Not AdMen but SadMen

Wednesday night is TV night in the Milla’n’Rottie household, wall to wall pleasure courtesy of “The Apprentice,” Adrian Chiles talks to the You’re Fired candidate, “Desperate Housewives” and “Dexter.”
I couldn’t possibly go out. It’s all so exciting.

The eagle-eyed, and Radio Times-savvy, will compute that a certain amount of recording needs to go on to make feasible this heady feast, so of course it is the stuff on the commercial channels which is DVD’d. This we can then watch on Catchup. For the marvels of modern technology mean that one programme can be being recorded while we watch another FAST FORWARDING through the adverts.
What a lovely phrase that is, fast forwarding through the adverts.
I’m as fond of a good Honda ad as the next person, indeed I worked for the world’s biggest advertising agency a lifetime ago, and I’m gullible to boot, but it’s not enough. It’s not that it’s glossy lie after glossy lie. It’s not merely the personal injury commercials, or the ghastly soi-disant celebrities hamming it up about Iceland or Tesco. What really fuels my rage is the portrayal of family life, at the heart of which seems to reside FuckWit AdDad, his Eye-Rolling Wife and Disdainful Offspring.

Prince FWAD is the hapless fule who stumbles in one day in search of something fairly straight-forward, like a sandwich. Mother is busy being capable, children are doing homework or watching TV or something. All is calm, all works. The scene is set. Who’s going to cock it up, the equilibrium? Who do you think? FWAD wanders in, picks up the bread packet and frowns. What’s wrong, FWAD? Square bread of a sudden? Whiteish brown? Invisible crusts? Bit Of Both? What’s going topsy turvy in breadworld to stump you so? It’s all so very difficult to take in, love, you have the nation’s pity.
Mother rolls her eyes, catches the glance of Disdainful Offspring who raise a tired eyebrow, flare a nostril and do that silent harrumphy thing with their lips expressing a total disbelief in shared genetic material.
Yup, FWAD’s at it again, just can’t cope when the rules change.
Mother patiently explains in idiot speak. This is the clever bit. We sofa monkeys at home, barely able to cling to the simplest of concepts, in need of great help when it comes to leaps forward in breadland, are clearly the ones who need total idiot speak, thus has FWAD had to be invented, to be us – geddit?
What greater punishment can be doled out to middle aged white male, he who has conquered continents in times gone past, won Pulitzers, run large companies, landed on the moon and, er, been President of the United States, than to be the butt of 50% of all current advertising campaigns?

Women it seems have no sense of humour, so they can never have the piss taken out of them or be the butt of anything. We have to watch with our irony meter turned down low while they writhe orgasmic under the effects of a hair conditioner (going where no hair conditioner has gone before), or get down and dirty with a packet of soup, or go doolally over some newly packaged catfud breathing in with a happy simper particulate matter dense with roadkill brain spatter masquerading as Finest Duck. Or are flirted with by Chippendale types, wooed for their approval of a flavour of hot chocolate.
Our presumed need to be “pampered”, and for that pampering to be deemed Job Well Done thanks to a sachet of hot chocolate or a bit of bath oil irritates on so very many levels.
For every discernible reason (starting with “she’s loathsome” and finishing with “and smug”) Advert Woman is generally isolated. Good. No wrinkles, weird hair and friendless. There is a God. She will have a supporting cast (cat, fireman type) but on the whole she is lone, indulging in a love-in with herself, whether roller-skating on the beach, getting too damn personal with a cat, or looking whimsy in a mirror searching for lines which aren’t there: you’re 19! Stop it. FWAD is only allowed to shake off his intrinsic cluelessness and indulge in being manly when he is out in his car for cars, we all understand the rules, are the one place that Men can be Men.

Meanwhile FWAD has found his nadir in the sponsor ID links topping and tailing the ad breaks in “House.” Here we are presented with a familiar face – fat, 40-ish, blokeish, bit stupid, trying to eat something. He fails, naturally, landing him with his leg in plaster. Oh, the comic potential. For still the FWAD pursues tricky things like yoghurts, lurching at them hopelessly with his crutches, chopsticks for the big fat toddler emasculation has made of him. Obviously the yoghurt conspires against him, explodes on the floor rendering FWAD a flailing yoghurt-free zone on the sofa, which calls for Capable Mum to bustle in, sighing, with her Vax to tackle the trashed floor in only the way that Capable Mum can. She doesn’t even seem to mind much being waylaid from her day job of running the world from her kitchen.
There’s a similarly irksome smug individual who explains to a FW how to make tea, using filtered water. I truly dislike her.

It’s not surprising really, since this take on men has seeped into so much actual programming. No series is complete without some patronising, proficient woman mopping up after the great inept, men. In drama series these are called not BossyBoots, but Matriarchs. And virtually every HowTo series on telly is fronted by this ghastly boorish breed, teaching us how to clean, dress ourselves, cook. The sort of thing that mothers used to do without the eye-rolling. Now we need freakshow versions of pantomime mothers and they have to be on television since there is a new perceived truth that parents don’t know anything. The only truth lies on the screen. We’re worth it. But we’re so very stupid now, that we can’t even be trusted to cook properly. Thank God for Delia, an erstwhile by-word in common sense and since self-traduced via a packet of frozen mash into EverySlut incarnate. It’s exhausting, seeking out a truth in these very many representations.

Just as every man in parliament seems to be Scottish, so on TV if men do get a chance to get some action in the bossing around stakes, they have to be seriously gay. I’m thinking of Gok Wan here. The Jeremys are different, because argy bargy with the Scottish brigade and bruiting on about cars clearly call for Real Men so we’re lucky to have Paxman and Clarkson on hand.
But in thriller type programming, rights are restored, here, the producers have failed to realise that straight men are hapless, that they can’t even open a yoghurt or tackle a packet of bread. They’re brutish and mean and hit people. It’s all very confusing.