Take Anne at face value
PEACOCKS pose a problem for evolutionary biologists. If Darwin had it right, making yourself visible to predators, slowing yourself down with a big display of feathers, ought to be a bad move. A lady peacock ought to see all that plumage and think, “No way.” Unless, of course, lady peacocks see it all and think, “He carts round all those feathers. And he ought to have died of exhaustion or been eaten by now but he hasn’t. What a guy!”
Beauty has rarely got anything to do with looking good, a point made clear on ANNE ROBINSON’S BRITAIN (BBC1) even if it escaped the hawkish senses of Anne Robinson herself. As part of the life-swap element of last night’s programme, a chap called Danny
PICKS OF THE DAY
traded places with a younger chap called Alex.
Danny’s morning routine consisted of brushing his teeth and grabbing a pair of supermarket jeans off the floor.
Alex’s involved make-up and moisturisers, visits to the tanning salon and a vast wardrobe of designer gear. Although it was a good-natured encounter, it could have seemed like a clash of old man versus new man, or cash-strapped versus wealthy.
In fact, it was about two very different things. For Danny, being a man was all about not taking an interest in his appearance. He was, in a way, as vain about keeping up his image of a “proper”, masculine man who didn’t wear product and didn’t fuss about clothes, as Alex was about his.
Alex, for his part, had started slapping on the products when he’d had a bad bout of teenage acne, and just never stopped. It wasn’t about looking good so much as convincing himself that he didn’t feel bad. In Liverpool, meanwhile, Anne interviewed some of the ladies who can be seen walking around the city centre in their rollers in preparation for a big night out.
With typical frankness, she observed that they looked prettier in their curlers than they did in the evening, with all the make-up and fancy gear. She was right but also, perhaps, missing the point.
The point was spending the day walking round the city doing a Hilda Ogden impression. Announcing, to everyone else, that you were the exact opposite of Hilda Ogden, in fact, a lady at leisure, devoting a whole day to your big night out. Beauty was about a billionth part of it.
ME AND MY AFFAIR (Channel 5) had an assortment of people speaking awkwardly but candidly, straight to the camera. Some seemed to be doing it as a way of beating themselves up for past sins.
Others explained their extramarital activities as a way of letting themselves off the hook. It’s inevitable that the most interesting stories ended up in the final cut and the drearier, tawdrier, everyday infidelities were left out. It was telling though how dramatic these confessions seemed to be.
A woman found a strange address on the car’s sat nav, drove to it, and saw her husband’s shoes in the porch.
After a passionate affair a woman split from her lover and found someone else. Then one night, years later, she sent a stray text message and found herself the next day fleeing in secret to Italy to reunite.
It was soap opera material, if not, in some cases, big-screen epics and that, perhaps, was the point. Cheating, getting away with it, even getting caught were ways of making their hearts beat faster. They should have gone jogging instead.