved in an hour of good-slot Channel 4 TV every week. Without googling or scanning Wikipedia, one suspects Dolan has worked in production or commissioning before, so pitching himself a new show is as simple as telling Channel 4 what hours he can work. Otherwise there’s no way someone so monumentally untalented – either in front of the camera or coming up with concepts behind it – would get this much work. Otherwise there is simply no justice in the world.

This latest outing has been criticised by critics as a tasteless neo-freakshow and coming at it with fresh eyes, having not seen any of the last series, you can see exactly why. In The Most Enhanced Woman In The World, Dolan travels to America (where else?) to track down women who cater to the ‘big boob’ fetish. A dying breed (in some cases literally) since their wobbly bosomed heyday in the decadent 90s.

Dolan doesn’t say why he wants to meet ridiculously augmented women and he neglects to add a Louis Theroux style disclaimer at the start explaining that he’d like to know what these people are all about. He simply dives in there, like an over-enthusiastic public schoolboy, intent on fulfilling his pointless mission. Without any context for the brief, we’re left with a lanky moron going on a jolly to poke fun at the spiritually bereft.

Ho ho!

First he meets a big-boobed blonde who, since the softcore work dried up, recently made the move into hardcore. Her silent (and much younger) husband retrieves two implants from a carrier bag that she no longer fastens to herself because they’re too big and they leak – with the potential for the silicon to enter brain cells and the bloodstream, causing paralysis, brain damage and death. Despite her life choices, this one was quite aware of the inherent tragedy of her surgery. Without any suffering to poke his pointy stick at, Dolan cruised off to find something a little more perverse for the camera.

And he found it. Minka was, once upon a time, an adequately proportioned South Korean lady, doing normal things – like playing tennis and working in a mundane job, all the while with a normal set of dumplings – until Woody entered her country and her life. Woody swept her off her feet and dragged her to America where he persuaded her to stick implants the size of space-hoppers up her armpits so they could make millions of dollars.

Their household, as far as we could tell, was a loveless void where the big-boob obsessive kept his disfigured missus for two reasons. Firstly, so that he could live with a grotesquely adorned doll (that’s what she had become – all trace of personality wiped) and secondly so he could make money out of it. Dolan made steps towards obtaining an understanding of Minka, but so superficially that he needn’t have bothered. It was left to the viewer to use the scantest of evidence to piece together how this relationship worked. The devil is in the detail – owning seven small dogs might demonstrate that Minka is lonely, for example – but rather than go searching for more of this kind of stuff, Dolan just snorted and singgered his way through before committing the ultimate documentary-making sin.

The ‘judgement piece to camera’, where the presenter addresses the audience (or the cameraman), is a major mistake in this sort of television. Especially when the presenter judges the subject and offers his opinion. Notice how Theroux only talks to camera if he’s telling the cameraman to get out of the way, of if totally necessary to give a sense of time and place. Nick Broomfield also avoids it at all costs. This is why they get awards. They’re aware of what documentary actually is. Dolan, however, treats his audience with contempt and attempts to tell us what’s going on despite the fact we already know, and think he’s an arse for not being able to cope with it properly.

Finally, Dolan visits Brazil where Shayla was going for the world record in terms of the size of her waps. Shayla was immediately a sympathetic character, and Dolan initially appeared to make a connection. We were witness to tears and insecurity which came to a head in a scene on a beach, were Shayla admitted she had self-esteem issues due to a lost love, and then a shopping mall scene wherein Shayla hoovered up the curiosity of onlookers, mistaking it for love. There was a lot here that could have been said about the culture of celebrity. With a few more questions along those lines, we’d have got to the heart of Shayla. But Dolan couldn’t be arsed. He was too busy watching her balance her boobs on the table so she could take the weight off her spine.

When Shayla went for her record-breaking augmentation, instead of asking pertinent questions, Dolan stood like a spare prick at a wedding doing bugger all. He appeared to have lost all emotion in the face of truly troubling subject matter. It was obvious that he was in too deep and, without the charm, charisma of presence of mind to deal with it, what could have been quite a startling piece of insightful TV turned into the absolute opposite. Freakshow TV where the host becomes even freakier than his subjects by virtue of his ignorance.

The final piece to camera did nothing to rescue this nasty slice of nothingness. Dolan simply bailed, with words to the effect of ‘I’ve met the most enhanced woman in the world, and I wish I hadn’t’.

