This week's TV (19-22/6/06)

Richard is doing my nut in. If the cadet-cap-leather-arm-thong-and-one-glove-with-pearl-bracelet outfit wasn't offensive enough a parody of homosexality for every BB viewer regardless of their sexual orientation, he also fulfils all other requirements of the gay from hell. Throw in a dash of misogyny ("Oh, all girls are like that. Don't you know what girls are like, Mikey?") and at least six litres of lifestyle-choice smugness ("I wait tables because the flexible work allows me to concentrate of my writing"; "Monogamy is so boring. I like to have sex with my harem of men"), and you get closer to what a deluded and essentially lonely person Richard must be. And because he obviously has a much better life than all those sad heterosexuals who knuckle down and get on with their uncreative work during the day, returning home to their long-term partners and missionary-position sex in the evening, the man thinks he has a right to tell EVERYONE how to live their lives. The poor housemates can't turn without finding Richard saying, "You don't want to turn like that. You want to bend your knees much more and find the fulcrum point from within your torso". Later on you'll see him bitching under his breath, "I can't believe Imogen turned without bending her knees. I think you and I are going to have to have a word with her about that. Ya, I think we are all going to have to, we just can't go on like this." Oh, do SHUT UP you bloody KNOW-ALL!
While I'm in 'annoyed mode', can I also just say that I'll be very very thankful when Grace's time in the spotlight is finally over and I don't have to see her stupid, grinning mug all over my tellybox anymore. Her professional smile has become so fixed to her face, and to such cartoon-like proportions, that the evictee, to my mind, now looks criminally insane. I'll just be glad when that vile little pro is back where she belongs, starting fights in the bogs of Chinawhites and Boujis with Davinia Taylor.

Bitty?

I'd just like to write a few lines about the very strange breasts going down in Big Brother. Or should that be up, given the ubiquity of implants in the house? When Grace was evicted on Friday, she also affected the ratio of real-fakies so that now 66.6% of the female housemates in BB are cosmetically enhanced. Not that I have a particular problem with fake boobs but it's just that these are an especially rum bunch. Lea is obviously the Queen of Tits with M-cups which she insists on covering up with only the teeny-tiniest triangles of fabric (or maybe they're not teeny-tiny, maybe they're as big as ground sheets - but her breasts are SO massive that she's skewed my sense of perspective). The thing I find particular disturbing about Lea's boobs is the way they escape from her half-arsed attempts to cover them. I'd find it very offputting if involved in a conversation with a bikinied Lea to ignore the bottoms of the beachballs protruding from underneath her nipple patches. Maybe it's because it's possible to gain an idea of just how big her boobs are when you can see the underside of them. I'm just astounded that the woman can stand upright.
I find something about Suzie completely obscene. I don't buy this upper-class act, and read her hugely inflated assets as the evidence. It is impossible to have a boob job over a D cup and to remain classy anyway, perhaps even to have a boob job at all. Extreme boob jobs betray a certain desperation to be viewed as sexually attractive which belie class in a female. Which brings me onto Nikki; the woman with a body of a child and the face of Old Man Steptoe. Having found topless pictures of Nikki on the Digital Spy forums, I can confirm that she has the strangest breasts in Christendom, and got some really bad advice from her surgeon when he said implants would work on her little boy body. Her fellas look like tennis balls inserted below the most superficial layer of the dermis, and yet are still invasive enough on her tiny frame to push her nipples skywards. It looks like she's trying to locate a radio station with 'em.

p.s. While I do not think it is right to view women as sexual objects, the multitude of fake breasts in the house is worthy of comment. I also wonder why the producers have started trying to develop a boob signature for each series of BB? Last year was like an episode of Benny Hill what with Lesley, Saskia and Makosi's mammoth melons, while this year is like watching any programme after 9pm on channel 5. Is someone at Endemol a tad fixated?

Monday Night's TV (12/6/06)

So, Nikki and Grace up for eviction this week then. Obviously Grace is going to be the one to leave, despite the fact that she's actually no more appalling than Nikki, who is four years older than her and also says completely awful things - but in a funnier voice. The real point of contrast between the two is their relations with men. From the first night Grace slid into bed with someone with whom she had very little in common other than the fact that they're both young and cute, while Nikki had to survive on her own terms in the BB house (not through choice, admittedly, but through her perception of a lack of available men). Her reward has been the gradual development of a relationship with Pete - a person who I am sure does not fulfill her pre-BB criteria for romance - resulting in a kiss during a game of 'spin the bottle' last week which contained real magic. Since then the pair have been magnetically drawn to each other, and - like Chantelle and Preston initially - are completely unaware of what is happening between them. Like two 'real' people in the first flush of love and attraction, this is simply gorgeous to watch; life-affirming, heart-warming and entirely natural. Grace and Mikey, meanwhile, formed an artificial bond almost immediately and - because nothing really links their spirits besides circumstance - have run the whole gamut of a relationship in a month. From hanging out and going to bed, they began to make demands of each other and now the arguments have started. Why? Because there is no profound base to their friendship. It is for this reason that Nikki should stay in BB. Not because she is nicer than Grace - she's not - but because something is really happening between her and Pete, the start of something exciting and new and delightful. A smile doesn't creep onto my face if I see Grace and Mikey holding hands as it does with Pete and Nikki. Their compromise already feels tired, sordid, and increasingly uncomfortable to watch.

