Barbie’s depressed — perhaps she’s seen her weird, culty fans
Barbie: The Most Famous Doll In The World Sex, Chips And Poetry: 50 Years Of Mersey Sound
Little did the original 1959 Barbie doll know that her 2017 counterpart would have her own Youtube channel where she posted videos detailing her latest battles with depression.
But then as Mary Portas discovered in Barbie: The Most Famous Doll In The World (Channel 4), no one had any idea just what a phenomenon she would become.
Over a billion dolls have been sold worldwide and to date Barbie has had 180 jobs, been President and landed on the moon (two years before Neil Armstrong did).
Portas set out to uncover the story behind Barbie and whether she was an affront to feminism and responsible for young girls’ negative body image.
Mary kicked off proceedings — ‘investigation’ would be pushing it — at the annual Barbie Convention. More than 800 women from around the world, nearly all of them middle-aged, gathered to relive their childhoods and play with their dollies.
No doubt it was meant to be fun escapism, but it came across as weird and cult-like as they sat in near silence stitching clothes for the dolls they should have grown out of 50 years ago.
Barbie may still have her middleaged fans, but the digital explosion, coupled with increasing criticism of Barbie’s body shape, has seen sales sharply decline over the past five years. in an effort to reclaim the market, manufacturer Mattel gave Barbie a makeover last year and introduced a curvy doll.
the only problem was that she really wasn’t curvy at all — just not quite as anorexic as the original.
At the Mattel headquarters in los Angeles the staff fudged any leading question from Mary: would they ever make a fat Barbie? ‘Nothing is off the table.’
How many of their board members were women? ‘We have some work to do going forward.’
the most entertaining part of the programme came when Mary offered her son a Barbie to play with. Horatio, five, had been raised in a ‘gender neutral’ environment, but still responded with: ‘err. No way,’ when asked to play with the doll, preferring to amuse himself with his toy swords and trucks.
But the big question was why last night’s documentary had been made at all. Supposedly, it was to mark Barbie’s 60th birthday — but that’s not for another two years.
Although Portas is commanding on screen, there were times it felt as though C4 had made the documentary in order to find something — anything — for their contracted presenter to do.
Also popular and controversial were the men who made up the Mersey Sound. No, not John, Paul, George and Ringo, but Roger McGough, Brian Patten and Adrian Henri. they were liverpool’s beat poets whose story was told in documentary Sex, Chips and Poetry: 50 Years of Mersey Sound (BBC4).
thanks to the Beatles, liverpool had become a cultural hub and this trio of working- class men set about making poetry more accessible. they wrote gritty verse about chip shops, alcohol and one-night stands.
they performed their work in the bohemian liverpool 8 area, bringing poetry to the masses.
Fifty years ago, Penguin published their work as the Mersey Sound, which sold 500,000 copies. the only people it didn’t impress were the stuffy poetry critics. ‘A three-headed pantomime horse from liverpool’ was one description.
the film brilliantly captured the famous Scouse wit and the heady days of liverpool in the Sixties, and it was great to have a focus on the fab three, rather than the Fab Four.
MEMORY JOG OF THE DAY: Returning characters are always a big theme in soaps. But surely it’s a stretch for EastEnders to imagine that viewers remember James Willmott-Brown, back 28 years after his last major storyline?