He’s all heart.

Nature Shock: Alien Ice Bear

I like nature programs – especially ones about weird animals. The opening credits hinted that I’d be seeing some pretty alarming stuff, making me really excited for things to get started, not just because the first episode was entitled ‘Alien Ice Bear’.

‘An alien bear?’ I thought. ‘Wicked!’

The program opened with a lot of reconstructions and talking heads. Apparently, some American businessman had gone off to shoot a Polar Bear and had ended up shooting something that wasn’t a Polar Bear. He got into a lot of trouble because he only had a license to shoot a Polar Bear.

Now, I should point out that I shoot things occasionally – rabbits mostly, and then I eat them – but the idea that anyone would be allowed to shoot a Polar Bear horrifies me. They’re rare and their habitat is rapidly shrinking, so we should be doing everything we can to protect them. This probably doesn’t involve letting American businessmen shoot them for shits and giggles.

The businessman shot the bear and posed for photos. The photos showed that this bear had black eyeliner on, so it wasn’t a Polar Bear. Teen Polar Bears don’t become goths to rebel, so this meant he’d bagged some other species. When you do shoot a Polar Bear you have to bring some bits back to show some Rangers so that they can be sure you shot it and not a moose or something.

At this point we got to listen to a CSI-type person waffling on about how they couldn’t tell what it was. A taxidermist also rambled on about how they had never seen anything like this before. We eventually got the point that he’d managed to accidentally shoot something even rarer than a Polar Bear.

After thirty minutes of these people saying ‘Gee wizz! We killed a unicorn!’ they dropped the bombshell that you can cross-breed Polar Bears with other bears. People used to do it in zoos all the time – those crazy Victorians, eh?

The bear, which I was starting to get bored of, was actually just a cross-breed and not that alien at all, really. Nobody had ever heard of a hybrid being born in the wild, so they’d ultimately proved that it could happen by shooting it. Great.

So, after an hour long program they had conveyed information that could be summed up in a paragraph of text.

Next week they’re covering some man-eating river monster that killed someone. They never found a body. I’m going to presume that the vicious monster that killed a person was a rock and go and read a book instead. Or shoot a Gorilla.

Cradle Snatcher & Proud

Seeing this show in the listings, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stomach it. I mean … Sue Perkins was doing the voice-over. Still, I’m nothing if not dedicated to my craft.

This is the latest offering in Virgin 1’s ‘… And Proud’ season and is obviously an attempt to cash in on the success of Channel Four’s recent run of highly-succesfull freakshow documentaries. My Husband is a 1987 Transit Van, and so on.

The title is self-explanatory. We met various couples, all with a wide age-difference between them, and found out what they thought and what society thought of their relationship. It’s encouraging to see that women these days have now achieved full equality-of-embarassment – there were just as many randy old women with their glasses steamed-up over young boys’ pecs as there were middle-aged men drooling over schoolgirls.

Ken is 44 and a children’s entertainer. His girlfriend, shy, timid Hannah is 17. They first met when she was best-friends with his daughter Nina and came to stay with them while she was moving schools. According to Ken, Hannah made the first move. Whether that move was made when she rolled a six and landed on Ken’s Park Lane hotel during a particularly important game of Monopoly was never mentioned. But once word got round that they were dating, his career as a children’s entertainer started to suffer and Ken and Hannah eventually had to move out of the area. I suppose it’s inevitable. Noone likes to think that their children’s entertainer is offering ‘extras’ and I dread to think what sort of material he was making his balloon animals out of.

In the past 40 years there has apparently been around a 20% increase in older women dating younger men. So, it was interesting to meet 62-year-old blonde MILF Wendy. Before bringing up your breakfast, you really should see her. Wendy is still a very attractive and sophisticated women who could easily pass for a highly-eligible 45-year-old. In fact, she was getting so much attention from young men that she wrote a book about it called, ‘The Toyboy Diaries’. From what we saw of Wendy’s lifestyle, the combination of notoriety and good looks means that she’s knee-deep in glistening pecs and baby oil every night of the week.

A gaggle of drunk, cackling 40-something women who set up the toyboywarehouse.com dating website told us ad nauseum how great it was to shag young men. Inevitably, the idea of 40 and 50-something men getting together and setting up a website of the same sort for young girls, without having molotov cocktails hurled through their windows, was never mentioned.

