It could be a measure of my essential shallowness, or that of my friends, or a general traumatised need to avoid thinking about the news, but now our conversations go something like this: “Mmm, yes, well the thing about Brexit is ... oh my God, CHANNEL 4’S NAKED ATTRACTION! Did you SEE it? That guy! That woman! With the … And his … Aghhhh!!” Naked Attraction is Channel 4’s extraordinary new dating show, set to be the sulphurous super-success of the age, despite the Ofcom outrage and also the inevitable protestations of those who claim to find it “boring”. (Oh please.)
The participants see each other stark naked first — which is the way we see them. And then they have the clothed date, which is over in a few seconds, of course, because who cares? The real nude action has already been dwelt upon, at some length. It’s an evolutionary advance on the coy flirtations behind Strictly Come Dancing, The Voice, The X Factor — everything. Naked Attraction cuts to the naked chase.
What is interesting to me is that tattoo-reveals are considered unimportant. In the first programme, a woman had a line of something that could have been poetry, or Hallmark-greeting-card banality, tattooed across her stomach. At first it looked like an operation scar. And nobody ever asked her what it meant, or why she chose it.
What a very effective idea for a dating show. It reminds me of Kingsley Amis’s famous, if slightly unsettling dictum: what is the sexiest part of a woman’s naked body? Her face.
The kitchen coalition
Miriam González Durántez, the lawyer married to the former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, has publicly derided Samantha Cameron’s fondness for serving up Hellmann’s mayonnaise in the jar. Is González Durántez being a snob? Or is she making a subtle dig at what she considers to be Mrs Cameron’s breezy inverted snobbery in slapping the Hellmann’s jar down on the table at lunch?
My theory is that González Durántez wants us to remember the greatest mayo-related event in British cultural history: the Gourmet Night episode of TV’s Fawlty Towers, where Basil, played by John Cleese, is trying so hard to be a cut above the common herd that he declines to serve Heinz salad cream, instead giving his clientele the impossibly exotic substance called “mayonnaise”. And then of course someone complains that there isn’t proper salad cream, sending Basil into a paroxysm of rage. Which brings me to another question: whatever happened to Heinz salad cream? I quite liked it.
We’ve been expecting you …
MI6 made history this week by hosting its first ever school visit. Pupils from Pen Y Dre high school in Merthyr Tydfil were shown around the intelligence organisation’s London headquarters, where they met Alex Younger, known as C, and even spoke to the person who deals in spy equipment — a real-life Q.
The schoolchildren themselves didn’t know it was happening until the last moment; they were in the capital for a general careers event, which they had won as a prize. Of course, that is because of security, but I wonder if C and Q didn’t want the teenagers getting time to think up any cheeky questions.
The last thing they wanted was for someone to put up a hand and ask C to comment on the Unite chief Len McCluskey’s theory that their chaps spend their time trashing anti-Corbyn MPs’ offices, and blaming it on Jeremy. That might cause Q to reach for one of his specially customised umbrellas and give the teen an old-fashioned spycraft poke in the ribs.
