Invaded

If an English man’s home is his castle then his garden is surely his bailey.

Now, although Karen and I haven’t dunged ours about with watchtowers and weapons of war we have (at considerable expense) erected the kind of fence that even Daley Thompson would have trouble pole vaulting over.

So it was with some considerable shock that whilst going about our cosy family business in the dining room yesterday we spied a complete stranger running across our lawn towards our side gate and from thence to the street beyond.

Who this guy was we have no idea. We have never seen him before.

My wife’s only reaction was to drop her jaw. The guy saw this, waggled a finger to her as if to say, “no,” and carried on running. I didn’t get a good look at him but my wife did. He was, to quote her exactly, “chubby – in his twenties and plainly running from someone.”

Aside from the annoyance and sense of outrage this engendered in me (“Get orf moi laaaand!”) – not least because he left our garden gate wide open and we are constantly at pains to keep it secured lest our little ‘un wander out onto the street – he also aroused my curiosity.

Namely because my first reaction from my wife’s description of him was to surmise that he was merely trying to escape bullies or some yobs.

Why did my tiny mind jump to this conclusion? Because he was “chubby”. And that struck me as odd. (a) That my immediate conclusion to a fat person running across our lawn must be because he was trying to escape a mob of size zero Nazi’s with pitchforks and copies of the Atkins diet and (b) that I never considered that his slightly larger body shape might be disguising a thief, murderer, rapist or even a garden gnome defiler.

It just did not occur.

I mean, I’m annoyed he invaded the sanctity of my garden by making it his personal escape route to the chippy up the road but my first reaction wasn’t one of feeling threatened. His body shape somehow rendered him non-threatening. To the point where I wonder why the police don’t employ “big boned” people to act as hostage negotiators or anti siege personnel. I mean, if you were on a bridge about to commit suicide the one person bound to talk you down successfully would be Cbeebies chubber, Justin Fletcher, right?

OK. So that argument fell down at the first hurdle. Scrub that.

But it did make me think very seriously about how the media has trained us all to judge people purely on their body shape. What huge assumptions we all make based on waist size and body mass index.

I mean for all I know, My Chubby could have been running a marathon and had just got himself completely lost...

Rack Off

The great debate has started.

Forget the US vs. Iran. Forget Miliband vs. Miliband. Forget man-pants vs. mankinis.

The question that is dividing the nation at the moment (like a wire-thin mankini in fact) is what is your all time favourite sit-com?

Bizarrely two distinct contenders have stepped forth out of the smoke and rubble of snarling opinion. In the red corner we have The Office – currently flopping about in Heather’s boxing glove like a rogue horse-shoe – and in the blue corner we have Kath & Kim swishing about like an illegal nunchaku in a Japanese tea-house as toted by London City Mum.

This is the moment when I jump into the debate and, much as I love The Office, I am going to nail my boxing shorts to the blue corner. For those of you that have been reading this blog a while, this patronage should come as no surprise as I’ve previously written about my love of Kath & Kim before – right here in fact – see I was on this particular bandwagon before it was even a bandwagon! That’s how cool I am.

Now I freely admit Kath & Kim aren’t to everybody’s taste. The ‘yoomer’ is distinctly Australian and rooted (if you’re Australian, you’ll find that word funny) in the heart of Australian suburban life. It is, to quote one Australian TV presenter whose name I don’t know, Australia laughing at itself.

So to get the yoomer I guess you need to have some kind of affinity with all things Oz. This does not mean you have to like Neighbours or Home & Away. In fact if you don’t like them Kath & Kim will probably tickle your fancy even more.

For me though, the biggest selling point of Kath & Kim is the incredible dialogue. This is where the yoomer resides. Yes, occasionally they do slapstick and physical humour, but for the large part the funnies are in the language and in particular how it is (Joe) mangled. Words are misplaced, transposed, wrongly emphasized and spliced in ways that are both cringe-making and ingenious. For me it’s what makes the whole show one of the most joyously quotable on the market.

For instance when Kath Day-Knight nee Day thought she’d committed bigamy with the love of her life Kel: “you know, Kel, I think I might just ask the pope for an annulment and be damned.”