This weekend's TV (9-11/6/06)

My goodness, I'm glad Samuel's gone from BB. I have rarely been more disturbed than when they showed him/her masturbating last week. With her/his eyes wide open. A really very frightening sight to behold. And then there were the embarrassing, ignorant gaffes which any 18- year-old would make, but which aren't usually recorded for posterity, for instance her definition of eclectic (apparently keeping a book after you've finished it, rather than throwing it away). So now we've got Suzie, the "Golden Housemate", a random member of the public who has auditioned for BB several times and spent £4000 on chocolate to find her ticket. Random indeed. Verdict: singularly unexciting, unrepentently bourgeois, drippy drippy drip.
Watched the football on Saturday. Funny to observe the same old World Cup pattern emerging - loads of hype, people tattooing England flags on their faces, then the inevitable realism setting in as we collectively realise we're shit at football. How many TIMES?

Tuesday Night's TV (6/6/06)

What??

I just wanted to write something so I had a post for 6/6/6.

Wish they'd stuck the real The Omen on last night, the proper one. The rulers of telly really didn't make enough of the unusual date yesterday. However, I did see something on 666: Searching for Satan on the intellectually highbrow Channel 5 suggesting that if numbers in Hebrew correspond to letters, then 666 could actually be WWW. As in World Wide Web.

GET OFF YOUR PC NOW, SLAVE TO THE ANTICHRIST!!

Monday night's TV (5/6/06)

By the way, if anyone tells you Desperate Housewives is a kooky, cool, surreal American drama with a Twin Peaks sensibility, smack 'em in the face. Judging on several episodes of the second series which I have been unfortunate enough to catch, I can reveal that it is weakly written and even mildly offensive (last night Gaby and her husband coerced their Chinese maid into carrying their baby; apparently you can trick domestic slaves into that sort of thing because they are stupid and foreign). I can't even be bothered to dissect it further, suffice to say that why any man would go through the niggles of relationships with the deeply unlikeable and two-dimensional main characters is beyond me. And there's only so much Botox a face can take, Teri Hatcher. Something's going down on Wisteria Lane? The show itself, it would seem.

I got into an argument on the Digital Spy forums last week when I started the thread 'Where are the intelligent women on BB?". Many people seemed to think that Grace was intelligent, despite my pointing up that confidence and intelligence aren't necessarily the same thing. I now have my own conclusive proof that she is in fact a silly moo, complaining about the "amniosity" in the house during yesterday's BB. Amniosity? Is that the feeling you get when you don't want a baby? I actually wonder if there have ever been any intelligent people in BB, because intelligence is, in most cases, linked to reading and anyone who is happy to go into a house without the possibility of picking up a book for three months has to be a bit of a thicko in my opinion. If I was a housemate, that would be far more difficult for me to come to terms with than Sam continually trying to make me look like I had rosacea. Honestly, can you imagine it? No printed word? I'd rather felch Richard.

Lea's accurate age is still up for grabs. Saw a lovely little self-adjustment on the live screening where she claimed to be 15 years older than Nikki's 24 years, which was quickly downscaled to 11. We're getting closer......

This weekend's TV (2-4/6/06)

It's almost too facile to register my happiness that Sezer has left the Big Brother house and what that reveals about the voting public, so I won't - but I will register my surprise at his demeanour during the eviction interview. You had to forgive him a little bit for his behaviour in the house because the poor boy obviously didn't realise he was such a colossal COCK, and that's certainly no-one's fault, just a reflection of his impaired mental function. What I was also too insensitive to see when blinded by irritation was the fact that he's incredibly insecure - that all that macho bravado was premised on the unstable and hidden foundations of his own probable homosexuality. I must be losing my touch. I've always been good at picking up on those who fear to be queer in the past. But then Sezer is a chimera to me. I even thought he had charisma for about two seconds.

I'm wondering about the sense of a BB blog, you know. Not only are the rapid developments adequately covered in the Digital Spy forum and more quickly than TellyEllie, but everyone seems to have the same opinion about the housemates anyway. Largely because everyone I know is nice, hates bullies and likes funny individuals with Tourettes syndrome which only serves to enhance their funniness. I reckon I'm onto a loser. For this reason I am going to review Wilde which was on BBC2 last night, a biopic of the notorious Irish arseraider whose sodomitical exploits landed him in jail for two years. Call me grisly but I thought this period in his life might be one of the more interesting areas to explore, yet the film focuses on his relationships with Constance, his wife, and his subsequent male lovers. All very well, but there was a little bit too much, "your youth is like the golden halo of your hair", and "your body is so white, as white as the snow that blankets the mountaintop. It is studded with the flowers of your beauty" in the portrayal of Wilde's homosexual relations. The film seemed to endorse the Platonic notion of love between men surpassing the love that exists between a man and a woman, an idea which resurfaced to provide a valid excuse for those men whose sexual preference criminalised them (Wilde included). I wouldn't mind, but the representation of Constance in the film tended to portray her as silently submissive, or with babies hanging off her like possums, or sickly and pathological. Not so much mad, bad and sad as sad, sad, SAD. As such, I don't think the screenplay of Wilde resisted the narratives which produced sexual difference during the nineteeth century, narratives which saw women as more 'natural' and 'irrational' and men as more 'intellectual', thereby rendering love between men, with its basis in rationality, both better and purer. And the end was bloody awful. Loads of musical crescendoes as Oscar and Bosie clasped hands through the grate that separated them, declaring, "I love you, my darling boy! Not a day shall pass when I shall not be kept alive by the thought of your golden hair!" (There was a lot of talk of Bosie's golden hair). Anyway, it wasn't that bad. I just thought I'd expose the fact that the film didn't necessarily challenge the picture of male/male love presented by Wilde himself during his trial. It reiterated it. And I don't think that's very exciting.