X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I’m warning you now, there will be spoilers. Just one or two. The problem is that I can’t think of any way to tell you what I really feel without revealing a couple of things that would otherwise come as a complete surprise, especially to the fellow Marvel fans out there. What I’m hoping is that all the fans who are as sad as I am will already have seen it and everyone else won’t give a crap.

However, here’s your chance to look away. Look away now if spoilers concern you.

I’ve been looking forward to this ever since I heard it was being made, which is probably not the best way to approach a film. Marvel’s track record with movie adaptations is fairly hit and miss. The first two X-Men movies were great; the third one was a great big wobbly pile of shite. Iron Man rocked; Spider-Man was emo even before Venom got in on the act. There are two Hulks. Fans disagree which of them was better (me, I go with Edward Norton, in case that makes a difference to you). The less said about Ghost Rider the better, but then the Fantastic Four films were actually not too bad at all.

I’ve seen them all. Mostly opening night, at the cinema. The sight of the Marvel flicker-flack on the big screen puts a grin on my face that would make an orang-utan proud.

I’m not just a Marvel fan girl. I’m a Wolverine fan girl. So for this movie I didn’t even wait for opening night. I went to the special preview advance showing before the official opening, dragging Frood along with me. I take no blame for Rev Will’s attendance. He said he wanted to come. That’s him on the right.

The opening section appeared, initially, to have been lifted from the Origin story arc by Bill Jemas. So far so good. But then, um. WHAT? Say WHAT? Since when was Sabretooth Logan’s brother? Chris Claremont originally intended Sabretooth to be his father, and the source of the long-term enmity the simple fact that Victor didn’t think Logan measured up to the standard he’d set. Canon has since made it clear that Creed isn’t Logan’s father, but he sure as hell ain’t his brother.

Then follows a quick timelapse special of the two boys fighting through various wars (invariably for the Americans, despite Logan fighting for the Canadian army, but whatever, this is Hollywood). I already knew Liev Schreiber had been given the Sabretooth role, despite being about as non-Sabretooth as you can get. The only way they could have cast someone less like Sabretooth would have been to ask Will Smith to do it. Having said that, Schreiber wasn’t as bad as I expected him to be, but I still think they should have gone to the WWE for their casting.

I found Creed’s continual use of “Jimmy” to refer to Logan intensely irritating and totally out of character for both of them. Just, you know, as a by the by.

We come to Vietnam and Creed’s bestiality has been fed by decades of fighting, and yet Logan is still the noble warrior. When Creed attempts to rape a Vietnamese woman his officer tells him to stop. A fight ensues, in which Logan initially tries to protect the woman and then ends up protecting his brother. This theme arises again and again throughout the film: the notion of brotherly loyalty between Wolverine and Sabretooth. I found it totally unbelievable. Sabretooth is the character who takes great delight in the annual Wolverine birthday bash. By which I mean he bashes Wolverine on his birthday. That was the whole Silver Fox thing and… I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Full Metal Jacket this is not. Watchmen this is not. Where the Comedian shoots a pregnant woman in the head and walks away, here our two brothers find themselves in front of a firing squad for assaulting an officer. I wasn’t aware they did that in Vietnam. But still. Whatever.

Apparently it tickled.

They are then recruited by our old friend Stryker, although Brian Cox had the sense to turn down this one. He’s still in military rather than religious guise, so I can’t complain about continuity there. They join an elite group of soldiers, all of whom are mutants, for some purpose that isn’t made clear, although by the end it’s obvious that this was the start of the Weapon X project.

Yay! Deadpool!

There are three characters in the Marvel universe I follow with any degree of consistency. Wolverine, X23 and Deadpool. The merc with the mouth is simply one of Marvel’s finest creations, and it’s all thanks to Fabian.

I have no idea who the rest of them are. I don’t care. Deadpool! Squee!