Or when Kim lays into her poor beleaguered husband Brett: “Oi’ve made your favourite tonight, Brett – rack off lamb” (think about it).

The characters are incredibly endearing too. You can’t help but love Kath even with her eighties fashion sense and her frizzy perm (“the fro is the way to go – Kel loves my frizzy hair, no matter where on my body it is” and “Kel, loves my hair, he says it’s my clowning glory”) and even though Kim is the most horribly obnoxious, high maintenance be-actch in the entire world you can’t help liking the ol’ hornbag. And as for Kim’s “second best friend” Sharon Strzelecki – there is something about her morbid obesity combined with her rabid devotion to sport that is both tragic and richly funny.

I could go on. I know humour is a personal thing but my vote goes to Kath & Kim because, if nothing else, it is a Ricky Gervais free zone.

Now that has got to be the killer argument.

If you want to join the debate then feel free to dive in! The troops are assembling. People are arming themselves. Do you really want to be the one left in no-man’s land with only a copy of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum to protect yourself?

Where’s Wally?

Does overweight really mean overlooked?

According to Paul Yarrow it does.

Forget oil spills and Afghanistan, what caught my eye in the media last week was the story of Mr Yarrow (pictured above). He’s the guy at the back of the picture looking pensive and frustrated as if, to quote Russell Howard, he’s taking a tricky shit.

Apparently he’s been popping up like a pale bulby version of the witch from Chorlton & The Wheelies in a lot of the outdoor news broadcasts that the BBC likes to hurl at our telly’s in their attempts to keep us informed and up-dated about the various news items that make our world such an interesting place to live in.

Shove a camera, a boom mic and an anchorman outside Westminster and there Paul Yarrow will be, floating in the background like the inevitable anomaly in “Picture B” of a Spot The Difference picture competition.

A quick news podcast outside the magistrate’s courts and Paul Yarrow will be dynamically standing still in the background, usually to the left of the guy holding the microphone, not saying anything but ready, Goddammit, for anything.

Now this isn’t a real life Where’s Wally viral. No. This is a campaign. This is a media war. This is the start of a big movement (and no, I’m not talking about Russell Howard’s tricky shit).

Paul Yarrow, in his own words to the Evening Standard, said: "It is a statement about the image conscious media. I am overweight and people like me are treated as unsightly because of the way they look.

"I could have a valid point about something but the microphone is always passed to the person alongside me. The point I am making is that the more you push me aside, the more I'm going to be determined to make my presence known."

Now, while I admire Mr Yarrow’s stance and his campaign to give a voice to the voiceless I can’t help wondering about the effectiveness of his crusade. Because, to be honest, standing at the back of a news reporter who the viewer will be concentrating on so they can ingest the information, is not a particularly good way to get noticed and, more saliently, to get taken seriously – which surely is the true aim of Mr Yarrow’s campaign. As it is he’s become something of an internet joke. He’s in serious danger of truly becoming a real life Where’s Wally.

And is he really doing this on the behalf of all overweight people? Do overweight people really need Paul Yarrow gurning in the background of news reports to make them feel more taken notice of? More to the point, are overweight people really ignored and overlooked in our society in the first place? Are their opinions and their intellect truly counted as worthless?

‘Cos let’s be honest, when you look at most of our MPs, they’re all rather portly to say the least. Being overweight is plainly no bar to political acumen. I suspect also that a good deal of our richest businessmen have supped deep of the fat of the land and have a few spare tyres rolling about the place – usually between the ribcage and the pelvic floor. And does being overweight ever stop you getting on the telly? Of course not. I bet we can all name 5 celebs who could be deemed as being overweight.

In fact here’s 5 for you now straight off the cuff.

1) Ruth Jones (who I’d even say is a bit of a fox)
2) James Corden
3) Dawn French
4) That gingery fella from TimeTeam
5) The annoying opera guy from the GoCompare adverts

OK. So maybe 5 was a bit much. But my point is this: how much is Mr Yarrow’s campaign for the benefit of others and how much is it to satisfy his own personal need for recognition and validation? Because, let’s be honest, we all feel overlooked and ignored sometimes – regardless of our metabolism – but we don’t all throw ourselves under Jon Snow when he’s performing a to-camera monologue for ITN.

