Over the last few years, TV schedules have started to fill up with shows telling you exactly how to live your life. Messy house? Call in the How Clean Is Your House people. Naughty kids? Get Supernanny in. Droopy willy? Bring in the Sex Inspectors.
And now the latest in improvement TV: Disobedient husband? Train him like a dog.
BBC2’s Bring Your Husband To Heel showed women doing exactly that, and the BBC received 200 complaints about the "sexist, offensive and degrading" show’s "scandalous drivel".
In Bring Your Husband To Heel, dog trainer Annie Clayton used canine training techniques to modify the behaviour of a series of errant husbands. hecklerspray didn’t see the show, but we’re hoping the "rub their noses in it" technique wasn’t employed too much.
Apparently, men share 85% of their DNA with dogs, and that was the basis of the show, filmed with hidden cameras. The men taking part thought they were involved in a documentary about relationship roles.
However, the BBC Points Of View website was inundated with complaints following the broadcast. Complaints like this one, from Lovepie1977:
"I have actually only made an official complaint once before in my
entire life and that was to Cadburys concerning their removal of the
creams from Roses chocolates (NB – they were back the following
Christmas). I usually take the ‘well you can always turn it off’ view.
However, I fully intend to send a proper complaint about this programme
to the BBC. Its a bloody disgrace."
And this one, from Schojack:
"Why, oh why, is licenec money being spent on such grossly insulting
television, especially on BBC2!! This is yet another example of
feminism going way too far. As Mivahel Buerk quite rightly professes,
the pendulum has swung too far this time!
How dare the BBC, of all
respected institutions, give air time to a programme that allows a wife
to be trained at a dog school, apparently the means by which one can
improve a husband’s behaviour at home. Men are not all like dogs and
it’s about time that some of us bit back."
The BBC have responded, not as we would by laughing at all the bad spelling, but by saying how sorry they are for any offence caused.
Male rights seem to be a theme of the day. A number of posters showing Jerry Hall posing with 12 topless men on leashes have today been removed from the London Underground for being "sexually demeaning" towards men.
And it was also announced today that Ben Stiller and Jim Carrey are to star in Used Guys, a film set in a world where women rule the world and men are used only for pleasure.
Is it us, or is the world all going a bit Two Ronnies?
Read more:
‘Sexist’ BBC show leaves viewers barking mad – The Guardian
Jerry Hall banned from Tube – This is London
Carrey and Stiller as obsolete pleasure clones – Monsters And Critics
[story by Stuart Heritage]