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149. Bisexuals

Tapehead no 149

Are the nation’s programme-makers trying to tell us something ? Their fascination with bisexuals/transsexuals seems to know no bounds.

Still, if nothing else, the nature and quality of programmes like Seven Sins confirm: love (or lust) is blind.

Take Paul Farquarson for example a black bisexual included to demonstrate how bisexuals represent Greed (because they like men and women, even though they very sensibly refute any association with promiscuity).

Now, Paul is charming, passionate, and, er …cute. But honey, you ain’t no rocket scientist.

Paul, like a lot of bisexuals on TV, feels the need to announce that he doesn’t recognise “conventional terms” (i.e. words) like “gay”, “heterosexual” etc.

“I mean, how do we define being black ?!” he demands. “By the fact you can dance or you’ve got a big cock ? And if you can’t dance or you haven’t got a big cock, does that man you’re not black ?” (No Paul, it doesn’t.)

If Seven Sins is suggesting Paul’s excitable, schoolboy, insights are representative of bisexuals, blacks, or black bisexuals, then they can only have been included to indicate how ridiculous they are. And if not, then what’s the point ?

Most of Seven Sins is take over by Felicity – caterer, masseuse (which she rhymes with moose), and a “greedy” bisexual who resembles a sort of plain Theresa Russell.

Sadly, Felicity merely confirms how tiresome bisexuals on TV are: indulgent, narrow-minded, stereotypical, and painfully inadequate, and insecure (can’t deal seriously with men or women, constantly needing got convince them selves they are sophisticated, scandalous, fascinating, etc).

Bisexuals are so pretentious: the worst kind of show-offs. “I love the sophistication of humanity,” Felicity announces dramatically, by way of explaining her dual-sexuality. “I love the fact that we can control who comes into our lives.” (We can’t.)

Explaining what attracts her to someone, she gushes: “it’s the way a person holds themselves. It’s a pair of beautifully manicured hands…Beautifully painted lips, a well-designed bicep, a bulge in a pair of trousers.”
So nothing superficial then…

With women, she says, “you know how their bits work. You understand they’re going to get shitty at certain times of the month” – which as summaries of women go, certainly no male would say unchallenged.

Felicity, of course, thinks she is fabulously, fascinatingly broad-minded despite announcing that when she starts a relationship, she “always discusses the rule first. I have my own set of rules.”

Later she predictably contends: “Most people aren’t intelligent enough for bisexuality. They prefer to play safe. They have dull, grey lives and petty-minded rules… I wanna touch. I wanna taste. I wanna feel. Take me to a buffet,” she shouts to the heavens, “and I will taste everything on that buffet. And I will taste everything on that buffet.”

Judging by the difficulty she has squeezing into her more outlandish outfits, unfortunately, in this case, she’s not speaking metaphorically.

Cocktail Party is Tapehead’s first exposure to those 

roly-poly Wallace and Gromits of TV cuisine, The Two Fat Ladies, bossy-boots Jennifer Paterson and her unfortunate sidekick-in-a-sidecar, Clarissa Dickson-Wright.

The new series opens with a chortling: “oooh, I think I’m getting stiff ! Not enough red meat.”


The level of humour and quality of insight are not much better than Viz. They are actually both rather frightful, dull, snobs.

Correspondent is unmissable if only for the way it resembles the secret work of Chris Morris.

The reporters – melodramatic, pompous bods – are funnier than Brass Eye’s Peter O’Hanrahanrahan and Susannah Gekkaloys.

One follows a London mother’s “desperate quest” to cur her heroin addiction by going to Thailand – which is like going to Las Vegas to quit gambling.

She joins Buddhist monks at Wat Tahm Krabok (The Temple of The Opium Pipe) where “the path of enlightenment” lies in a tough regime combining toil, self-discipline, and shit-loads of opium (actually “herbal purgatives”).

To the strains of Born Slippy, and hilariously out-Brass Eyeing Brass Eye, our correspondent announces: “I’ve never been with someone coming off a Class A drug before”, as if the report was actually about him.

If the detox fails, he declares, “she will be condemned to the life of hopeless junkie thief”, branding her “a junkie mum. A crackhead turned smackhead.”

In the next item, reporter Sue Lloyd Roberts becomes a vice girl. I mean, “joins the Vice Unit in Hong Kong.”

The give-away that the hand of Morris has been here is that the Vice Unit is called the “Mon Kok Squad.”

We miss you, Chris.

ends

Correspondent: Sat, 6.45pm, BBC2

Two Fat Ladies: Mon, 8.30pm, BBC2

Seven Sins: Mon, 10.55pm, C4