Freaky Eaters. Again.

 

Christ – it’s like some sort of vacuum, sucking me into it’s hideousness! Last night, Freaky Eaters managed to somehow reel me in like a fresh and naive trout on a particularly devious angler’s line. BBC3 will surely be the end of me. Along with Dog Borstal and Help! My Dog is as Fat as My Face!, Freaky Eaters is default television. It’s always on and I’m always half asleep and inclined to watch the televisual turd smears they wipe my screen with.
It’s important to point out that I found within my frail body the ounce of fortitude required to turn the TV off before my mind was sneezed out of my clenched face by a rebelling brain. Even I can only take so much.

So. Freaky Eaters, again. Yesterday we travelled to Newcastle, or Middlesborough, or somewhere up there in the land where they say ‘war’ instead of ‘your’ and enthuse that things are ‘reet canny’. Lovely people, but violent – and greedy too, as it turns out. A young lady (whose name I forget) was eating chocolate to assuage her feelings of worthlessness. No surprise there then, not a massively big deal. But when we were shown the sheer amount she was putting away, I was actually shocked. Real shock, not mock concern. She could eat nine full size Crunchies in minutes without feeling sick. And her method of eating was actually terrifying – slowly and blankly biting off huge mouthfuls and then swallowing whole. It was like watching the act of vomiting, but in reverse, and with delicious, chocolatey puke.

The introduction took a good twenty minutes and by this time I was not only completely shattered from a good, honest day’s work but also nauseous to the point of needing to wash bits of sick from my lips after watching this poor unfortunate fill her stomach with crap. When they sent the shrink in, it became apparent that his conclusion was pre-prepared. He didn’t listen to a word she actually said. He decided that fear and anger had made her so gluttonous. Nothing to do with a low self-image then? Nothing to do with the fact that her parents have a shitload of confectionary stashed away in every corner of the house? I think they should take this bastard’s PhD away. I also think that if BBC3 are going to exploit those with eating disorders, they might try and name the show something other than Freaky Eaters, which is possibly the most heavy-handed title for a show about damaged people that I think I’ve ever heard. Me and Freaky Eaters are going to have a bit of time apart from hereon in.

Now, who fancies a Blue Ribband?

Freaky Eaters

 

I wanted to watch Tattoo last night, a German film about a mental man who cuts intricate tattoos from the backs of alternative types – cyber goths, crusties, you know the sort. Dragons’ Den had ended (a strange episode filled with in-fighting amongst the Dragons, which was entertaining) and I rubbed my hands and nads together as I loaded the DVD player and prepared for misery. But then the DVD halted. DVDs are always broken these days. I fancy a return to VHS. Anyway, it wouldn’t bloody work and so regrettably me and the missus ended up watching BBC3’s ‘Freaky Eaters’.The programme details the rehabilitation of individuals who have somehow managed to forge themselves a very limited daily diet from which, psychologically they’re unable to veer from. They pick one foodstuff and they’re set on it, for life. Last week it was a shaven headed geek who could only stomach pizza and this week we were served up an Essex girl with a chip butty fetish. I like pizzas and I like a good chip butty, but if one of those was the only thing I was allowed to eat for every meal, I suspect I’d be bored by lunchtime and possibly suicidal by the time breakfast came around again. Variety is clearly the spice of life. To deal with the problem, the BBC sends in a dietician and a psychologist to solve the problem eating pattern. So over the course of an hour they set to work reversing the complex.An hour is a bloody long time. It’s two episodes of Dad’s Army. For some reason, Dad’s Army is the gauge I use to measure TV time and it’s something I’m unable to shake off. It’s the same with money and pints of lager. I count cash in blocks of £2.50 because that’s how much a pint of premium lager was in the pub when I was a teenager. We have these little habits, created in our formative years and they inform our decisions for better or worse. Freaky Eaters argues that the reason their participants have these bad habits is that they made one such decision early on in life and haven’t the facility to break the habit, despite the fact that their digestive tract is probably beginning to resemble a gnawed hose, even in their late 20s. Seriously, on a diet of chips I’d imagine she doesn’t shit for days on end.I can believe that this happens though. With the shaven headed chap, his pizza fixation was a result of a strange relationship with his father, who died while he was quite young and in a process of rebellion against his parents. So his diet was one way of continuing this resistance to admitting his natural love for his father. He talked this through with a counselor, spent time trying different food with a dietician and fixed his mind up good and proper. The cameraman got his tears from the rest of the family and everyone was happy.

Last night, however, the Essex girl they picked was not, perhaps, the best choice. They narrowed her chip butty kink down to the fact that when she was younger she had some form of bronchitis, meaning that if she ate and coughed at the same time, she would gag. The inference being that her problem stemmed from her mistrust of food in general. But then, when going through counseling, she giggled when asked questions about this period of her life, refusing to think that it might be the root of her extremely high carb diet. When offered different foods from the dietician she turned into a complete Daddy’s girl, spoiled and noxious and, let’s be open here, a right royal pain in the arse-end.

My feeling that she was simply the type of girl who had never found herself wanting, who was waited on hand and foot by her parents and doting boyfriend, was compounded when the ‘reveal’ of the programme arrived after 50 long, tedious minutes. To see if her gross obsession with fried spuds had been headed off at the pass she was taken to a posh restaurant with her boyfriend who, he had told the camera, prayed she would choose something other than chips. Guess what gang? She ordered chips, chips and only chips.

So not only was her time wasted, her boyfriend’s time was wasted and her family’s time was wasted. Oh – and the dietician’s time was wasted. And the psychologists. And mine and my missus’s time was wasted. And anyone who bothered watching this pile of crap’s time was officially, undeniably and irretrievably wasted.