Hurrah for Big Brother. However did we fill the excruciatingly dull summer evenings before Channel 4 whooshed to our rescue with this blow by blow account of emotional carnage in east London? What did we talk about at our dinner parties and round our office water coolers, whisper about with our lovers in the small hours, dissect with our families on monthly duty visits? What did we do ? In case you're feeling a bit shaky about the looming end of the series (only another seven million or so episodes to go until one of the unholy participants claims their hard-won 70 grand, after all), good news: C4 yesterday announced it has commissioned Boy Meets Girl, yet another "educational docu-soap". More twisted personal politics and portraits of grotesque personal ambition for our viewing pleasure.
This latest variant in the self-styled experimental telly genre is billed as "exploring what happens when the sexes switch roles". For at least three weeks, two men and two women will live, work and booze as the opposite sex. We, the general public, will vicariously experience their scrapes via three one-hour episodes, to be screened early next year. Oh, the first time one of the boy-girls totters past a building site, dragged up to the hilt and shaky with anticipation! The moment one of our faux men approaches a single lady at a bar, lechery in "his" eye and swaggering bravado in "his" stride!
How terribly Kim Basinger in 9 1/2 Weeks. How thrillingly subversive and sexually titillating - yet how culturally significant, how politically relevant. This is the living, breathing symbiosis of good, entertaining telly and sociologically important study. It's going to be fun, yet it's going to make us all better people.
Or maybe not. Apart from the fact that it is essentially C4's long-winded, quasi highbrow spin on one of the oldest women's mag stunt features ever ("Next week, Sally swaps her brunette locks for blonde! Will she have more fun?") and will attract a very specific, exhibitionist type of subject matter (the shortlist boasts an escort, a male nurse, a motivational speaker), Boy Meets Girl is flawed at its core. It rides on the dubious assumption that gender is grounded in a rigid checklist of behaviours that can be exchanged at will.
At some point, the men will, presumably, clean a loo while wearing beige Karen Millen trouser suits. They will take care not to flash their smalls when exiting sports cars. They may even get cross if they ladder their tights. The women, meantime, will become trapped in a twilight half-world of emotional feebleness. They will gravitate towards DIY stores. They will go to the pub a lot. And these small, narrowly defined acts will be passed off as the sum total of the genders.
Gender is, of course, infinitely more complex than that. It is formulated according to past experiences and the anticipation of future ones and, most significantly, is grounded in the knowledge that this is it for you. Your gender can't be shrugged off, swapped, replaced. Nor can an alternative be learned in a Channel 4 crash course scenario. Gender, in Boy Meets Girl terms, is a kind of over-long episode of Men Behaving Badly, in which Leslie Ash andCaroline Quentin decide to confuse Tony and Gary by wearing their suits and drinking their beer.
There is, admittedly, some potential for genuine revelation in the swapping of clothes. As the nation's summer sidles into its humid stage and our clothes become smaller in response, so our wardrobes buckle under an inadvertently loaded expression of sexuality. Potentially, in the course of Boy Meets Girl, the men may brush against a certain deep self-consciousness that tends to accessorise any modern gal's look.
But ultimately, the programme can only be a cop-out. There's something naive about the concept that reminds me of those tiresome Tory wives who took it upon themselves to live on the equivalent of state benefit for a fortnight, to prove that, hell, it wasn't really that hard, you could provide healthy meals every day for your family - and who entirely missed the point because, once their time was up, they could hotfoot it to Harrods' food hall for truffles and quails' eggs, and their whole experience of how the other half lives was based on that understanding.
Still, Boy Meets Girl does hold the potential for some extravagant, if confusing, sexual exploits. So it may not be a complete waste of time.
