A MAN with too many face lifts described how his heard now grows behind his ears. Even with a couple of meticulously positioned magnifying mirrors, it's an awkward place to shave, so he's having electrolysis. Another bloke, keen to become a member of\ the "eight inch club", underwent botched surgery for "male enhancement" and, more or less, lost it all. "Who wants me now?" he wailed. "Who wants me now?"
Well, obviously the Hung Jury dating agency (for certified "eight inchers", who are checked and photographed by the Mistress of Measurement) doesn't want him. But sleaze TV, like the new four part series, Hollywood Men (following on from Hollywood Women and Hollywood Kids) loves such Tinseltown titbits, even if titbits isn't quite the word in this case. "Be all the man you wanna be," Dr Melvyn Rosenstein's ad had said. "I was only hoping to market myself a little better, the emasculated one whimpered.
This series of Hollywood documentaries, all made by Carlton TV, can bring out the worst in a viewer. It's almost impossible to feel compassion for the victims of such extreme vanity or delusion. The bloke destroyed by the botched surgery didn't need it. His female partner, who has since bolted, even, pleaded with him not to bother spending his $5,900 - a special offer price - for a combined "lengthening and thickening procedure. (How could he possibly have been made any thicker?).
But, in Hollywood, "enhancement" is, what Fianna Fail might call, a "core value". Pumping iron, liposuction, face lifts, teeth colouring, beauty treatments including mud packs and eyelash dyeing, arm and pectoral implants, hair transplants, hair pieces ( wigs, mats, rugs ) and sun tan pills are now all routine parts of male primping. British actress, Stephanie Beacham, taking Hollywood money while being head girlishly condescending about the nonsense, insisted that she has seen bald pates placed on top of toupees to make actors seem bald.
Mind you, there were some magnificently awful rugs on display. Bony, old men with, withered, little faces had full heads of luscious, dark brown hair that few young women could match. Some of these wigs even come with pony tails attached. One bald bloke, wearing a hill length "Jesus" rug, beamed as he claimed that within half an hour of being rigged out with, his new mane, he was "stopped at traffic lights and asked for a date by a real babe". The ad for GLH Formula Number 9 head dye (apparently, for more, eh, coonvincing" results, you dye your head the same colour as the wig) says: "Bring the Babes Back!". But one bloke who doesn't need GLH Formula Number 9 is Fabio the star turn of Hollywood Men. Fabio has a head of hair that a shampoo company would kill for. He is also California's idea of male perfection and he's making a fortune as "a romantic icon".
He has made his name as the model for cover illustrations on women's romantic `fiction. Clasping swooning romantic heroines in his muscular arms, Fabio really has hit the big time. "He's the hunk for women who are as thick as a brick," said one commentator. Judging by the crowds of females who turn out to see Fabio on tours of shopping malls, California is teeming with thick women.
"I cannot explain Fabio. He is so disgusting," said Ms Beacham. "He's an awesome, awesome man and I would guess he has a very large penis," said Roseanne, the sitcom vulgarian, who, long ago, had a couple of good jokes and a winning line in brazenness, before she beat them to death with repetition. For his own part, Fabio, who speaks a dialect of Arnold Schwarzenegger English, reckons that it's not just his looks that women want now. "Id is de hull bersona," he smouldered.
As vulgar TV goes, Hollywood Men was funnier than most. Pictures of male strippers performing as women stuffed crisp dollar bills down the lads' skimpies were bizarre. "Paper cuts are a real risk and can, be very sore," said one of the lads. But the formula is tiring. The message is that Hollywood people are not real people and, as such, are beyond sympathy or compassion. Clearly, a lot of them are jerks but freak shows inevitably leave a lingering guilt in the viewer. In some ways, everybody is demeaned by this sort of stuff, despite the fact that it can be compulsive.
PERHAPS the cast of Our Friends in the North (i.e. Newcastle), Peter Flannery's ambitious, £7 million, nine part "epic drama" spanning 30 years (1964-1994), could have benefited from a course of Californian youth enhancement treatments. The first episode featured the four principals, all allegedly 18 to 20. But BBC make up can only do so much. Most of them looked more like 35, which means that by the time the series reaches the late 1970s or early 1980s, they'll look fine.
Anyway, the four young friends - Nicky (Christopher Eccleston), an idealist attracted to the Labour party, when such a conjunction was possible; Geordie (Daniel Craig), who needs to get, away from Newcastle and his alcoholic father; Tosker (Mark Strong), a pushy bloke who wants to be a pop star and nary (Gina McKee), who, like Nicky, is off to university - fall out over the course of the first, scene setting episode.