There follows an infiltration exercise designed primarily to show off the various powers of these mutants to the audience, and towards the end of this short sequence Ryan Reynolds shows a glimmer of promise. I begin to think that yes, yes, he really could do it. I mean, he’s not horribly mutilated with a face that looks like the inside of a tin of dog food and a voice that sounds like Demi Moore on gravel, and there’s no sign of him recognising the fourth wall, never mind breaking it, but this is pre-Weapon X, right? There’s still time.

But that’s it. That’s your lot. Not even two minutes of a chance to shine. Then our boy Logan takes exception to a bit of violence and walks away to find a new life in the Canadian rockies as a lumberjack with a beautiful schoolteacher girlfriend (who isn’t called Silver Fox). Next thing we know his old squad is dead, and the implication is that Sabretooth is doing it.

What? But I thought… Deadpool? Deadpool? Noes!!!!11!11! He can’t die! Wake up, Deadpool, please wake up!

He does. Eventually. But you’ll wish he hadn’t. It’s just too painful.

Anyway. Then follows a standard Marvel bit of manipulation to get Wolverine back into the Weapon X programme involving murder of loved ones and revenge and all the usual stuff to bring out the animal in him. Yada yada. I’m not going to bother describing it all in detail because it’s all rather predictable. He gets his adamantium — I was disappointed that they toned it down from the stark brutality of Barry Windsor-Smith — and escapes before they can wipe his memory, leaving a trail of bodies as he seeks revenge on his brother.

The plot seems to have taken a pick-n-mix selection from the various story arcs. The Weapon X programme is sort of classic, but mostly Ultimate. In this one the familiar characters from the X-Men films are kids, as they are in the Ultimate series, being used as the basis for experimentation… Sorry. My brain veered dangerously close to what they did to Deadpool and I had to stop and take a few deep breaths or else I’d have been reduced to a quivering heap on the floor, screaming to the heavens “WHY? FOR THE LOVE OF THE LITTLE BABY JEBUS, WHY???!!”

The Blob, usually nothing more than the butt of jokes and someone too foul to generate sympathy, was really nicely done in this film, and for me was one of the high points. Kevin Durand did a very good job with him. I think, basically, that’s one of the reasons this film was so disappointing. The actors all did a remarkable job with the material they were given (apart from Danny Huston as Stryker, who appeared to believe he was working in a straight to TV flick, or was asleep). But the plot was full of holes and inconsistencies; the characters were forced into actions that were simply not like them for anyone at all familiar with canon; the dialogue was at times trite, melodramatic and downright cheesy (that Wolverine and Moon thing was almost enough to make me gag); the fight scenes were often shot unsympathetically and there was just far too much CGI. Especially that bit at the end when Professor Xavier in a Dale Winton tan turned up in Airwolf. The power effects seem to have been taken straight out of Ultimate Alliance (“XXXOO overhead spin kick!”), although that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it worked very well for Gambit and both Frood and I were move-spotting throughout.

I could see where they had levered in bits to “please the fans” but you can’t just take something out of a story arc and drop it into a context that is held together by the araldite and cable-ties of retcon and expect it to work. You can take ideas, principles, tropes or themes and use those, but not plot points. It was obvious and necessary to focus on Wolverine’s battle to be human rather than animal, because that’s the character’s main conflict throughout his various incarnations. It’s fine, even better, to deal with the memory loss in a completely different way because the Weapon X programme isn’t being played out the way it does in the comics. It’s not fine to dump the future complement of the X-Men into cells and then randomly make the White Queen Logan’s girlfriend’s sister. Pulling plot points straight from the comics and juxtaposing them with major retcons is jarring and unsettling for those of us who know the comics. It’s one of the reasons why the third X-Men film fell down (Morrison did the Logan/Jean death scene far better in New X-Men). The other reason was the wasting of one of the best characters of the entire franchise. And Wolverine makes both those mistakes.

It’s a pity, and I have to wonder who’s to blame. The writers? The director? I can’t help but feel you could take the same acting complement, give them the production crew of X2 or Iron Man and you’d have an absolutely stonking movie in which the merc with the mouth would remain the merc with the mouth and I’d have been a very happy girl.

