Rosie keeps her TV on 24 hours a day to entertain her collection of 180 teddy bears. Teddy bears, like the torture victim in A Clockwork Orange, don’t have functioning eyelids, nor do they have the opposable thumbs necessary to work the remote. As a result, they have to watch whatever Rosie puts on. If the CIA is looking for new ideas to get suspects to confess, they could do worse than to hire Rosie as a consultant.
She explained that many of her collection are rescue animals who, after being fitted with new outfits she created, come to life. Or so she believes. Personally, I could see no movement from the Paddington clones who sat in neat rows sporting duffel coats and floppy hats, their beady little eyes and mouths remaining inexpressive. Though, to be fair, there are more inert families on Gogglebox.
I’m not suggesting that the target demographic for the new series of Posh Pawn (Channel 4) is dead-eyed subhumans without two brain cells to rub together, but I would like to see a species breakdown of its viewing figures. It’s also possible that Britain’s obesity epidemic is skewed by including benefits-cheat stuffed toys who come here, Ukip nightmares turned real, to be waited on hand and foot and watch telly at the taxpayers’ expense. Rosie, an impecunious heiress, was one of the needy posh, pawning high-end nonsense to a London firm. The company, whose name will not sully this review, thrives from others’ misfortunes in austerity Britain, helped, you might think, by Channel 4 offering what amounts to a weekly, hour-long advertisement for its services.
She sought £20,000 by pawning two handbags, one ostensibly Louis Vuitton, the other purportedly Hermès. The proceeds would bankroll her new business, Bam Bam Dog Boutique, named after her chihuahua who was fatally injured in pitbull-related unpleasantness last year. We got an idea of what the boutique might offer when we witnessed her putting a lime-green tutu on a small dog. I’m not saying the outfit was unbecoming, but the footage is surely worth the RSPCA’s attentions.
Pawnbroker Patrick suspected these bags weren’t kosher and refused to buy them. The stitching was wrong, the locks unconvincing. And then there was the odour: it wasn’t the smell of money but, as his boss James put it, the pong of a Y-reg Datsun minicab. Bam Bam Dog Boutiques will, therefore, have to remain a dream – at least until Rosie and her bears get to star in a lucrative reality show, which can’t be far off.
If we learned nothing else from Posh Pawn, and we didn’t, it was that the posh have terrible business sense. Steve had decided to sell his yacht moored off Majorca to help him and a business partner fund Pouffe Daddy, a diabolical enterprise devised to supply posh beanbags to slacker adults, over-indulged babies, smug dogs and – quite possibly – really stuck-up teddy bears. At some point, this programme stopped being Posh Pawn and mutated into a compilation of the duffest ideas that didn’t make it on to Dragons’ Den. Frighteningly, pawnbroker James loaned Steve the value of the boat so the latter could finance his beanbag business which, like the flip-flop, is emblematic of how society is going to hell. Soon the world will be unacceptably flooded with Pouffe Daddys. Here’s a useful call-and-response chant for the looming end times: “What do we want?” “No bean bags.” “When do we want them?” “We don’t – that’s kind of the point.”
In A Brief History of Graffiti (BBC4), art historian Richard Clay traced the means by which the people have subverted the yawnsome dictates of capitalism. You may think that graffiti is vandalism, but Clay’s thesis was that a blank wall is a provocation to those who don’t own it. Think of it this way: an untagged, virgin wall expresses its class allegiance – it is under the deadening control of the powers that be, particularly when there’s a sign on it saying “No posters or graffiti”.
In the Paris Commune, Clay noted, there were so many political lithographs that a Swiss visitor said it was as if the walls were screaming, and screaming with revolutionary fervour. Clay’s history – which speeds from Stone Age cave handprints to the era in which street art has become collectible – was a eulogy to countercultural artistic expression. The best of it, he argued, deserved its place in the museum where it need not be co-opted by the art-world Man.
That said, Clay spoke up for the values of middle England. “If someone wants to tag the side of my house,” he said. “I’m going to want to break their legs.” Not necessarily – it depends who’s doing the tagging. If Banksy, Brooklyn graffiti artist Lee Quinones (who counts Eric Clapton as a customer), or Blek Le Rat tagged Professor Clay’s house, he could buy a bigger one, or a yacht moored off Majorca. Street art isn’t what it used to be.