Mr Yarrow’s campaign seems a bit... well, shabby and ineffective. There’s nothing to identify his cause – no banners, no sloganeering. He could just as easily be protesting about the fact people with bad hair get ignored by the media. Or people who wear polo-neck sweatshirts.

Let’s hear it loud and proud folks – equal rights for comb-overs who clothes shop at ASDA!

Oi’ve Got One Word To Say To Youse. Noice!

I must confess to being a secret Kath & Kim fan.

Hey guys, I’m only yuman, roight?

So I’m enjoying the fact that BBC 2 is currently showing series 3 on Monday nights. I’m also sad enough to be getting email updates from the official Kath & Kim site in Australia where they are currently enjoying the new episodes of series 4. But it’s a (veggie)mite frustrating knowing we’ll have to wait a good 6 months before they hit our TV screens here in the UK...

For those of you who don’t know the show it’s a weird mix of sit-com, docu-drama and soap. Kind of like Neighbours meets French & Saunders. The humour (or yumour) isn’t to everybody’s taste I must admit but it’s a real shame that the show isn’t as big in the UK as its fans here would like it to be. Nevertheless the girls have built up a respectable and loyal following outside of Oz.

Although the show frequently utilizes slapstick and some fabulous comedy set-pieces what I like most about it is the way the show constantly plays with, twists and mangles the English language. You have to listen very closely to all the conversations or you’ll miss some real gems...

Pacifically, things like the dreadfully permed Kath Day-Knight telling her bitchy daughter, Kim, that Kel (Kath’s husband) thinks her hair is her “clowning glory”... it’s delivered deadpan and in all seriousness and actually makes us feel a great deal of affection for the hapless characters. The joke is always on them, never on us, and yet we persistently wish them all well – even as we’re hooting with laughter at their latest predicament.

In fact the show’s stars/writers – Jane Turner and Gina Riley – constantly walk a fine line between the grotesque and the loveable but always manage to keep the viewers in a warm and friendly place, even when the action is making you cringe with embarrassment.

There’s a realness to the character’s relationships too which makes them easy to indemnify with – the same quality that makes Only Fools & Horses so great but is sadly lacking in new shows like Hyperdrive. It’s a corny thing to say but Kath & Kim has got real emotional heart.

It’s also got an ex-navy butcher with a penchant for man-bags and disturbingly short shorts and the fabulously funny Magda Szubanski as Sharon Strezlecki whose unquenchable sporting fanaticism in light of her morbid obesity is always handled with a curious sense of respect rather than ridicule.

What can I say? The girl’s have got unimpoachable standards as well as being absolute horn-bags. Do yourselves a favour and tune in, toot sweet...

Movements

Rumours abound this week that Dominatrix of Dieting, Gillian McKeith has been dropped from Channel 4 like a lead jockstrap. Apparently her Third Reich tactics and blitzkrieg nutritional regime have appalled even the most iron stomached of Channel 4’s TV executives who are now of the opinion that Ms McKeith is simply just too cruel and needlessly harsh in her patented weight loss techniques to be allowed onto the nation’s tellies.

About time too. I can hear Gillian’s shrivelled bones circling the S-bend of television world even as I type.

Not that I’m taking credit, you understand, but this here blog has thrown a couple of good slaggings her way in the past; notably here, here and here...

And now for a movement of a different sort: I actually heard from Mr Chauffeur man yesterday. A very polite and respectful email promising to get payment to me ASAP. I was pleasantly gobsmacked.

About time too yet again.

Though I’m very aware that it might be wise not to count this particular chicken until it’s hatched...

Stick Witch

Feeling in a malevolent mood I deliberately watched Gillian McKeith’s new show – Three Fat Brides One Thin Dress – yesterday evening with the sole intention of taking it to task on my blog today.

Am I a sad git or what?

Anyway, as always Ms McKeith didn’t disappoint…

The thing with Gillian is… she might do health food. She might do dieting. She might do nutrition. But she sure as hell doesn’t do people. Not unless it’s to do over somebody’s already crumbling self-esteem that is.