Chris was on holiday at Butlins with his parents aged just 18 when he fell for 50-year-old karaoke queen, Norma. Despite the enormous age difference, the two of them began a passionate affair immediately. Chris proposed to Norma three weeks later and they’ve been together for 12 years. Regardless of the age difference, they seemed like a fairly well-matched and happy couple. And Chris doesn’t really think of his wife as old. As he told us, ‘Norma doesn’t need oiling.’ All the best Chris. But no more details please, if you don’t mind.

This is all fair enough, I suppose. It’s hard enough to find someone to spend your life with without ruling someone out on the basis that they’re the wrong age. And so long as it’s all legal, I don’t see anything to worry about with any of this. But some of the stories were …well, best viewed on an empty stomach.

From MILFs we move to GILFs. Awkward chubby spectoid Simon (34) met game old bird Edna (73) a few years ago and they are now happily shacked up together. They first met when Simon was playing his organ in the local cinema [readers are invited to fill-in their own jokes here] and immediately fell in love.

Simon was still living with his parents at this point and they initially kept their relationship secret – but would speak for five to six hours on the phone every night, each conversation ending with Simon playing Edna ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ on his organ. They both live in Weston-Super-Mare and the first time Simon kissed Edna was under the pier. Thankfully for all concerned this is merely a statement of fact and not a euphemism.

As a further tribute to his undying love, Simon is now installing an antique pipe organ the size of a swimming pool into an enormous pit in their back garden. On the bright side, what with Simon’s obsession with old organs and Edna’s irrepressible joi de vivre, if they do ever breed, the child will be assured of a long career playing the lead in touring productions of The Phantom of the Opera – probably from a very young age and without the need for make-up.

Super Botox Me

Kate Spicer is not happy with her face – and it’s easy to see why. When it’s not fixed into strenuous self-absorption, it’s lolling with a ‘vacant’ sign written all over it. She’s the very definition of ‘hangdog’ – but this is not because there’s anything wrong with her, it’s because she’s a cynic without wit and is permanently pulling a petulantly disappointed expression.

To confirm to herself that she’s pissed off with looking knackered, she sits herself next to a 16 year old model (Kate’s in her late thirties) to drive home the fact that she’s no spring chicken any more. She puts a panel of apparently important people in front of her to tell her why she looks worse than the model (none of whom point out that it may be because she’s not 16 any more). She makes us complicit in her disatisfaction with her own crumbling mug as the basis for this horrible injection of poison which screened on the now risible Channel 4 last night.

What is happening to Channel 4? When it’s not milking the middle class indie kid demographic, screening endless Kooks sessions, it’s pandering to the Grazia-reading prattlers who consider ‘boho’ an actual word. And part of this problem is shit like ‘Super Botox Me’ – the name itself a tiresome rip off of a pseudo-doc style that’s completely saturated.

Here, that format doesn’t even fit. She’s not subjecting herself to endless botox sessions. She’s just asking surgeons about the treatment. There would be nothing wrong with that, and with a different name for the show this could have been interesting investigative journalism. But Spicer makes it clear from the outset that she may have the surgery. Why she thinks we should care about her multiple insecurities is baffling.

But insecurity is one thing she develops by the bucketload as she chats with plastic surgeons (literally: fake doctors) who make a living out of lying to the neurotic and then charging them the earth for making them look weird. And, unforgivably, she has the surgery. Despite a couple of blips when she is subject to the voice of reason quite sensibly telling her to stop, she still ploughs on relentlessly and has injections in her jowels and forehead – and to my eye she looked no better for it. Then she had fat removed from around her eyes with a horrific implement that removed 30% of the fat on the skin it touched. ‘I’ve looked worse after a big night out’, joked Spicer. I’ve had some big nights, but the only time I’ve woken up looking that bad was after a bouncer kicked me repeatedly in the head. In Yorkshire.

So what we have here is an extended and unrequested ad for Botox. Just what the world needs.

Spicer turns up at the end to conclude, wrapping up the messy vanity project she’s just put us through. And, like… yeah – she thinks it’s not worth the hassle, but, like, she looks so much… better. She was told she looks better by an expert who’s also had surgery and looks like a swollen mannequin, so it must be true. And she’ll probably, she teases, be having more injections in the future.

