Talking balls
The latest in a barrage of freak-ofthe-week ‘documentaries’ serves nothing other than voyeurism.
LOOK AWAY now if you’re eating breakfast. Turn the page if you’re squeamish or easily offended. We are about to talk about testicles.
I know what you are thinking, and you’re right. The testicles are an intrinsically comedic appendage. It is as if an overworked God passed on their design and construction to a subcontractor who was still learning to sew. This inexperienced worker then fashioned a wrinkled, dangly pouch using far too much skin, then thought – ‘‘Bugger it, that’ll do. What with creating the world, smiting unbelievers, dancing to Creed and so forth, God’s pretty busy; he’ll never notice.’’
The inherent ridiculousness of the human scrotum has not gone unnoticed by humorists. Alongside Sid The Sexist, Sweary Mary and Johnny Fartpants, heroically puerile British adult comic Viz features a character called Buster Gonad, ‘‘the boy with unfeasibly large testicles’’. Poor old Buster must cart his balls about in a wheelbarrow after they were zapped by cosmic rays during a thunderstorm and grew to an enormous size. They’re so gigantic and so prominently displayed, every passerby wants to talk about them, so Buster has no privacy.
Las Vegas man Wesley Warren Jr can relate. Warren is the subject of The Man With The World’s Largest Testicles, which screens on TV2 on August 15 at 9.30pm. Due to obstructed lymph channels, Warren’s testicles are six feet in circumference, and weigh more than 70kilograms. They’re so large that he cannot wear regular pants, and has instead come up with an ingenious plan where he thrusts his legs down the arms of an inverted hoody and uses the sewn-up hood as a makeshift intellectual weight to what are in fact cheap, exploitative, overly sentimentalised reality shows.
Where reality TV was once aspirational, offering a glimpse into the private lives of the rich and powerful, there’s been a recent proliferation of shows that focus instead on the poor, the afflicted, the deeply eccentric, wildly dysfunctional or not awfully bright.
Any marginalised group is fair game. Fat people, hoarders, gypsies and gingas. Wiccans, hookers and dwarfs. Families who loathe one another. Neighbours at war. Uncontrollable teens. Plastic surgery addicts. Junkies in rehab. Drunk hillbilly kids. Underage mums. Horny Welsh clubbers. People with unusual mental illnesses or neurological disorders. Children with heartbreaking medical conditions. Teenagers with Tourette’s.
From the comfort of our own armchairs, we peer through the keyhole into the homes of those less fortunate. We are invited to rummage in the closet of crossdressers, sniff the sheets of swingers, avoid scampering rats and scattered cat poo in the trashcrammed kitchen of some poor sod who’s so terrified of parting with anything that they’ve started bottling their own urine.
We weep crocodile tears at the bedside of dying strangers, shake our heads at other people’s poor parenting or crap relationships, thank our lucky stars that most of our own bodily bits still work pretty well.
Some viewers might kid themselves they’re watching such emotionally manipulative drivel to broaden their understanding of our society, but this sort of programming isn’t about education or empathy so much as old-fashioned voyeurism. Ultimately, the purpose of these shows is to make the viewer feel comparatively lucky/slender/well adjusted/sane by gawping at the lives of those who are fat/sad/ seriously ill/mad as a snake. And with each new show, the threshold is raised, or rather, lowered. Audiences begin to crave ever more outrageous intrusions into the privacy of others for their own entertainment, and it can surely be only a matter of time before we’re offered ‘‘World’s Sickest Cancer Patient’’, ‘‘Celebrity Crotches’’ or ‘‘Meet Brian – He’s Mental!’’
Incidentally, Wesley Warren Jr finally underwent surgery just two months ago. He’s now 70kg lighter, though not especially grateful, complaining that the operation left him with a one-inch penis.
Unsurprisingly, Warren’s epic 13-hour medical procedure was filmed for a follow-up doco, coming soon to a screen near you. I’d watch something else, though, if I were you. There’s a high likelihood that it’ll be bollocks.