Holier-than-thou Channel 4 is using Around The World in 80 Weighs as a marketing tool to flog pies and cakes
YOU want a free foreign holiday? Hit the doughnuts and keep hitting them until carers need to winch you out of bed in the morning.
At which point, some conniving little sod from a TV production company will probably appear and ask if you want to go on: “A fact-finding mission to help solve Britain’s obesity crisis?”
At the bottom end of the scale, you might then earn a trip to Turkey for surgery, on BBC3’s Getting Thin Abroad, but whinge and binge enough and you could land the jolly to end all jollies, on Channel 4.
It’s called Around The World In 80 Weighs and is one of those shows where you know they’ve come up with the title before nailing the format because there are only five “weighs” during this 35,000-mile odyssey, so they might as well have gone with Planes, Cranes And Automobiles, given all the heavy lifting that’s gone on with the show’s six “plus-sized pilgrims” who vary in terms of girth but all seem to have either funny or deeply inappropriate jobs.
Supremely entitled
Tiffany, for instance, is “Waste Co-ordinator”, in oh so many ways, while Russell is a “Health Insurer”, despite the huge premiums that must come with being part of a group that’s “absolutely ginormous”, according to the very likeable Phil, who’s a Behavioural Welfare Coach.
General tone for the duration is tearful, worried and a bit too self-pitying but, as with every television show, the younger they are the less likely they are to have any concept of personal responsibility.
On 80 Weighs, the really bad news comes in the form of body-positive activist Tiffany, 24, who describes her gluttony as “instinctive eating”, and a mound of sound called Therryi, 32, who, despite enjoying all the benefits of a free British education and healthcare, said: “Society is a lot to blame for me being overweight. It’s got chicken shops and Chinese shops everywhere. It makes me think, ‘wow, does my country not even care about me?’”
If that was even remotely true and she really believed it, of course, you wonder why she didn’t just get Channel 4 to drop her off at Dignitas on the way.
But if they’d done that, the supremely entitled Therryi wouldn’t have got her holiday of a lifetime which, this week, reached beautiful Tonga, where the island is buckling under the weight of its citizens and even the stick insects have diabetes.
Here, the six were given a broadly sympathetic welcome by the islanders.
The week before that, though, they were in Japan, where only four per cent of the population is obese and the locals have a more disdainful approach to the overweight, leading to some fantastically abrupt conversations at a Tokyo clothes market.
“Do you have that to fit me?” “No.”
“Were you shocked when we arrived?”
“Yes,” they thought Sumo’s Honbasho’s finalists had rolled into town.
Harsh or sympathetic, however, there’s never any question the tactics will work and help the six lose weight because there’s never any other outcome on UK diet shows. In fact, they wouldn’t make it on to television if they weren’t successful.
Yet Britain’s obesity crisis still gets worse every year, so the best you can ever hope for is that someone twigs what’s actually going on here which, I’m pleased to say, Therryi does in next week’s episode when she says: “America’s not attempting to tackle the obesity crisis, it’s attempting to build an obesity industry.”
The inference here, obviously, is that holier-than-thou Channel 4 is somehow different from heartless America.
It’s not. It’s using the six as a marketing tool and clearly gives not a toss about their health issues, as you can see from the adverts filled with plugs for Nutella, Super Noodles, pies and cakes.
If you doubt they’re also just being used as entertainment, then tune in next week when, for no good reason at all, Tiffany is sent for an enema that begins with an assistant saying: “I’m just rubbing your abdomen, sending a message to your colon telling it to wake up, wake up . . . ”
And I promise you’ll hear yourself replying: “No! Sleep, baby, sleep.”
Chmels great to me
A PROPER “Doctor Livingstone, I presume” moment on Saturday’s unforgettable episode of the Big Show, as host Michael McIntyre held a microphone in front of a bleary-eyed and naked Bradley Walsh and said these immortal words.
“Please welcome, Fanny Chmelar.”
For the next few seconds, in that startled Sheffield hotel room, Fanny stared at Bradley, Bradley stared at Fanny, and probably half expected her to wrap one of her skis round his head after that fit of The Chase giggles 13 years ago.
Instead, to the utter delight of the student audience, something far more surreal and funny happened.
