Boy Meets Girl C4
Omnibus: Nancy Mitford BBC1
Position Impossible C4
The Real Erich Von Daniken C4
Tonight With Trevor McDonald ITV
Mel Gibson's observation about women and penis envy in What Women Want ('they're not envious. Most of them don't even like it') was tested in Channel 4's deeply pointless 'sex swap' challenge, Boy Meets Girl.
Watching the girls stuff socks down their boxers revealed that, even in the spurious guise of a 'social experiment', size mattered, and if one had to wear a sock-penis it had better be the sort of sock a girl could be proud of: sports socks, for example, rather than pop-socks, helpfully adjusted ('up there, down a bit there') by Lewis, a female to male transsexual. But just as the women all chose to impersonate the members of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers ('as soon as the sock went in, that was it!' said Lisa-as-Lee), none of the men-who-would-be-women opted for a flat chest, either. Funny that.
'Beyond drag, beyond camp, beyond mere dressing up...' insisted voiceover artiste Gail Porter (and how I wished she'd joined in too), but there was no evidence of it here: everybody looked laughably draggy and camp. There's no disguising an Adam's apple, stubble and bricklayer's hands, after all - and, more interestingly, no hiding a fear of, or loathing for, the opposite sex either. Of the initial eight sex-swappers, only six were allowed to carry on the experiment into Week Two. The pair who were rejected - Helen as 'Bob' and Stan as 'Stacy' - were both actors whose alter egos turned out to be rather unpleasant two-dimensional cliches, revealing more about Helen and Stan than perhaps either would have liked.
Helen's 'Bob' was, physically, the most convincing of the lot, but the character was 'aggressive and emotionally aloof'. 'Bob' clammed up, angrily, when asked 'how do you treat a woman in bed, Bob? Do you treat her right?'while Stan's 'Stacy' was a parody of the frigid man-hater, whose greatest regret was 'losing my virginity'.
'Stan wouldn't let himself be a weak woman because he's a strong man,' explained one of the judges, even though Stan hadn't created a strong woman, but merely sketched a madly surrealist cartoon in a fake Chanel suit.
BBC1's Omnibus on Nancy Mitford, screened to complement the dramatisation of Love In A Cold Climate (to be reviewed next week), revealed that although the whole of Miss Mitford's life was spent in a cartoonish Pursuit of Love (doubtless while wearing kosher Chanel, too) she ended up Loveless In A Chilly Emotional Climate. I guess the downside of a lifetime being professionally witty and gay and not appearing to take anything terribly seriously may be that when one finally does take something seriously, nobody will actually notice.
After a failed marriage and a deeply shallow friendship with a man called Hamish ('she wilfully refused to see he was homosexual,' rued her biographer), Nancy fixated on a Frenchman with appalling facial pustules and moved to Paris to be near him. Unfortunately he wasn't remotely interested in being anything other than good friends and, shortly after he announced his engagement to another, Nancy was diagnosed with cancer. I'm sure she carried on being witty and gay until the bitter end. Indeed, on her death bed, she told her sister, the Duchess of Devonshire, that she only regretted that she couldn't squeeze in one more day's hunting. 'It was a very happy, full life,' said another Mitford gel, Lady Diana, 'but the men in it... they were hopeless.' Which was not only presumptuous but, frankly, just a wee bit rich coming from the woman who married Oswald Mosley.
It was both a fashion moment and a cue for a bumper sticker - 'enlightened sexual beings do it with accessories'. The woman in the Kama Sutra had changed her blouse for each position, while the man was wearing the same red hat in each. 'There's quite a lot about who's putting whose hands, and where...' said the man from the Wellcome Institute, sounding archly Mitfordish, to Sanjeev Bhaskar, as they both pored over the source material in C4's Position Impossible. But despite its punning title, this was a largely sniggerless journey from Penzance to India in search of the seed of Eastern sensuality. Bhaskar seems like a nice bloke, but the only qualification for this job seemed to be the colour of his skin, which perhaps wasn't quite enough. The star of Goodness Gracious Me ('cheque please!') was clearly torn between the desire to deliver stand-up funnies or really getting to grips with his subject, and in the event he didn't quite manage either. At the Tantric Sex workshop in Penzance, where a very unattractive man called John and his 'assistant' Hannah were up to all sorts of tricks, like a saucy Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, Bhaskar squirmed when he was urged to 'play the inner flute' and 'dance the snake awake'. That's the Kundalini energy 'snake' that lives at the base of one's spine, by the way, and you really can't fake it with a pair of old socks.
In India, our host was far more comfortable and, indeed, affected a bit of gravitas - though I'd imagine Varanasi does that to you. On the whole, though, Position Impossible was a hybrid of a documentary: it looked lovely, but there wasn't much depth to it. A bit like the illustrations, really. After all, who, aside from Nancy Mitford, wouldn't lose themselves in a union of spiritual and sexual ecstasy without also losing their hat?
I thoroughly enjoyed The Real Erich Von Daniken. When I was about 13, I was a big fan of Von D, just after the Harold Robbins phase and right before the Jane Austen crush kicked in. It all made deliciously perfect sense at the time: well, of course aliens had built the pyramids and Stonehenge, and naturally those sketches etched into the Peruvian earth were parking bays for spacecraft, and I needn't feel embarrassed because a whopping 59,999,999 other readers all agreed. It was a jolly good wheeze and all the more fun for being the work of a hotelier with a distinct lack of qualifications in archaeology or history or indeed any other relevant discipline.
Von Daniken at 65 now looks like a retired stand-up comedian - a chunky Swiss Bob Monkhouse, with an even more impressive filing system for all those cosmic jokes than Bob's. There's no doubt, though, that whatever scams he pulled to make himself a bestselling author, Von D was given a very rough ride when he was tried, ostensibly for embezzlement and fraud in relation to his hotel business, and then denounced in court by the prosecution as 'a validity-craving, lying, insecure, criminal psychopath with an hysterical character', before being given a three-and-a-half year sentence.
These days Von D plies his unfashionable trade at places like The Eclectic Viewpoint Convention in Texas and has just come up with his best wheeze yet: the Mysteries of The World theme park, scheduled to open near his home in Interlaken in 2002. Imagine: no jet lag, no steamy jungles accessed only by lengthy and terrifying bus journeys, just a short stroll from Peru to Egypt via Wiltshire, with a pit-stop for cosmic refreshments. I can hardly wait.
Though in pursuit of an early night, I caught ITV's trailer for Thursday's Tonight With... while channel-hopping. Hello? Trevor McDonald interviews Eminem's mother ? 'Is he a dangerous menace or is it just hip-hop hype?' Well, no sensible TV reviewer would dare miss it. In the event it wasn't Sir Trev, but Fiona Foster who spoke to Debbie Mathers, Eminem's spun-sugar haired, panda-eyed mom, currently suing her son for $10 million for defamation. This was almost the best, and easily the funniest part of what turned out to be National Eminem Week.
Anyway, it turns out that Eminem's success is really just the revenge of the nerds: Debbie told us how young Marshall got hit by a snowball thrown by a classroom bully at an impressionable age and so life was never quite the same again chez Mathers. Just a few years later he was to be seen shouting 'none of you fake arse bitches get a piece of my cake' during a birthday party, but one couldn't help noticing, however, that this threat was issued straight to camcorder, rather than at any of the presumably non fake-arse un-bitches who happened to be present, which tell-tale piece of performance sort of gives the game away. Eminem is about as much of a threat to society as was Von Daniken in his heyday and when Mathers proudly eventually shows off his plans for The Great Pop Scams theme park just outside Detroit, Malcolm McLaren will be seething in his bath chair.
