There’s only one way to find out

Here's a post from Special Guest Shouter James Bainbridge (JRWB)...

Television has had a long love affair with the concept of making people live as things that they’re not: Iron Age roundhouse dwellers; the Victorian upper class; Second World War evacuees. Because TV is older than any of us, it’s grown a bit obsessed with seeing how us cosseted modern folk would cope with rationing. It wants to see how we’d get on with woad. Wants to stick cameras on us, and film us crawling up chimneys, weeping because it’s confiscated our iPod.

Like most things, these mongrel forms of Big Brother meets historical reenactment, vary in quality. One of the most surprisingly fascinating pieces of television for me this year was BBC2’s The Victorian Farm; a programme that by all reckoning should have been painfully and sentimentally dull. Yet through the casting of some quite ordinary-seeming agricultural historians to undertake the pretend time-travel, through the unflinching respect with which they ate offal and ploughed with horses – what emerged was a very likeable, educational treat. Television should be commended for showing us the constantly cheerful historian Ruth Goodman demonstrating how she constructed her sanitary protection out of moss.

It was with such optimism that I tuned in to watch last night’s My Life as an Animal (BBC3). I like things in which ordinary modern folk live as things that they’re not. That’s what I like. I liked seeing that Ruth Goodman stitching braces by gaslight, I’d like this. Surely.

The programme, which claims to try to answer the question “do we truly understand animals?” suggests that “there’s really only one way to find out.” By that it means it will take two ordinary modern folk and through a series of dangerous and humiliating rituals (eating from buckets, drinking from troughs, sleeping in fields) make them “live as an animal” for four days.

I’m no animal psychologist, but I can’t help thinking that there might be other ways. In fact, having watched last night’s programme – in which two people were kicked and bitten by horses, fighting for raw vegetables with their teeth – I left feeling I understood less how people might resemble horses, and more how television could resemble the cruel inventiveness of a war crime.

Freak Paeans

I was going to write something about Freaky Eaters, and how I used to be a freaky eater and how it ruined my life for years, and about how the latest Freaky Eaters focussed on a gay couple showing that gays can be fucked up too, but then I realised I didn't really have anything else to say. But, as in Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa For Kingsley Amis, I liked the title.

I'm watching the excellent Adam Curtis's excellent short film on the excellent Newswipe. Brilliant little argument about 'ohdearism': how the news stopped reporting politics and focussed on emotive stories instead. I do hope he's got a new series coming up, The Power of Nightmares was a rough diamond among the polished turds of political programming on TV.

Young Mums' Mansion, or The House of Mardy Tearaways

I watched (and was hugely moved by) the last series of this, much more than I was expecting to be. It came along as I was still mourning Dr Tanya's flight from The House of Tiny Tearaways, the most compulsive psychology programme on telly in the last decade, cunningly dressed up as a toddler training show. The basic premise of YMM is you get ten single mums and their kids, stick them in a big house and put each mum in charge in turn and watch them break down over the period of a month. The twist in the new series: half of the single mums are in fact single dads.

Simone is the first one in charge, she of tiny daughter, teenage son and a chip on her shoulder about men which will only increase during the episode. Her plan is to segregate the house, send the women out on lovely day trips while the single dads deal with child care and housework. Her plan is initially derided by the men, who feel justifiably victimised by her assumptions about them as lazy, feckless no-hopers. As the alpha female she was always going to come into conflict with the alpha male, ludicrous pocket ex-cage fighter Lee who can't stop himself slagging off women at every turn and bragging about the affairs which ended his marriage. Simone, with cruel accuracy, puts his complaints down to short man syndrome, which was the only moment in the episode when I felt for her. Well that, and the bit when she was being savaged by the other mums and dads at the end for her reign of shit.

It all starts to unravel for Simone when she couldn't get up in time to dress her daughter for the school run, and so cue the kind of sad piano music you get on Australian soaps when teenagers go to the beach to think things over. And she causes a scandal in the house by going back to bed and shirking her responsibilities as leader for the entire day. Isaac, her teenage son, is growing into a thoughtful and melancholy lad who wants to know who his father is. His well rehearsed plea is ignored by Simone, who decides to take advantage of his good nature by deciding that 'if I don't say anything he won't ask again'. And she's right, and all our tortured teen can do is cuddle her in case she is upset by his timid enquiry.

As with the Tiny Tearaways it's always much more painful for the adults, and the final reckoning is difficult to watch as all of the parents come together to slag Simone in the feedback section. Lee, hideous David Brent-style prick that he is, gives her the kind of feedback that shit managers give their staff, full of meaningless motivational buzzwords. It is for dad Oscar, the Obi Wan of the house, to try to make sense of Isaac's demands, and to confront Simone about her treatment of her son. But in a moment of brilliant emotional blackmail she throws it back at them that no-one has the right to talk to her impressionable son about the topic of his dad, and even Lee ends up looking guiltily at his feet.

I'm sure I'm going to end up shouting 'you fucking bitch', 'piss off', and 'dirty liar!' at the screen like I did last year. And I'll probably cry a bit too. But it's good telly, is Young Mums' Mansion, and makes you think for a minute about the plight of hard-pressed folk laughed off as pramface chavs by people with more money and education than sense or decency.

Being even more Human

So, there's just been the 'making of' documentary, Being Human: Unearthed, and now they're repeating the first three episodes, for 'tis BBC3's Being Human night.

I was worried when Being Human and Red Riding both finished earlier this month. What would replace them in my affections? Ten Years Younger with Myleene Klass and Moving Wallpaper? Not quite. But luckily for me, as it was made by cash-strapped BBC3, Being Human will be repeated every month for the rest of that channel's existence, and I'll keep stumbling across little gems like: 'A-positive: a bit Jacob's Creeky for my taste...' as I surf about looking for something that doesn't make me feel violent.

Being Human has a remarkably good cast. And I'm not just saying that cos I fancy Russell Tovey. After all, I'm more of a Gilbert kinda guy. I actually bumped into one of the actors, the woman who plays Nina, at a play recently. She was, in the words of a work friend, almost medically short. It must be the oddest thing for actors, getting involved in 'cult telly'. The obsessiveness of geeks (like me) and the cynicism of TV companies means that the acting is the least of their priorities: there's DVD commentaries, interactive online episodes, idents and behind the scenes documentaries to record before they even get to conventions in the Ramada in Hemel Hempstead and SFX interviews for the rest of their lives.