As it is this may not even end up as part of my DVD collection, and the only other Marvel films I don’t own are the ones in the Spider-man series.

Lest you think that my negative reaction is the disappointment of a superfan whose favourite character has been brutally sodomised by the writing crew, I can report that neither of my companions thought it any better and they quite happily tell me I’m a sad Marvel geek.

Let’s hope they manage to do a better job with Avengers, eh?

I bought the game thinking it was going to be a 2-player co-op. Frood would get Spidey and I’d get Wolverine.

Fat chance.

Back in the 1950s, Britain’s tiny Saunders-Roe company was building the rocket-powered SR.53 fighter. Designer Maurice Brennan, according to some of my old Flight colleagues, used to defend the concept against missile fanatics by remarking that “the guidance system weighs 200 pounds and drinks gin.”

That’s from an article in the Register on UAVs, quoting Bill Sweetman.

Think I’ll get some Easter Hodilay Gin for me and Frood. Top ho! Although he’d probably prefer rum.

Got back from my lunchtime run today, pulled off my socks and discovered my right foot was covered in blood inside my sock.

Arse.

Apparently I missed a bit when trimming my nails and there was a little pointy edge that dug into the next toe along and put a big hole in it. Thankfully something of a similar, but lesser nature happened a couple of weeks ago, so I was aware that the pinpoint pain in my toe when running meant it was happening again and the sight of blood didn’t fill me with panic and horror. Not that the sight of blood usually does. Not when it’s mine, anyway.

There was an article in Runner’s World last year, I think, about how to trim your toenails. At the time I thought it verging on the side of obsessive-compulsive. Not any more. Wish I hadn’t thrown that issue in the recycling.

In other news, I’m racing at Cuper in the East Fife Triathlon on Sunday, and I’ve entered Bishopriggs (closed road circuit, woohoo!) and Peebles. I’ve heard so much about how good the Borders series is from other ladies when hanging out by the pool waiting for our heat to start in other races that I thought I’d try one. Maybe I’ll be sufficiently in shape to do Selkirk next year.

In other other news, I was watching the new series about Wonky Willie’s chocolate last night, and they did a sports test to see how cacao worked as an energy drink. Reduces perceived effort and promotes fat burning rather than carb. Wow. I’m sold, and I don’t normally like chocolate. The stuff that’s sold in the UK as chocolate is too sweet, and dark chocolate has too much tannin taste in it.

Although, having said that, I just bought a small bar of his 70% Peruvian, which I was convinced would be too bitter for me, and it’s really rather scrummy.

Sometimes it’s a wonder, in these days of Wiggle and other internet sports shops, that actual, physical shops manage to stay afloat. When you can buy sports kit so much cheaper online, why go to a shop with overheads?

I’ll tell you for why.

A couple of years ago I went to RunAndBecome in Edinburgh and bought my first pair of trail shoes. The staff were great. They spent a long time making sure I had the right shoes for my purpose, my feet and my gait. The shoes were the Asics Gel Trabucos, and I’ve been very pleased with them. They’ve done sterling service both in training and competition.

Finally, however, they wore out, as shoes are wont to do. I knew they were on their way out, and then I had a dream in which I got back from a particularly tough run and discovered the soles were completely smooth. My feet had been hurting of late so I figured this was my subconscious telling me to bloody get out there and replace them.

A copy of Runner’s World had arrived with a catalogue from an online retailer offering the Trabucos at half retail price, and money is kind of tight at the moment so I was sorely tempted. However, I like to support shops because of the service they offer, so off I went to RunAndBecome and told them I needed to replace my Trabucos. Size 39. I was expecting to be in and out in a flash.

But when I tried them on in the shop they DIDN’T BLOODY FIT. Asics, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to change the last for the 2009 model and they were now too tight. Several pairs of different and not quite right shoes later the lovely shop lady found a pair of 2008 Trabucos on offer, and they happened to be in my size, and also were made with the same last as the 2007 model. Hooray!

