Television
Two cheers for fatties
Martyn Harris
Ever since Minder began to invent its own rhyming slang you have had to be wary of what passes for vernacular on the box. Do customs officers, for instance, really call a surveillance operation an `obbo', and do they actually shout 'Knock, knock, knock' when they pounce on a drug smuggler? (The Knock, ITV, Sunday, 9 pm) Surely it would be more efficient to shout, 'Get them!' And nice as it is to see the lovely Caroline Lee Johnson (late of Chen again, does the Excise actually have many dishy black women officers, and are they usually on the trail of a paedophile, a drug smuggler and a gold bullion swindler all at the same time?
I quibble pointlessly, because The Knock is very good — the latest in a line of solid uniform dramas, out of Casualty, The Bill and London's Burning — of which Knock writer, Anita Bronson, and producer, Paul Knight, are veterans. You take a public ser- vice with dramatic potential, staff it with youthful and conflicting personalities, and make their work look exciting by telescop- ing their cases and running two or three stories in parallel. In the second episode Gerry (David Morrissey) was being ele- gantly corrupted by the bullion villain (Anthony Valentine). The paedophile's attic yielded a lifetime's store of porn while his wife pleaded downstairs, 'But we're just an ordinary family. We are Christians!' Meanwhile, on a darkened airstrip, Diane was revving up the Range Rover to ram the drug smuggler's plane. It was great stuff, and if they can do this for the miserable sods of the customs service how long before we are cheering to the television exploits of the Inland Revenue, the park keepers and the traffic wardens too?
On the South Bank Show (ITV, Sunday, 10.15pm) Dawn French conducted a simi- lar revisionist exercise on behalf of female fatties. Her argument was the familiar fem- inist line that advertising, fashion and the media present a false and oppressive image of women as glamorous stick insects. It is false because 47 per cent of women in this country are size 16 and over; oppressive because it feeds the commercial tyrannies of diet and exercise, and the private tor- ments of anorexia, bulimia and self- loathing. Those prehistoric fertility goddesses were big girls, and the Rubens women were pretty well padded - though you had to admit that none were actually the kind of ambling Alp you see around American amusement parks.
Where the programme rose above the routine, was in French's refusal to assign blame to some nebulous male conspiracy — even to admit that most men actually prefer them big and bouncy. Vivienne Westwood made the good point that the modern fashion industry has been propa- gated by photography, and that the camera prefers the graphic simplicity of bones to billows. French herself rejected victim sta- uite a nice day, don't you think?' tus, by bravely offering her own body as an alternative model, nude and semi-nude, to a series of cameramen, painters and stylists — and very nice she looked too. Even Camille Paglia talked sense, attacking the notion that women were the 'tool of patri- mony' and demanding they 'take control of the image of fat.'
What nobody dared admit was that the image of fat as ugly is not all subjective or culturally determined (I write as a former fat-boy myself). Fat is fine, but gross obesi- ty — and there were no examples on dis- play — is not attractive or natural. (When did you last see a flabby antelope?) It is a disease of civilisation and increasingly of poverty, which makes your thighs chafe, your paunch tremble when you walk and your heart stop before its time. Dawn French can cope with her modest obesity because she is clever and beautiful and self confident and rich, but it is glib to suggest it is a mere trick of self awareness for everyone else to do the same.
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