Gillian’s emotional blitzkrieg approach gets my goat right on it’s belligerently hairy nelly. I honestly think she is rude, nasty and bitchy for the sheer hell of it. “Being cruel to be kind” is really no kind of excuse at all. Not when you are attacking someone on such a personal level in front of the entire nation. There is no need for it. It is unjustifiable. I bet Gok Wan pulls out his carefully dyed two-tone hair in absolute horror at Gillian’s Cruella antics.

I know that at the end of the day these women have agreed to appear on the programme but I’m sure a lot of their willingness to be televised is down to transient gratitude and inordinate relief when, at the end of Gillian’s 8-week regime, they find they are at last 2 stone and (more importantly) one sabre-toothed Scottish battleaxe lighter. When Gillian disappears back up her drainpipe they must all cheer and break out the stotty cakes in celebration. Awful woman!

She dares to tell them off for not loving themselves enough right after she’s landed the mother of all guilt trips upon them! I need her to see the full horror of what she’s doing to herself, says Gillian, as she presents one of the women with a coffin freshly engraved with her name. Into this she pours trifles, take-away curries and a host of other victual-based crimes that the poor woman has committed. How classy. Next she’s presenting the terrified women with beautifully wrapped mock wedding presents which, when opened, turn out to be diseased livers and clotted up hearts, etc… manky offal fresh from the butcher’s shop. Cue much heaving and gagging. But it’s all for their own good of course…

Surely there are better ways of getting someone to change their way of life than by scaring them and brow beating them into it? Gillian plainly sees herself as a God and these poor overweight women as her unworthy acolytes with which she may do anything in order to achieve the end result. What I see is a megalomaniacal dictator stomping over everybody’s feelings just to score points and ensure that her programme achieves its only selling point…

Weight loss.

Pure and simple.

It’s not about the women accepting themselves or undergoing counselling to deal with the issues that have possibly lead to their unhealthy eating. The goal is weight loss. Nothing more nothing less. Oh look. They’ve all lost 5 inches from their waists in a mere 8 weeks. Job done. Mission achieved. And off Gillian trots like one of those freaky automatons from Bladerunner… onto the next fat target that needs taking down a peg or two as well as a dress size.

What annoys me most about Gillian’s programmes is that the over weight people featured on them stand no chance whatsoever. They’re set up to look fat, gormless, contemptible and infantile. Last night saw three overweight brides-in-waiting struggling to get into wedding dresses that were deliberately chosen to be too small for them. Of course they looked awful. They looked dreadful and were naturally mortified. But if I tried to get into an outfit three sizes too small for me I’d look pretty horrible too! As my wife, Karen, pointed out: if these women had been put into dresses that actually fitted them every one of them would have looked gorgeous. But that, of course, is the Gok Wan approach.

Unfortunately this was Gillian’s show. So instead of beautiful Buddha we got bombastic Beelzebub.

One last thing. Gillian smugly pointed out that obese people live 9 years less than their thinner counterparts. Hmm. But if I have to look like Gillian McKeith to gain an extra 9 years on my lifespan then I’m breaking open the lardy cakes right now…

What’s the difference between Gillian McKeith and a walking corpse?

No. I couldn’t think of anything either.

Gillian’s Nipples

This is not the first time I’ve written about Madame Gillian McKeith (read my previous post here) but I am compelled to write about her again today because of two undeniable spurs.

One is a post about Gillian M and healthy eating in general on Flaming Nora’s fab blog – read it here.

Two (fittingly) is the novel spectacle of nipples appearing for the first (and hopefully last) time on this week’s edition of You Are What You Eat broadcast by Channel 4 on Wednesday evening.

Before you turn away with sickening visions of Gillian McKeith pole dancing around a twiglet swirling around your mind I must add that the nipples were not Gillian’s and weren’t even attached to a body...

In an attempt to plumb new depths of revulsion Gillian this week presented some poor hapless student with a round of drinks that would make a pig throw up. It seems that this pleasantly buxom student had a penchant for cider and cocktails – and in particular Slippery Nipples (well, don’t we all?). All of this quaffing had had rather a ballooning effect on the poor girl’s waistline. This was all the excuse Gillian needed to line up a selection of drinks that could only have been mixed at the nearest abattoir or A & E department:

1) Cider with lumps of brain matter in it – cos cider rots the brain, don’t you know.

