Britain’s Fattest Teenager: Hidden Lives

 

Although it may seem at times that I’ll watch any old shit, I am in fact quite particular about which kinds of shit I allow to seep through my eyes and penetrate my brain. I enjoy programmes that I can get a laugh out of, albeit for the wrong reasons and ‘Britain’s Fattest Teenager: Hidden Lives’ (Not very hidden if it’s on TV, I thought) last Wednesday was no exception. This slice of health propaganda was a kind of televised fat kid sandwich placed lovingly in between ‘Bodyshock: World’s Biggest Boy’ on Tuesday and ‘Mind the Fat: Does Fast Food = Slow Kids’ (shit title) on the Thursday.

Hidden Lives (Channel 5) concerned itself with big, fat blubber-boy Jonathan Wallace, an eighteen year old chubbawit from
Hartlepool who was truly digging his own grave with his teeth. Until my eyes had grown accustomed to his unholy appearance I was genuinely staggered by the sight of his bulbous head which I half expected to burst at any moment and spray volcanic ash in all directions, the way the swollen lump that was protruding from Mount St Helens had in 1980.

The programme followed Wallace’s journey toward a gastric bypass, a journey in which we see him stuffing his face every five minutes and generally just looking like a hideously distorted interpretation of a human being.

As well as being morbidly obese, he suffers from sleep apnoea as well as being dyslexic and plain thick. For these reasons I was trapped between sympathy and disgust watching this, although any sympathy I had for this grotesque figure eventually gave way to utter displeasure due to Wallace’s attitude.

His philosophy seemed to be ‘fuck it’, which would be fair enough if it wasn’t for all the personal and medical help he was being offered to shed his mammoth load, which was, in my opinion, more than he deserved.

During the part of the programme where my sympathy was still intact, we see Wallace explain how is life is a kind of living hell, in which he had obviously suffered the cruelty of bullying. I was slightly taken aback as he explained “They call me a fat cunt and that”. Then again it was Channel 5. The bullying had also included taunts of ‘Waller, Waller, Waller’ (as in Rik Waller), in a Kebab shop of all places. It regularly cut to shots of Waller, sorry, Wallace as he walked down the street trying to mind his own business, which proved impossible as his epic proportions encroached on the freedoms of others in various ways, consequently becoming other peoples’ business.

The camera also looked on mockingly as every now and again we would see the behemoth truffle-shuffle his way through a kickabout in a park with a load of what looked like 12 year olds.

“Ironically, he wants to be a chef”, says the narrator’s voice. How the fuck is that ironic? This titan worships food! It seems completely natural to me that he would want to spend his every waking moment around food.

It is around this time that we are informed by our narrator that he’ll probably be dead in five years if he doesn’t alter his lifestyle.

On top of this we are told that his bypass op could finish him off, I listened to this piece of information with cold ambivalence, unsure as to whether I could even give a fuck if it did.

One of my favourite moments was Wallace’s guided tour of his fridge freezer. In particular the part where he waves a box of Cod in Parsley sauce before the camera and proudly declares – “I can eat five of these at once”. I also enjoyed the part where his mate says; “He loves leftovers!” with the misshapen Wallace sitting next to him, grinning uncontrollably in agreement.

The low point of the show was graphic shots of the stomach stapling op and the inside of the lard-arse’s guts, something which neither man nor beast should have to have witnessed. After the op, he is told his appetite will shrink dramatically and that he will only be able to eat very small amounts, a warning Toad-boy disregarded as he frequently continued to over-eat, making himself vomit in the process.

A process which I’m confident will never end until he finally stops soiling the earth with his vile presence.

Britain’s fattest teenager was just one in a series of programmes that explores the media’s current obsession with fat, but quite what-in-shitting-Christ the point is beats me. There are fat people and fat kids everywhere, always has been and always will be. But all of a sudden we human beings want to be perfect. Well we’re not. We’re a bunch of cunts. Deal with it.

Help! My Dog’s As Fat As Me!

I arrived at the bottom of the BBC3 barrel by chance, only to find executives scrabbling around with a shit-scraper, trying to grind out a title that hadn’t been used before from the stinking dregs of their channel’s previous content. Freaky Eaters had been a new low. I was interested to see how low they could go. When I was browsing the schedules and saw the title ‘Help! My Dog’s As Fat As Me!’ I thought for a second that someone who writes the mini-reviews in the back of the TV Guide had suddenly been gripped by an overwhelming realisation about their own lives and that this was not, in fact, a dire new attempt at television-making and more a cry for help.

I was wrong. The show is one of the not-so-recent-any-more phenomonen of does-what-it-says-on-the-tin TV. Through tear-filled eyes I tried to switch the television off before my mind was blighted by the blindingly predictable events that were doubtless about to unfold. Through the opaque wash of saltwater I saw something about a weigh-in where the combined weight of owner and dog are measured against recent scale-based humiliations. I saw dogs being inspected for contours. I saw women crying and refusing to speak to the cameras. I saw a huge mound of furry blubber being fed a Big Mac. I saw a huge mound of furry blubber’s dog eating the same meal.I saw a morbidly obese labrador squeaking out a hideous fart, clearing the room of cast and crew. I began to smell the odour. Screaming in agony, I reached the television set and booted the off button just before the point where my brain was about to burst.

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.