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Buerk’s Rage

by | 23rd, August 2005

‘MEN don’t watch the telly any more. Not real men. Not men like Michael Buerk. Programmes are geared for women and feminised men who moisturise their smooth skin.

‘And here is the news for those of you wearing Y-fronts’

That’s not to say that men, those risk-takers and possesses of a single-mindedness that, as Buerk puts it, can be seen as dysfunctional, do not have a role to play on the magic box.

This week Buerk himself plays the role of “man” with aplomb. He’s on Five, appearing on a show called Don’t Get Me Started. That title should give you a clue that this is chance to see a man in full grumpy old sod mode.

Five wants to get Buerk started and then encourage him by way of the Viagra of publicity to bang on at some length about his bugbear.

As the show’s blurb promises: “In this first programme Michael Buerk examines man’s role in today’s femocracy and asks whether there will come a time when men aren’t needed at all.”

To save you the bother of watching and listening to a moaning middle-aged man in your living room – especially those of you who live with the real thing – let it be known that there will never be a time when men are not needed on the magic box.

Nature may dictate that men go the way of the dinosaurs, but on TV they will be vital in playing the role of grunting berks in TV documentaries like last week’s Transformed. In that show, useless husbands were invited to show the world what life was like before Angela Rippon showed us her legs and that ubiquitous blonde woman read the sports news.

Without men you couldn’t have a show called Bring Your Husband To Heel, in which Annie Clayton shows us how you can train your husband like you can a dog.

It’s the next staging post in the sexual revolution, in which men will be told when to lie down and then ordered to do what they’re told, on all fours and in a doggy style.

That’s on BBC2, a channel which used to show men herding sheep on One Man And His Dog and living comfortably with dandruff on Open University, and now broadcasts them trying to make an evening meal out of a tin of peaches and some polenta on Ready Steady Cook.

But there is hope for the so-called real man, the recidivist for whom TV died the moment the first run of The World At War ended and the batteries went in the remote control.

They can stick with Five after Buerk has been faded out, preferably still ranting, and stay tuned for a night of, in running order: golf, V8 cars, Indy cars, motor racing, boxing and football.

Happily, this scheduling means that from 00:45 onwards, a certain type of man can view his kind of programmes without interruption.

And in between shows, he can flick over to ITV and watch reruns of his appearance as an utter monosyllabic bastard on Trisha…’



Posted: 23rd, August 2005 | In: Celebrities Comment | TrackBack | Permalink