That, boys and girls, is why one should not buy such an important piece of kit as running shoes online, no matter how sure you are that you know exactly what you want. As for you folks who take advantage of shops by going in to try them on and then going away to order them cheaply online: boo sucks to you. That’s just taking advantage, that is. It’s practically theft. You are using their services and not supporting the shop. Keep that up and there won’t be a shop, and then you’ll be reduced to ordering unsatisfactory kit online and having to send it back.

I don’t really mind that the new ones are bright yellow. Even though it tastes teh nasteh. I’ll just not look at them.

As readers of my LJ will know, I was not especially looking forward to Tranent this year. It wasn’t because of anything like lack of motivation: it was, probably, a combination of season’s first race nerves and the weather. Oh yes. The weather.

After a short spell of sunny days and mild breezes, Scotland had decided it had seen its shadow and hopped back into some severely wintry conditions. As of Friday, the weather forecast looked like this:

I had a rough time with injuries last year, including a broken tooth that needed surgical extraction, a stress fracture in my right foot that cancelled the tail end of my racing season, and a nasty head injury that put a severe dent in the start of my winter training. The psychological effect of all this was twofold and paradoxical: I was both dead keen to get stuck into this year and also suffering from a degree of trepidation over my fitness. The thought of having to race in conditions like that, when I was unsure of how fit I was for it, was almost enough to make me decide to DNS on the Friday.

On the other hand, my Mum kindly bought me some private swim coaching for my Christmas, with Zoe (who can be found at the David Lloyd in Newhaven, as her website appears to be fubarred), and I’d just posted a PB for the 750 in training, beating my previous best by more than a minute; and I had been working pretty hard on my running. I wanted to race. Friday night prep came as second nature so I was confident I wouldn’t simply fall on my arse in T1. I’ve done this often enough now that I should be satisfied my base fitness should take me through a sprint distance triathlon — maybe not in a decent time, but I’d get through it.

The first one of the season, in those conditions, is always a matter more of survival than putting in a good time. I do triathlon as an excuse for drinking beer, not to get myself in the ranks of the elite.

When the alarm went off at 06:30 on the Saturday the sun was shining and it didn’t look too windy, so there was really no reason not to go for it. Apart, that is, from being snug and cosy in bed and not having had much sleep.

I was still half asleep when we left, bike in the back and my stuff in its box. Arrived in Tranent about 45 minutes after registration opened and grabbed the last parking space next to the Loch Centre. It was cold. There was the usual crowd, generic triathlete faces fettling with expensive-looking bikes, plus a few familiar faces from the last couple of years. I’m almost used to being recognised now. I suspect the black eye is a dead giveaway (my triathlon race licence is the only piece of ID I own where I’ve got my preferred eye in the photo).

Heat 2, starting at 10:40. It’s the one thing that I always find a bit of a bummer with competing. You have to get there early to secure a parking space, and then there is invariably a period of a good couple of hours at least of sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting for things to get going. If you’re in the later heats you can watch the slow coaches before getting going, but in the early heats you don’t get to watch the faster people race because they’re done by the time you get back and you’re getting prepped while the few people slower than you are swimming.

The one thing I have never been able to train for is the pre-race toilet requirement. I swear, if you ever want to weigh yourself and get the lowest possible figure, do it just before getting in the pool at a race. There will be nothing inside your digestive system to add to the overall mass. I wonder if organisers have to advise the facilities to supply even more toilet paper.

I was hanging with a few ladies I recognised from previous years. We were a little confused by the number of men in the female changing room: most of them were watching the swim but one was busy slapping himself with embrocation and making use of our loos. We considered that this was, if not plain rude, at least a little ungentlemanly, given that there was a perfectly good male changing room. A minor distraction from fretting about how cold it was going to be.

(At the end he was back, and with the sort of assertive curiosity for which I am infamous, I simply asked him outright why he was using the female changing room rather than the male. He claimed he hadn’t realised it was the female changing room. Even though it was full of females. Hmm. With a rubbish excuse like that I suspect ulterior motives.)

Then it was our turn.

