Cutting up women for fun and profit

[davidn]

While Whitney's been away I've been watching loads of British television, and one of the things I'm catching up on is a TV discussion programme called You Have Been Watching - it's a panel quiz in name only, being the most free-form excuse for an actual quiz I've yet seen in the genre, and is really a vehicle for grumpy old Charlie Brooker and his chums to mock the world's ready supply of particularly awful television. And it's very funny, but there was one section that I felt horribly uncomfortable watching even within the additional frame of satire. I think you'll probably know by now that it takes a lot to prompt me to react like... oh, I don't know - this, for example:

Jesus Christ, this is absolutely fucking hideous

Having been beaten into being a cynical misery-guts from late school age, I've always had great discontent with the idea of purely cosmetic surgery, but my dislike of it started well before I could fully realize how hateful it was - it's used as a gateway to further objectify women, a process to turn people into what they think the world wants them to look like, simply to cut them apart and put them back together in a way that instantly cures them of the ugliness that they perceive themselves to have thanks to the pressure that we put on to them. As said later on in the video, what this televisual atrocity is doing is saying that they're absolutely right - that they shouldn't have any self-esteem for who they are, but that we can save them by drawing up a plan to change them, adding to or slicing out the pieces of their faces and their bodies, reassembling them bit by artificial bit to make them look acceptable and replace their old selves with this universal pre-packaged silicone grimacing standard in a primitive form of roboticization.

Normally at this point I would blame America for being the only society remotely capable of giving this to the world, but this is really on a whole new level - I can't unload the blame on to one country this time, I'm just ashamed that it existed. Besides, the television that is vomited on to me daily here is so appalling that this programme unfortunately didn't come as any great surprise. Listen to the comments from the three panellists as the nightmarish vision goes on, and especially the little interjection at 6:55 - Frankie Boyle is disgusted with it. That's how wrong this is. If that doesn't tell you about the sheer scale of the problem, then nothing will (apart from the blunter conclusion at 8:35).

Actually I've decided it's America's fault after all. Thanks a lot. (It's worth mentioning that even their press was revolted by it - they've got to have some standards.)

Comments

[davidn]

I didn't know you'd been to any of the recordings! Did the back of your head get on to TV at all? :)

To your comments above, I've been realizing more and more recently just how compressed the final cut of programmes like this are - especially with the rise of 45-minute versions of what used to be half-hour shows (QIXL and Have I Got A Bit More News For You, two equally unwieldy titles for very opposite reasons, for example) - in fact I'm not sure why the half-hour ones are now kept around if there's always a longer follow-up (and tightness for time has changed since the mere four channels that I still remember...!) In this, I never got the impression that people were laughing at the poor souls misguided enough to go through with it - more an uncomfortable sort of laughter at the whole horrific concept that someone actually made it.

I thought Frankie Boyle was needlessly offensive when I first saw him on Mock the Week, but I've grown to really like him now... he's still abrasive sometimes but you have the feeling that... well, that's what he does! And despite all that, you get the impression that he's actually a decent person (especially in the section that was the subject of this post).

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately not -- I was in the audience section on banked seating, behind the bit you could see on TV! [If you're desperate for the back of my head, it's prominently visible throughout this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa1HpMjOTyA&feature=related) live recording of Metric, by someone I don't know. [I, obviously, am the one who's still not had a haircut since November '05, day before my 19th birthday.] The chances of this desperation are unlikely.] Recordings are a worthwhile and free thing, if you're living in London, though can be hard to get to. I also went to the radio recording of Charlie Brooker's So Wrong It's Right, which I'm less likely to be visible on. That show suffers even more with format problems, and helped me decide I really, really dislike Lee Mack.

Actually, I was very nearly at the recording for the election episode of hignfy you spoke about previously (http://davidn.livejournal.com/392576.html), though I only discovered this recently. A friend from St Andrews (http://www.ninepointeightone.net/) who's currently moving from Bath to London, while continuing his PhD at the former, against his supervisor's wishes, in one of the of the most ill-advised moves I know, told me this recently. Dave (for it is he) got a phone call at midnight election night, got a phone call from a friend asking if he wanted to come to the following day's hignfy recording. He said "Of course", then discovered it was 8:30. He went to bed at 4:30, got up at 7:30 arrived, and his friend opened the conversation with "Dave, I'm cold and the conservatives have the most seats in the House of Commons." They had four tickets, for the two of them, and were waiting around for two hours (continually being told it would be on in five minutes) while the show was being written, before being let in. Hislop, apparently, was still drunk, and Dave was surprised to hear about a lot that went through. They'd conidered calling me, but didn't know if I would've had time to make it. Given I was wearing a kilt and a T-shirt with a sign saying "I'm British" stuck to it, and had an appointment that morning, it's probably best I didn't go.

The half-hour versions are kept around for the obvious reason! There are primetime half-hour slots which really want to still show the program, and it allows for more flexible repeats.

Frankie Boyle is abrasive for being abrasive's sake, and likes to pretend to be controversial or to have a point by saying things that sound shocking, but really are too stupid to actually have any point or actually offend anyone. Mock the Week's a terrible show for a lot of reasons - a lot of which are encapsulated by the title. It vaguely looks like it's a satirical show on the surface, but is entirely, at root, about laughing at things, as though all of this is something which must be accepted, or can't be explained, and definitely isn't our fault. Or, alternately, is just mean.

Frankie Boyle is at root a decent person, possibly. It's irrelevant to the fact that his comedy's not particularly funny, and mean-hearted, for mean-heartedness sake. He's got a comic talent, but most of the time doesn't use it particularly well.