Television
James behaving badly
James Delingpole
Ihave been living in a state of shock these last few weeks. My girlfriend, who used to work with me at home, now goes to an office every day and for the first time I have been forced to take charge of the household chores. They are legion.
Does any male reader have an idea of how long it takes to hang up 12 pairs of socks, eight T-shirts and never mind how many sets of underwear on a washing-line? Is he aware of the brain-numbing complex- ities of getting the machine on to the cor- rect cycle or of changing the salt and rinse aid in a dishwasher? Does he know that to stop a kitchen looking foul, you can't mere- ly throw the dishes in the sink, but have to put sticky jam pots in cupboards, find homes for myriad strange objects and then wipe all the surfaces with a cloth which you have tried to rinse for hours to stop it smelling rank?
These are discoveries I would not wish on any man. My girlfriend believes it is healthy that I should finally appreciate how much work she had to do. I might well have cravenly agreed with her had I not recently heard of a useful term which explains exactly why women should do all the housework and men shouldn't.
The word is 'multi-tasking' and, loosely translated from the American, it means `doing lots of jobs at once'. Women have been good at this sort of thing ever since the days when they had to stitch hubbie's mammoth skins, suckle baby, kick discard- ed bones into the fire and tend the ptero- dactyl stew all at the same time. Men, on the other hand, are atavistically predis- posed to tasks that require single-minded concentration, like hunting or painting pic- tures on cave walls.
`What have you got that's nectar to the gods, fit for a king and low in salt, fat and cholesterol?' I think it's the latent cave painter in me which stops me being good at housework. I deliberate for hours over bags of laundry: is a white and red striped Breton shirt a `white' or a 'colour'? I peg up the clothes with a careful eye for balance and tone; I fold them in exact halves. I don't just wipe the crumbs off the surfaces — I keep pol- ishing until the last stain has vanished. This pronounced aesthetic streak, incidentally, is why men make better cooks than women but I'd better not go on because this is meant to be a review of Men Behaving Badly (BBC 1, Thursday).
Simon Nye's sit-com makes many similar points about the fundamental difference between the sexes — but much more funni- ly. Its heroes, at least as far as I am con- cerned, are flatmates Gary (Martin Clunes) and Tony (Neil Morrissey), who dedicate their lives to such healthy male pursuits as farting, drinking, belching, scratching their testicles, throwing up and placing their heads between the ample breasts of bar- maids. The enemy — though female view- ers might take a different line — are Gary's girlfriend Dorothy (Caroline Quentin) and Tony's would-be girlfriend Deborah (Leslie Ash), whose principle aim is to thwart the boys' every desire. Unlike The Archers — which, as Michael Vestey has remarked with typical percipi- ence, is now marred by an excess of inci- dent — nothing much ever happens in Men Behaving Badly. You can tell a sit-corn's on the ropes when the characters start devel- oping bizarre traits or straying beyond their usual habitat. It says much for Nye's confi- dence that, in the third series of MBB, the blokes remain unrepentantly laddish and largely confined to their squalid lair. The most exciting event in this week's episode was the closure of the cherished local pub. Gary and Tony attempted to retrieve a few mementoes before it was refurbished: a stained hand towel, a urinal and a condom machine which Tony gallant- ly presented to his inamorata. When reject; ed, it served very handily as the lads' processed cheese dispenser. If you don't watch Men Behaving Badly, you're probably by now under the impres- sion that it consists almost exclusively of puerile sight gags, scatological one-liners and cheap sexism. And you'd be absolutely right. The episode began with Gary letting rip a loud fart in bed, and plunged ever lower thereafter. After a generation's tire- some worthiness from alternative comedi- ans like Jeremy Hardy, it all comes — pace Gary — as a breath of fresh air. The standard line on Men Behaving Badly is that it is a topical send-up of the new fad- dism. I'm sure that's why my girlfriend likes it as much as me. But though Nye bends over backwards to present the men in the worst possible light and the fairer sex, pret- ty much, at its longsuffering best, he can i resist including a wonderfully subversive subtext. The women may seem to win at the end of each episode (Gary is soundly chastised for his oafishness, Tony doesn't get his oats) but, by pretending to be more stupid than they really are, the men are given virtual carte blanche to continue pur- suing a life of unending frivolity.
This is why, though it's often hailed as a startlingly accurate portrayal of contempo- rary mores, it's really just a fantastical exer- cise in male wish-fulfilment. In the real world, no man in his thirties would be allowed by his hardworking girlfriend to leave the house in a mess, let alone go down the pub with his mates every night. The most he could hope for would be the occasional, pitiful display of sexist brag- gadocio. In columns like this, perhaps.
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