Ordinarily people underestimate their swim times when entering while I overestimate mine by about 10 seconds. This is partially because I don’t want the ignominy of being the last one in the pool and missing the cut-off. Partially it’s because I like overtaking everyone because then I get around 500m of free water and I’m the first one out, givng me a psychological boost. I’d put down 15’15 on the entrance form, which was about right at the time I entered. Having beaten that by a minute in training I thought I was onto a winner.

As it happened my heat was fairly closely matched. I was overtaken by one chap who was going really well, and then I was into the epileptic tadpole kick of the chap in the yellow hat, who had a very poor grip of pool etiquette. In heat-based triathlon, if you want to overtake you tap the ankle of the person in front of you and he is supposed to wait at the end of the length. This chap didn’t seem to understand that. I had to pull up short a couple of times, reduced to swearing in breaststroke. When he did finally stop, a couple of lengths later, he set off at the same time as me rather than letting me get going again, and spent half a length smacking my feet and tangling around my ankles.

The second time he failed to pull up at the end of the length I grabbed both of his ankles and yanked. Not impressed.

With the frustration and several bursts of intense sprinting, plus being unable to get into a rhythm, I found myself flagging towards the end, and it was a relief when the orange kickboard was waved at me and I knew I only had two more lengths to go. Tired enough to use the steps rather than bouncing out of the pool I staggered down the steps towards the cold outside.

Dear gods it was cold. T1 was slow as I had socks and gloves and a jacket to put on against the chill, but at least I didn’t get lost coming out of transition like I did last year. It was a slow start, feeling the effects of a choppy swim, and I was glad of having other people on the road ahead. In 2008 I was out first and saw no one for the whole of the bike leg, which makes racing difficult.

At first I felt warm enough that I could have done without my jacket, and was pleasantly surprised by how strong I was on the ascents. While other people were up out of the saddle and slowing right down on the hills I didn’t have to get up once, and only had to avail myself of my bottom gears a couple of times. That’s a winter of fixie riding in Edinburgh, for you.

Then we turned a corner and had a vicious crosswind combined with a series of long, steep descents. I got a seriously bad speed wobble in Dalkeith last year, which terrified me. There is something about feeling your bike going out of control underneath you at around 40mph and realising that you’re only wearing a small amount of lycra and a plastic hat. I had hoped that getting the bike serviced, and the rear cones adjusted, would give me the confidence to descend this year but it didn’t. People I’d sailed past on the climbs shot past me on the descents. I couldn’t let the bike have its head on that rough surface. I couldn’t convince myself it would stay stable.

I overtook a couple of the people who’d gone past on the next set of climbs, and then it was into the headwind. I was glad of my jacket. My legs became so cold my skin felt like it was on fire, and there was no power there. My muscles had gone into cryogenic hibernation. I also discovered that putting my Smart gels into the pocket of my jacket rather than my tri suit was a mistake, because I couldn’t get at the zip to retrieve them. I like having a quick boost just before hitting T2 as it gives me a bit of extra energy for the run.

T2 was slow, again, because I was cold and stiff from the ride and couldn’t get my running shoes on. The run was my usual plod, although this year, at least, I had no doubt that I could make it all the way round the course without having to slow down. The run, for me, is always a battle to keep going rather than giving in to the feeling I need to slow down to walk for a few yards. Tranent is a good run: I prefer cold conditions for running, and the marshals are absolutely awesome. They’d been out there since 8am, chalking happy, motivational messages and silly pictures all over the pavement, as well as the more practical arrows and directions.

Towards the end I even started trying to put a bit more speed into it.

You can find the table of provisional results here in Excel format. They’re cumulative — my run did not take me 1:29!

Good: I did the swim in 14’16 (based on my own timekeeping — the chip times include T1), which is a new PB and means I need to revise this season’s swim goal. I beat last year’s overall time by two and a half minutes and was faster in every single section, albeit not by much. The conditions were a lot worse, though.