She produced a cooler box and Bradley, who was blindfolded and wearing a woolly hat by this point, had to guess what food items “Chmel of Fanny”, which were, if tears of laughter didn’t deceive me, a lump of cheese and a sea bass.
It’s not often, of course, that you find a light entertainment programme or comedy that can produce such a reaction these days.
But to be able to do it and then switch to Alfie, the Unexpected Star with cerebral palsy, singing Born Free, without it feeling tokenistic, jarring or anything other than joyful is a rare and brilliant television show indeed.
(You can watch Bradley meet Fanny again and again and again, on the Midnight Gameshow segment, via BBC iPlayer or YouTube).
WINTERWATCH, Iolo Williams: “Fern sperm? Who knew that fern sperm was even a thing?”
Just about anyone who’s watched The Only Way Is Essex.
Unexpected morons in the bagging area
THE Weakest Link, Romesh Ranganathan: “In the animal kingdom, what W is a winged insect that lives in a nest known as a vespiary?”
Jowita Przystal: “Lion.”
Romesh: “In maths, what is 35 minus 18?” Janet Street-Porter: “12.”
Ant & Dec’s Limitless Win, Ant: “The breaststroke race in which Adam Peaty won his first Olympic gold medal was contested over how many metres?”
Adele: “One.”
And Celebrity Mastermind, Clive Myrie: “Koln is the German name for which city?”
Humza Arshad: “Lahore.”
WINTERWATCH – The big debate. Michaela Strachan: “I love a bearded tit, but they’re misnamed, aren’t they? The bearded tit is actually a moustached tit, surely?”
So should we go with the former, the latter, or just plain old George Galloway?
Random TV irritations
DANCING On Ice losing comedy contestant Ricky Hatton, whose brain never really recovered from Oti Mabuse telling him: “Moving forwards, you need to skate backwards.”
Drumming Welsh weather nuisance Owain Wyn Evans replacing Tommy Walsh on Homes Under The Hammer.
Gregg Wallace’s toe-curling attempts at Inside The Factory “bantz”. And former BBC newsman Jon Sopel cutting a very sorry figure as he used an appearance on The Chase: Celebrity Special to plug his new political podcast which, I must confess, I’ve never heard, but I’ll eat my own feet in a Subway baguette if it’s not a load of chin-stroking, centre-left b*****ks.
Great sporting insights
STEVE SIDWELL: “I like the way Toney always backs himself. He said he’d score 30 goals and he didn’t.”
Teddy Draper: “Jockey Joe Anderson was almost dismantled from his horse.” And Paul Merson: “Brentford are a steady, consistent team that have ups and downs.”
(Compiled by Graham Wray)
CHANNEL 4 series Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain is TV’s latest futile attempt to reverse the result of a dispute that was lost because NUM leader Arthur Scargill had neither the balls nor the brains to have a national ballot.
A fact that isn’t even mentioned until episode three because it doesn’t sit well with the political prejudices of the programme-makers, who’d rather you believed the strike was undermined by a shadowy establishment/ media conspiracy than the union’s own catastrophic failure to respect democracy. C4’s free to fool itself, obviously, but this documentary adds nothing to our understanding of the ’84/85 strike or the history of Britain’s miners which hasn’t already been summed up in just four words.
Lions led by donkeys.
FOR all those who’ve been wondering if Love Island: All Stars’ bombshell Arabella Chi is anything more than just a pretty face . . .
Monday, to Josh: “I’m definitely having the easiest conversations with you, Toby, Chris. That’s four of you.”
No, she’s not.
TV Gold
BRADLEY WALSH shaking Fanny Chmelar’s hand with a “Blimey, you’ve got a grip and a half”, on The Midnight Gameshow slot.
BBC4’s The Last Survivors.
Murder Trial: The Killing Of Dr Brenda Page (BBC2).
Lucy Lapwing stopping Winterwatch in its tracks with the news: “Barnacles have the biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom.”
And Netflix’s outstanding Six Nations: Full Contact which has captured absolutely everything from last year’s tournament, including Stuart Hogg leading the first victorious chorus of The Rattlin’ Bog and Loch Lomond after Scotland had metaphorically and almost literally pulled down England’s pants at Twickenham. Phenomenal.
Lookalike of the week
THIS week’s winner is Paul from The Traitors and a Van Gogh self-portrait. Sent in by Christine and Caden Back, from Maidstone, Kent.