Like Super Skinny Me, this is irresponsible programming in the extreme. I can’t, for the life of me, see how this footage is of any use to anyone apart from Ms Spicer herself (who was clearly after some free Botox from the off) and the shyster surgeons who make mountains of cash out of this loathesome fucking business.

It’s contemptible shite, and Spicer – lacking any journalistic integrity whatsoever – has made money out of promoting an elite form of self-harm, vanity, self-regard and idiocy. I’m moved to make my first complaint about a TV programme. Am I getting old, or is TV getting worse?

The Perfect Vagina

Okay, I’m a man. So when reviewing a programme called ‘The Perfect Vagina’ it’s hard not to think of a gag every 15 seconds. And ex-Scrapheap Challenge presenter Lisa Rogers certainly gave me enough material.

‘I don’t think my husband Paul realised by making this film, I’d start talking fannies day and night’

He probaby didn’t Lisa, otherwise I’m sure he’d have set up a premium-rate chatline. You can make a fortune with that sort of thing.

Lisa’s mission was to find out why so many young women in Britain these days are opting for vaginal cosmetic surgery or ‘labiaplasties’. There’s been a 300% increase in the demand for this procedure privately in the past few years and even NHS demand has doubled since 2003.

Speaking to a girl who waxes women’s lady-bits, Lisa found out that the problem seemed to start in the late 90’s, around the time Sex and the City first hit our screens and Brazilians started becoming much more popular. With the consequent bareness of this new fanny-fashion, many women started to feel self-conscious about the look of their vaginas.

The main story centered around 21-year-old Rose who was so self-conscious about the shape of her vaginal lips that she was getting them trimmed. She was actually a very nice-looking girl and fully-clothed she looked perfectly normal. But she was so distressed about the appearance of her vagina that I was half-expecting she must have had a fanny that trailed along the ground behind her and had to be disguised as a wedding train and supported by two fanny bridesmaids wherever she went.

Not at all, as it turns out. It looked perfectly normal. The plastic surgeon chopped a few bits off anyway. Seeing as she’d gone to the trouble of bringing along the tv crew and shelling out a small fortune, it would have been rude not to.

We then saw Rose in recovery and were told it would take up to three months for the procedure to heal. Even I crossed my legs at that point and I don’t even own a fanny (although I do occasionally rent one in the Dordogne.)

Lisa also spoke to Brighton artist Jamie, who was casting 160 vulvas in plaster of paris to display as part of a large ‘Vaginal Wall’ art exhibit. Dirty bastard. I wish I’d thought of that one.

There is regulatory requirement on these sort of shows where they have to ask a New Age gimp what their solution to the problem is, and this one was no different. So Lisa consulted fanny-guru Rachael Foops (no tittering at the back) who advised that women’s vaginas have stories and memories locked inside them and that by talking to them, women can heal these emotional scars.

To her credit, Lisa burst out laughing at this point. But, by the end of the show, she was sitting cross-legged in a kaftan eating pomegranites and showing her twinkle to the group like the rest of them – obviously on the basis that it makes good TV.

A more serious problem was highlighted by the rise in ‘Laser Hymenoplasties’ -particularly amongst young, Muslim women. These poor ladies are apparently under an increasing pressure to ‘bleed’ on their wedding night to prove they are still virgins, so they are having their hymens artificially reinstored. Here’s a tip for you girls: if your husband-to-be is such an evil religious bigot that he wants blood on the wedding night, why not just bite off his testicles? Better still, don’t marry the twat in the first place. No bloodshed required on either side. Just a thought.

Of course, we poor unfortunate men have had to contend with this sort of thing for decades. The size of the penises you see in porn movies are not at all representative of the rest of us, and a friend of mine (not me, a friend of mine) can only make it through one of these ghastly films by repeating over and over to himself the mantra ‘he’s just got very small hands, he’s just got very small hands’… As I say – not me, a friend of mine.

It also can’t help that every second email I receive asks me if I would like a bigger cock – and that’s just the ones I get from my mother. So we men feel your pain, ladies, and not just because it increases our chances of a shag, but y’know, for like, proper caring reasons ‘n’ stuff.

We’re all victims of this brainwashing shite. So here’s an idea. Stop buying the glossy magazines, girls, and stick around with us here at Watch With Mothers. I can assure you there are far bigger and uglier twats than yours on this very site, every day of the week.

Cue the comments…