Bad: Last in category. Ouch. I know you should really run your own race and not worry about everyone else, but my relative performance was pretty poor. I’m still getting severely spanked on the run. My bike leg this year was not as competitive within class as it should have been, and I know that’s partly because of my crappy descending but also because I just didn’t push hard enough. Overall I didn’t push hard enough except in the swim: I need to get out of this mental rut of merely surviving the run and start trying to go faster.

Still, today I feel pretty fit, when I would have expected to feel like death. Might even get the turbo out later. Must be doing something right in training.

Hats off to the marshals and to the Edinburgh University Triathlon Club. Once again they organised a great race, with an excellent team, and their volunteers probably felt the cold even more than the competitors did. After all, they had to stand out there cheering folks on and giving directions from start to finish, not just for one heat, and they didn’t have the benefit of physical exertion to keep them warm. I think that’s what makes Tranent enjoyable despite the ferocious conditions: the people running it are just super. Thanks, guys!

Only one photo this year: here’s me, 10 minutes after finishing, having retreated indoors, blue with the cold and my special “What do you mean I’m still alive?” face.

East Fife in two weeks. Cupar was cold last year, but I can’t imagine it’ll be as cold as Tranent. After that, who knows? I haven’t entered any more yet, but I’ll have to make a decision soon. If anyone has any favourite May events, I’m open to recommendations.

Don’t say Dalkeith. Not with that crazy zig-zag swim and that long descent with the manhole cover in exactly the wrong place.

“You’re a lesser spotted, frangible geek.”

OH REALLY.

Astonishing X-Men.

I am, as has been said many, many, many times before, a sad Marvel fan girl (which reminds me to get my comics box out so I can check which series featured that Glaswegian whale mutant). I can forgive Marvel many, many, many things. I own Ghostrider on DVD, FFS. I am that sad.

However, I still find the preponderance of the Most Common Superpower somewhat vexing. It’s not because I’m a feminist (as I said a couple of posts ago). It’s because I’m a realist. I will happily suspend disbelief when it comes to Cyclops shooting optical lasers from his eyes or (just about) Logan staying alive trapped in a glacier by eating bits of his own leg because his healing factor made them grow back.

Well… OK. Yes, I have issues with that latter example. Mostly revolving around amino acids. Like I said: I’m a realist. What this means is that I will accept a particular twist on reality. I will accept that Emma Frost can turn to diamond, or Kitty Pryde can phase through walls. I will accept that Logan has adamantium bonded to his skeleton and Jean Gray is pretty much the definition of will not fucking die, but there are some things I can’t accept.

You cannot be an action superhero with 36FF breasts in that outfit.

Every time I read something by, say, Liefield I want to send the artist a link to Boobydoo. That’s beyond fanservice. That’s just… It’s just stupid.

Here’s for why this makes me want to throw a book at the wall and weep.

I’m 170cm and 63kg (that’s 5’7 and ~140lbs for you imperialists). My chest size is 32DD. I compete in triathlon and participate in long-distance cycling. Half my annual sports budget goes on bras. I would not be able to jog twenty metres without the sort of support offered by the Sportjock Super Sportbra. It would be agony. How Emma Frost, who seems to have a chest size of around 40GG, manages to walk without falling over, never mind fight in outfits that are apparently no more than a couple of pieces of foil wrapped around a ribbon, is utterly beyond me.

Also: figures. I hate to break this to you boys, but while Seven of Nine’s assets are formidable, and all her own work, they are somewhat enhanced by very careful costuming involving seamless internal corsetry. You can’t have strength without muscle. You can’t have muscle and still look like a stick with a couple of peas (or, even worse, watermelons) glued on the front. One of the most unconvincing action heroes of all time was Leeloo from The Fifth Element, but she got away with it by the Power of Cool.

Trust me on this one. If you had a genuine action superhero girl, she would look more like Tessa Sanderson than Sarah Michelle Geller. I’m probably about 10kg (20lbs) heavier than the stated of weight of most women taller than me in movies (anyone remember Vicki Vale claiming to be 108?) but I’m no lard-ass.

