The Last TV Post

Television – in any nation – is not exactly the most fascinating subject, but it is a certain reflection of its culture, and in case you’ve conceived from my previous post that British TV is all about painfully-polite, tea-sipping Brits making their Yank cousins look like a bunch of Bud-swilling barbarians, I’d like to put the entire subject to bed – so to speak – with this post.

Lots of Americans (many of whom actually are Bud-swilling barbarians) think of the British as prudes, but after having been exposed to a limited amount of British evening TV as a substitute for having friends, I’ve come to suspect this is a classic case of projection. I’ve seen things at 10 pm on the BBC that I’d never have been exposed to on the roughly analogous U.S. broadcast networks at any hour, and what I have not observed are vociferous bands of picketers protesting it. In the States we have decency groups counting how many times SpongeBob holds hands with his friend Patrick, or whether Tinky-Winky should be seen by three-year-olds.

Even confining my informal survey to the past few weeks I can recall a documentary on men who have sex with their cars – and other people’s when they can get away with it – and one on women who have sex with fences, bridges, the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower, to name only a few willing partners. Sheer educational value notwithstanding, in the States this would have been strictly late-night cable, and one reason for that is the FCC.

As I understand it, the Federal Communications Commission was established 80 years ago or so to determine who would be licensed to broadcast along a limited spectrum of AM radio waves. Over the years, the commission became the Decency Police of American broadcasting, holding its powers over the heads of announcers who might utter words which shouldn’t be heard by decent Americans. Except, perhaps, at home or in the schoolyard. Broadcast is a slowly-cooling dinosaur in American entertainment, and the FCC is starting to draw flies, though they’re also drawing federally-funded salaries. But they’re not the disease; they’re more like the symptom. The Brits got rid of their Puritans, who survived the crossing to become…us.

So you’ve really read this far to find out about men who shag their cars, haven’t you? I knew it. The BBC documentary focused on two American men, a young man from the Midwest whom you wouldn’t be able to tell from your cousin Fred, and a middle-aged man from – ready for this, folks in Seattle? – Yelm, Washington. The younger man has friends and a life and other interests, but the bloke from Yelm seems pretty much content to stay home and pork his classic VW. He’d be only a little out of place at a science fiction convention, or perhaps less. Despite his rather hazy notion of what other people are like (can doctors transplant mirror neurons yet?) I’m pretty certain he’d never have allowed an American documentary crew to tape him rhapsodizing about the exhaust pipes of cars on the highway, or drooling (and worse) all over a Trans-Am in a motel parking lot. Yelm is a small town.

The following week’s doco explored women who can only respond sexually to objects. No, not those objects, but things the rest of us might consider rather impersonal, asexual, and even public, like the Eiffel Tower. One of the women the show followed had married La Tour Eiffel in a private ceremony, but they’d been unable to consummate their love due to all the bloody tourists. Fortunately she has a liberal attitude towards these things, and has been busily shagging bridges and fences in the meantime. She had a mad affair with her bow, but it cooled, and so did her archery career.

It occurred to me that what might be operating in all cases – NEWS FLASH! – was an inability to relate to other human beings. Most of the people profiled were technically virgins and had no interest in sex as we (well, as I…) know it. One of them had been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, and the rest had not, but almost all seemed to me to be out on that end of the neurological spectrum. None knew there were others like them until they went looking on the Internet. Now they’re starting to link up, and even to share lovers.

“Ten P.M. is the watershed hour,” a gentleman told us when a visiting American friend commented on the adult content on the BBC, which is, for any Yank barbarians who don’t know, a government-controlled-and-funded entity. “It’s assumed children will be in bed after that.” Well, if they’re not, they’re getting an education I was denied in my FCC-controlled childhood in the Puritan States of America. And if they happen to like boinking cars and bridges, they now know how to google up some friends.