More to the point, what the hell is a woodchuck? And while we’re on the subject, why would anyone want to sell seashells on the seashore, where they’re available for free? It’s not a viable business strategy. Not that I wouldn’t like to see someone take it to the Dragons Den, so we can watch Theo Paphites’ head explode.
Aside from the earth-shattering revelation that tongue-twisters are a bit contrived, this post was really supposed to be about Dangerous Jobs for Girls (Wed. 10pm), so back to the programme...
Dangerous Jobs is Channel 4's latest masterstroke, and more proof that if television really is the drug of a nation, as the Disposable Heroes once rapped, then C4 is ketamine. 20 minutes and you’re rocking in a corner, mooning unintelligibly about how much you love cheese.
Only part of the TV screen is visible from the corner of my living room, so I may have missed some key points here but from a distance it looked like some thrusting young turk at C4 had come up with the idea of sending three successful professional women to British Columbia to cut down a tree. Why? Because it was there? Because the Daily Express needed paper for its next 12 issues? A local squirrel had rigged the Big Brother voting?
Boringly, it turned out to be an empowerment issue, presumably a reaction to that well-publicised glass ceiling in the logging industry. It's a quite brilliant idea but for two things (1) there are already people who cut down trees — they're called lumberjacks, and (2) if it's about empowerment and all the participants are older than 17, why is it called Dangerous Jobs for Girls? Only Channel 4 can successfully empower and patronise someone at exactly the same time.
The real victims here are the lumberjacks though. this is merely the latest in a series of blows to their saw-wielding, moose-gnawing machismo. First Monty Python portrayed them as a bunch of wildflower-pressing, scone-buttering jessies, now a bunch of white-collared young guns turns up, demanding to borrow their helmets and have a go on the chainsaw. It if wasn’t so silly, it would be rude — after all, these people already have to wear plaid for a living, and risk life and limb on a daily basis, often literally. While we rant about the missing stapler, they risk going home in a box. Several different boxes.
The big question is, can Dangerous Jobs get even sillier? We can only hope. Deborah Meaden defusing unexploded WW2 bombs in Limehouse would be worth watching.
* Stop press: according to this month's Esquire plaid is IN. Lumberjacks are the new media execs.
4 hours ago
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