The sort of ridiculously low body fat that makes muscles stand out to be counted also results in no boobs. A passing glance at the ranks of female bodybuilders would tell you that. Look at Brigitte Nielson in Red Sonja, back when she looked like she might be able to fight, even though Sandahl Bergman should still have kicked her scrawny ass clear to the other side of Valhalla. Ultra endurance athletes, those skinny whippets who can run for miles and miles and miles: they’re all bone and sinew.

Basically, while I can cope with the leap of faith it takes to accept The Human Torch can fly and Jubilee can generate bursts of fireworks, I can’t cope with the inherent unrealism of the way people are depicted.

Which is why I would like to place Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men up on the pedestal next to Grant Morrison’s New X-Men. I’m not a massive fan of Whedon. I think that he has suffered from the common affliction of successful writers: he has become self-indulgent. However, I’ll give him this: his particular penchant for strong women means that the girls of this series are relatively realistic. Even Emma Frost looks like she might be wearing a push-up bra under there and if she took it off she’d be able to see her own toes. An important ability in an action hero, I’d have thought. John Cassaday, the artist, obviously also deserves a great deal of credit. His semi-realistic style is remarkably effective and sets off Whedon’s realistic dialogue.

Hisako: “Can I help”
Logan: “Are you a beer?”

There are still one or two frames where my inner bra-expert cringed a little, but overall this series is a rare thing: a comic book I can read without having my suspension of disbelief come crashing around my ears in a tangle of missing underwiring and absent corsetry.

Oh yeah. The plot’s not all that bad, either.

You know, while I’m at it, the whole concept of “reality TV” is a lie. It’s an outright fabrication. It implies some sort of connection with reality, and there is no such thing. We already have a word for real life shown on TV: it’s called the documentary.

Every single one of these so-called reality TV shows is scripted and the participants manipulated for the purposes of entertainment; if such crass, unintelligent melodrama can even be described as entertainment. These programmes are no more than the tabloid newspapers of television: soap opera dressed up as having some form of social commentary, when they are about as far from social commentary as Belgium is from Bolivia. The only information we can derive from such codswallop is the sad state of what passes for mass entertainment these days. They teach us nothing about ourselves as a social species apart from the willingness of the populous to see other people put in ridiculous situations designed to provoke emotional stress with the footage edited to highlight the conflict arising from the way the programme makers have constructed the shows to bring out the worst in people.

I wouldn’t call for a ban on reality TV, but it should be called something else. Utter trash would get my vote.

There are many labels people use to describe themselves that I don’t, and while some people might feel justified in accusing me of refusing to take a stand in order to have an easy life, the simple fact is that I detest defining myself by anything so rigid as a label.

I’m not monogamous: I’m picky. I’m not a triathlete: I happen to do triathlon. I’m not an environmentalist: I understand that this is a closed system and think that Malthus might have had a point.

My sexuality is no one’s business but mine and those with whom I’m intimate, thankyouverymuch.

So I don’t consider myself a feminist. Whether someone has tits or a dick is not top of my list of defining characteristics. Intelligence, wit, humour, tolerance, education — even diction — are all much higher on my list of factors to consider when it comes to deciding whether I like someone or not and wish to spend more time in his company (and that’s the grammatically correct third person neutral, not a Freudian slip); and I don’t make blanket decisions about whether women can do a job just as well as men can, never mind better.

There will always be some women who can do any given job better than most men. There will always be some men who can do any given job better than most women. You try telling a female Chinese powerlifter that girls are always weaker than men. Then run away.

True, there are biological differences that mean in some fields of endeavour women will almost always fail to beat a man in straight competition given an equal degree of training and similar degrees of natural talent. 100m sprint, for instance. Deadlift. Equally there are some things women are physically better able to do than men. Ultra endurance, for example, favours the female physiology over the male.

My point is, basically, that given the distribution of talent, skill and ability in the population, I think it’s ludicrous to make generalisations such as “women are just as good as men, if not better”. I would prefer the statement “any individual woman selected at random from a standard distribution of population has an equal chance of showing ability to perform a given task as any individual man selected at random from the same standard distribution of population, unless said task involves physical biological processes found predominantly in one of the sexes.”