2) Lager with eyeballs floating on the top – too much alcohol ruins your sight, doh!

3) A Slippery Nipple with real nipples in it – cos alcohol plays havoc with yer erogenous zones.

Not only was this biology lab gimmick disgusting, abusive and offensive it was also bordering on the perverted. Where does Gillian get all this stuff from? I’m assuming (hoping) that they weren’t actually human nipples - but it still begs the question whose nipples were they?

Now that could be one helluva game show...

They certainly didn’t come from a cow or a dog or a cat. Anyway, musing on their origin led Karen and I to surmise that maybe Gillian had grabbed a pair of nail clippers and clipped off her own nips just to make a point (as it were) and I must admit that I did come up with the revolting (even by my standards) idea that Gillian’s aureoles were surely surrounded by wispy grey hair and crow’s feet... you can see how such a disgusting TV spectacle had canted our thinking, can’t you? Normally we’re very sanitary and aesthetically high-brow in our conversational topics.

Anyway, it was a joy to read on Flaming Nora’s blog that Gillian’s rightful ownership of the epithet “Doctor” is in some doubt as her qualifications apparently come from some unaccredited American college so strictly speaking she isn’t a real doctor at all...

Hmm.

Is that a duck I can hear calling in the background?

Madame McKeith

How can such a tiny, decrepit, bag of bones be so humongously scary?

Ok I’m being unfair here; I know that health food dictator, Gillian McKeith, has bounced back to health from a very serious illness to embrace the nuts-and vitamins perfect-poo lifestyle that she so brutally advocates on her TV programme, You Are What You Eat, but for all that she bullies her fat clients with demonic Caledonian energy I can’t help thinking that there is something extremely unhealthy about Gillian’s general pallor and demeanour. Is she really any healthier than the morbidly obese size-0-wannabes that she regularly tortures with her celery and spinach smoothies? She certainly doesn’t look it.

But what really disturbs me about The McKeith is the contemptuous, harsh attitude with which she treats all her "patients". She’s a bully. She’s absolutely vile to people whose self-respect and self-image is already at an all time low. Her dietary techniques seem to centre around unpalatable food combos, daily poo inspections and ritual public humiliation. I am not exaggerating.

Gillian never seems to be satisfied unless each week she has made her clients, both male and female, cry with guilt, heave with disgust at their own bodily produce and gag with horror at their regular weekly food intake.

I realize that this is the traditional shock tactic approach. Gillian is basing her whole modus operandi on old school army training techniques: totally demolish the soldier’s current belief system and then rebuild him/her anew with a whole brand new ethos. And certainly it seems to work.

But does the end ever justify the means?

She made one poor woman climb into a bath of cold processed food sludge in order to illustrate the kind of crap she was subjecting the inside of her body to. Dubious in itself but Gillian made the sobbing woman do it in the front garden of her London home – with curious passersby peering over the wrought iron fence – thus publicising the poor woman’s distress. That is just not on. For all Gillian is undoubtedly motivated by worthy ambitions – a real fire to save people from themselves – she nevertheless doesn’t give a fig (syrup of) for their emotional well-being or their feelings. Gillian seems to have a very machine-like approach to people. I’d go as far to say she’s a nutritional mechanic rather than a healthy lifestyle guru. As long as people are physically fixed what does it matter if Gillian has messed their minds up in the process?

Of course, these people subject themselves to Gillian’s regime willingly so maybe that’s all the justification that Gillian needs? These people are in extremis and I’m sure in some cases it literally is do or die. Such endeavours always make compelling but uncomfortable viewing.

As I watched last night’s show though it struck me that Gillian is much like a high class dominatrix. An endless stream of clients readily shuffle into her home each week to submit themselves to her elegant E. Coli cruelty and her clipped colonic punishments – every one of them doe-eyed and desperate for one word of praise from Gillian’s perennially curled lips as she forces them to produce "the perfect poo" and imbibe tofu and nettle-root miso soup in quantities that wouldn’t fill a gnat’s belly.

Oh Gillian, I’ve been a naughty boy – punish me with the stotty cake iron maiden face mask again!

You are what you eat? Eat the underside of my boots, worm!