In 1964, lads like Nicky read lads like Jack Kerouac, red brick terraces were being pulled down and tower blocks (a new idea then) were on the drawing boards. The brick built terrace house is no longer an option . . . streets in the sky . . . high quality, high rise, apartment blocks made from steel, glass and sunlight are the future," says the local Labour power broker, who offers Nicky a job.
Knowing enough of the history of postwar Britain to realise that a lot of this optimism is going to end in tears, narrows the range of possibilities for this drama. We know what happened, even if we don't know what happened to these four, so they had better be interesting.
One aspect of which, doubtless, would have even the members of the Hung Jury dating agency drooling, is the virility of the young men of three decades ago. Geordie has unprotected sex once and hits, as the Americans say, a home run. Tosker has unprotected sex once (with Mary) and does the same. With blokes like that on the loose, it's no wonder the pill was so popular in the 1960s. Chastity belts wouldn't have been out of order.
Using music by The Animals, Bob Dylan and The Kinks to enhance the period feel, made the first episode something of a drama department Rock `n' Roll, Years. That's fair enough, but adding such memorable actuality just increases the pressure on the characters to live up to the times, or, even worse, the myth of the times. In its own way, this one is as much a period piece as the big Jane Austen adaptations of last year. We just know the period "a lot better.
DRAMA of a more modest kind finally got the 13 part RTE/BBC teen series, Scene, underway. After pulling last week of Edward No Hands (unforgivably, after a review had been filed!) Career Opportunities opened the series with a play about sexual harassment. Written by Declan Hughes and directed by John Lynch, it had a strong message. But the awfulness of some of the dialogue - albeit self consciously and self mockingly awful - tipped it dangerously towards farce a few times.
"You are a seriously ballsy lady," sales manager Ken (Conor Mullen) tells teenage sales woman Aileen (Janet Moran). When Page Three pin ups begin appearing on the desks of Aileen and her friend, Martha Clelia Murphy. Ken holds court in the open plan office. Okay guys, listen up. Now it I've gotta do some serious Sherlock to get to the bottom of this will but I don't want to.
Later, Ken becomes Aileen's chief sexual harasser. After helping him to a major sale of furniture (Sale of the century we're talking serious Nicholas Parsons here," he says) they celebrate in the pub. With drink taken, they kiss. Sobered up, Ken remains keen to proceed, but Aileen is not. Being her boss, he hassles her and finally fires her.
The sacking has ramifications. Martha fears that if Aileen takes Ken to court, she too will lose her job because he has threatened to close down the operation if there's any trouble. So, we get emotional blackmail on top of the sexual harassment. That seem accurate. Aileen's father also advises that maybe she'd be as well "to forget that solicitor stuff". She ends up heading for the airport.
Career Opportunities told a darker than usual (if not quite as bleak as Edward No Hands) teen drama tale. The glossy context, however, was often too close to parody: yuppie Ken speeding around Dalkey, Killiney and Blackrock in shades and red BMW was, surely, just a buffoon. There was too, as Ken might say, some seriously dodgy acting and dancing from the girls in one disco scene.
But, overall, it was engaging. The test, of course, is what teenagers think of it. So far, though, Scene has been worthwhile. There is a risk of preachiness in dramatising topics such as teenage suicide and sexual harassment. But Dermot Bolger's and Declan Hughes's scripts have largely, if not completely, avoided such pitfalls, even `though the plays to date have been more credible in plot than in tone. These are modest dramas, but they're welcome on RTE.
FINALLY, Witness screened an updated version of a programme, first shown in late 1994. Myra Hindley is back in the news in the wake of the West case and because she made a long statement to the Guardian last month. This film revisited bleak and misty Saddleworth Moor, where five murdered were buried 30 years or so ago.
It examined the arguments for and against Hindley's release. Former editor of the Observer, David Astor, Lord Longford and prison chaplain Peter Timms remain in favour of release. The families of the victims disagree and perhaps, most tellingly, people interviewed in Ashton market - where Hindley and Ian Brady picked up young John Kilbride remain ready to strangle her if she ever gets out. Where 30 years seemed like an age in Our Friends in the North, feelings seemed perfectly frozen over the same period in Myra Hindley - A Life Sentence. It's all about perspective, I suppose.