TRULY, we live in a global village. And sometimes it seems like we’re stuck inside the global village’s only fetish club.
Sex Stories: Fifty Shades Of Grey
Channel 4, Sunday, 10pm
The Dark: Nature’s Nighttime World
BBC2, Sunday, 9pm
Vexed
BBC2, Wednesday, 9pm
There I was hunting for Olympic gold using the BBC’s red button but it looked like the search for a British winner would prove fruitless – indeed, that the highlight of Day 4 would be Boris Johnson declaiming: “There are semi-naked women playing beach volleyball glistening like wet otters!” – so I turned to just about the only documentary swimming against the great sporting tide last week. Boris’s wee sister Rachel quickly appeared and this is what she said: “Call me old-fashioned but I don’t know any women who want anal fisting of a Friday night.”
Now, calling Sex Stories: Fifty Shades Of Grey a documentary is technically correct but I should stress it was a Channel 4 doc, so the producers had access to the network’s unrivalled database of freaks, loonies and perverts. Usually Ch4 doesn’t need any excuse to wheel ’em out, although when they turn up on Countdown or the horse-racing it seems a bit contrived (this is a joke). Here, though, the presence of S&M enthusiasts Michael and Alison was justified. Only if you’re an otter living in a riverbank den do you have the excuse of being unfamiliar with, if not the book then the hype about Fifty Shades Of Grey, the mummy-porn phenomenon ker-chinging its author E L James more than £1 million a week. Michael and Alison were willing participants in the programme (“These are our dusters … but not for dusting”) although as is often the case with the database they were really boring. So what was left? Another couple, much more attractive, recreating the scenes where the tome is falling open right across the land. A book group debating its merits over Pinot Grigio with one woman claiming it had put the feminist movement back half a century, although only after she’d supplied the most detailed and exhaustive list of its rude bits: “Whipping, biting, genital clamps, hot wax, padding, caning, ice…”
This wasn’t the serious study of Fifty Shades you would have got on The Culture Show or The Late Review but, frankly, who needs that? I enjoyed the succession of sexperts and other talking heids trying to out-pun each other as they competed for the cover quote for what will doubtless be the 179th reprint any day now, a contest won by literary agent Jonny Geller’s “This book will change your wife”.
If you’re shy about being seen reading Fifty Shades, befriend a headlamp beetle, one of the stars of The Dark: Nature’s Nighttime World. Dr George McGavin, an expert in such beasties and a Scot, assured us their glow was so bright you could read a book by them. Like everything else in this series, they’re nocturnal. “They use the headlamps to attract mates,” said George, failing to add that this behaviour was exactly replicated by young men in souped-up Vauxhall Corsas in Dundee.
“Why do so many animals come out at night?” went the voiceover at the start. Er, because there are now so many nature presenters tracking their every move during the day? But I don’t get the sense the guys (and gal) of The Dark are out to become “personalities” through this series. They seem to be as shy and retiring as the animals, as happy in the pitch black as a possum. “Ears of a bat, whiskers of a cat – and that snout,” said the possum guy, “but it really doesn’t matter what you look like when it’s dark.” He was talking about the possum, of course, not himself.
Strictly speaking, “playing possum” is to lie in a stupefied state, tongue hanging out, and pretend you’re dead to put off predators. The thermal imaging and infrared cameras couldn’t quite show us this, but there were plenty of other amazing, ghostly sights. The tapir guy got to see a tapir up close, the jaguar gal got to see what appeared to be a jaguar statue ditch the regal pose and lollop into menacing life – and George got to see a net-casting spider ambush a passing cricket in killer stretchy blue silk. “Wow!” he said, suggesting a life’s work in the half-light had all been about this moment.
I gave up on Spooks when they gave up on cool, brave, mysterious, beautiful Jo, she of the Jean Seberg haircut, played by Miranda Raison. The supreme act of self-sacrifice, I reckoned, although obviously Jo killing herself to stop some mad bombers came a close second. Anyway, Raison is back in the crime caper Vexed as the new sidekick of Jack Armstrong, the slovenly, sexist detective played by Toby Stephens. Can she do comedy? I’m sure she can, although inconveniently this is entirely gag-free. «