Men Only C4
Score BBC1
Football Stories: Psycho C4
They Think It's All Over BBC1
Men Only, the chilly tale of a bunch of footie-loving, alcohol-swigging, Class A drug-taking everyblokes (plus the women they 'love' and the woman they rape) arrived on our screens already shrink-wrapped in controversy. The Radio Times, flagging a preview by their TV editor Alison Graham, warned that 'whatever you do, don't make a date with Men Only', while in his editor's letter, RT's Nicholas Brett commented that 'try reading [Graham's] blistering attack on Channel 4's Men Only and, like me, you'll probably be cheering every word: it really does sound a vile, disgusting programme that would have been better not made'. Naturally, by the time I'd got to Graham's column (which observed that it 'is a hateful, misogynistic piece of pointlessness which will disgust women and infuriate men'), I was simply gagging for it - and I can't have been alone: condemnation by the nation's best-selling magazine will have added, at the very least, several thousand to the ratings.
Though Graham's reaction was entirely understandable, it was also hopelessly knee-jerk. Men Only was indeed often hateful and wildly misogynistic, but it was far from pointless, even if the most interesting point it managed to make was that a programme described in the accompanying press pack as 'the antithesis of the current trend for cool laddy drama' (the Loaded/Lock Stock culture which glorifies all that is most crass about modern masculinity) turned out to be... a cool laddy drama. How could it be anything else when it employed all the hallmark clichés of the genre it pretended to despise: slick camerawork, thumping soundtrack, shots of blokes swaggering in rows across our screen, ugly sex with beautiful women (lots of tits but no dicks) and a cast of two-dimensional characters (men unable/unwilling to communicate, women unable/unwilling to do anything else).
If the programme would 'disgust women and infuriate men' this is only because it highlighted what anybody who is really honest with themselves already knows, deep down - the very thing that Anthony Clare explored last year in his book On Men, when he wrote: 'All men, myself included, do not just love women. We do not see them only as colleagues, friends, lovers; as sexually desirable, physically attractive, mentally stimulating. We fear them, hate them, marginalise them, denigrate and categorise them. And we continually strive to control and dominate them. The call to us as men, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to turn away from violence, to get in touch with our feelings, to express our fears and admit our inadequacies, is a doomed call if it is made, as it tends to be made, predominantly by women.'
Men Only's writer, Richard Cottan, took a fascinating idea and executed it in the wrong medium - the words should have stayed on the page. Instead, on TV, a high proportion of male (and maybe some female) viewers will have found the programme extremely cool and possibly arousing, some will almost certainly have used it to achieve the same result for which the on-screen characters used porn. Many other women, meanwhile, will have been angry not because (as the press bumf arrogantly declared) Men Only might suddenly reveal 'that the man women viewers are sitting next to is potentially the same as the men on the screen', but because we already know it, and we despair. But even more, we despair of those hypocrites who exorcise their confusion and guilty self-loathing by making a shiny, narcissistic, smug, patronising, exploitative drama out of a genuine emotional crisis. Not only do women deserve far better than this, so too do men.
Interestingly, identical themes were also explored (just as unsuccessfully, though less controversially) last week in BBC1's Score. Here the gender chasm was charted via the story of a Lottery syndicate (a Welsh amateur football team and their partners) who won a £14 million rollover jackpot, but were soon divided on gender lines (with one exception) when the men were reminded they had signed a contract pledging to invest the money in the team: 'What makes us most happy? 22 men, two nets and a leather ball. Give us a muddy field and something to kick... you can't buy that!' So the women formed a council of war, depriving the men of 'cooking, cleaning and shagging'. However, when the team's old coach (ousted in favour of a salaried professional) killed himself, the men were forced to see their selfish, childish obsession for what it was and swiftly resigned themselves to buying new cars, permatans and estate showhomes with enough power showers and plastic coving to keep the missus quiet. Then the team's star player was signed by Leeds United and - hooray! - scored a goal in the first five minutes of his debut.
Six months later the wives were bored, consumed by all the consumerism, not to mention the terrible guilt that came of emasculating the menfolk, so they clubbed together to build a football coaching school, invited Leeds' star striker to cut the ribbon and then a team of local boys ran out on to the pitch to play... a team of local girls! Cute? At the end of this cosy drivel, I felt I'd been forced to suck a lemon for 120 minutes. Despite loathing Men Only I think Score might be just as bad because, though dressed down as mindless primetime entertainment, its 'message' was just as sinister: men will be boys and women better believe it.
I'm perfectly happy to watch football as football, but heartily sick of football as a metaphor - whether for all that is dull and stupid or all that is noble and fine. And I find it particularly irksome when the metaphors are mixed - as ably demonstrated by last week's Football Stories: Psycho, a portrait of Stuart Pearce in which a litany of professional failures (the lot of any England player, admittedly) were somehow, extraordinarily, disguised as success - faintly hilarious if it hadn't been sad. As was the wisdom of Ashley White, a man with, perhaps, very little in the way of an interior life but an England fan of quivering intensity, for whom Pearce's penalty in Euro 96 inspired the following fervent thoughts: 'yeah, that's the Psycho, that's the Stuart, that's the heart, that's the Three Lions; and... that is England!'.
And that's the definite article, England fans: a tragicomedy of category errors. By the end even the voiceover was gripped with gravitas and gargling balls: 'More than Nobby Stiles, more than Bobby Charlton, maybe more than Bobby Moore, maybe Stuart Pearce has come closest to reflecting the true spirit of England: raw, untutored, dedicated and unfashionably patriotic, he exists outside the world of celebrity, like a fan on the pitch, maybe even a psycho.' Sounds like a loser to me.
Last week I went to the taping of BBC1's nominally sport-orientated panel quiz, They Think It's All Over, screened on Friday. This was an interesting experience on several levels: First, it takes 90 minutes (plus injury time) to record the 30-minute show; second, the audience is exactly what one would expect (three suburban twentysomething smart-casual men with gelled hair to every woman. And they actually cheer during the brief sporting clips, for chrissakes); third, the production team are as charming, funny and intelligent as one would expect but also, perhaps, ever-so-slightly guilty about the fact that the best bits of the show often end up on the cutting-room floor.
I particularly enjoyed a bit of lengthy banter between Jonathan Ross and Nick Hancock, based on Zeno's Stadium Paradox (no, I'm not making this up): the one in which he argues it is impossible to complete the course because, before you reach the end, you must reach the halfway point and before that you must reach that halfway point and so on, indefinitely, because if space is infinitely divisible then distance must consist in an infinite number of points. That one didn't make the edit, obviously, though Ross's musings on the ins and outs of cottaging did. Just like the rest of the week's viewing, then, TTIAO turned out to be a predictably disappointing game of two halves. Still, at least England beat Greece 2-0, eh? (that Zeno's a lousy keeper).