Problem is, that doesn’t really trip off the tongue. What it means is that I believe, all things being equal, you’re just as likely to find a girl who can do a great job as you are a bloke. Not more or less likely: just as likely. The crucial difference between this and the feminist message I have seen most often stated is the probability factor. Because women have an equal likelihood to men of being crap at something, as well.

All this preamble brings me to last night’s going-to-bed-after-this-cup-of-tea-is-there-anything-on-telly-for-five-minutes?

When Women Rule The World takes ten men and eight women and dumps them on a desert island where the girls have to wear ludicrous costumes and the men have to do what they are told.

In this new series Steve Jones presents the ultimate gender experiment. Ten men and eight women on an island with only one law – women rule, men obey. Find out how the men cope with being the weaker sex, how the women deal with holding all the power and how both sexes cope with the backstabbing, bitching and infighting which runs riot.

With a £30,000 prize up for grabs, the men have a lot to lose if they stand up to the women. And with one man sacrificed to the sea at the end of every show, there’s even more to lose. In a village rocked by everything from strikes to arguments to all-out physical violence, anything can happen. Both the men and the women have to learn a lot about themselves in the process, because in this show it’s all about the journey.

So who will win the £30,000? Can the women keep control? Can the men accept the women’s rule? And can women really rule the world? Find out, in When Women Rule The World…

It’s fucking insulting to both sides.

Let’s just look at the use of the word “experiment”. For it to be an experiment there has to be a hypothesis and a null hypothesis. From the description of the programme their hypothesis is that women are just as capable of being in charge as men, which means their null hypothesis, the one that describes the accepted status quo and must be disproven, is that women are incapable of being in charge of men.

Fuck that.

It’s not helped by their selection of contestants. Some of the guys might get off on the idea but at least one or two are being egged on into displaying macho chauvinism and stereotypical alpha-male behaviour (right down to one of them describing himself as an alpha male!). The girls range from some bitchy, petulant, whiny-ass “queen” to a holistic therapist Newage type who does nothing but praise, describes herself as “soft” and gets upset when she has to choose which of the men she doesn’t want to stay any more.

This isn’t a social experiment about gender roles. It’s a half-assed Amazonian fantasy re-enactment, but the girls they’ve picked would make Amazons ashamed to call themselves women. They have no leadership skills, no management skills, no diplomacy skills and, lacking all of those, no capacity to beat the crap out of the blokes. They have been dumped there as a putative kratocracy: they are anything but.

Given the right skill set, talent and teamwork, a group of women is just as capable of despotism as any group of men. But these women do not have the skills or talent and they definitely do not have the teamwork. What they have is the ability to look good in a bikini.

This is not a social experiment: it’s telly. And that means the only qualifications they sought were that the girls were gorgeous and the males wanted the cash. The men didn’t even have to be particularly attractive: merely avaricious.

I can’t work out whether I’m insulted more by the premise of the show or by the fact that they are calling it an experiment. I think it’s the latter. If they didn’t call it a social experiment but were truthful about what it is — car crash TV — then I could shrug and let them get on with it. If they want to be crass and insulting about sexual stereotyping because their producers have run out of good ideas, then fine. But they called it an experiment. Which would imply that everyone knows women are the weaker sex.

What, have we slipped back in time to the Victorian era?

Oh, and you’ll note that there’s no mention of a prize for the girls. So what do they get out of it? Are they supposed to be satisfied with a nice beach holiday and being bitchy to a bunch of men?

I’d like to see a programme something like this, but I’d like to see one in which a group of competent, confident, strong women who work together and know what they are doing was put in charge of a group of misogynistic males. Hypothesis: exposure to women who show strength and capability will have a positive effect in removing stereotypical sexual prejudices. Null hypothesis: too much shite TV has indoctrinated some sections of the population beyond all help and we should probably just shoot them and the makers of said TV.