Remembering a lost 20th Century art form A couple of months back, I wrote about the mildly interesting but not exactly gripping BBC boyband reality series Made in Korea, which allows us, reality stylee, a close-up view of the hard drilling of the hopeful young members of fivesome Dear Alice in the… Read More »Boybands (Aren’t) Forever
Arching a bitchy eyebrow at Anglo K-pop TV experiment Made in Korea Back in 1994, the year of the metrosexual’s birth, and the height of boybandery, my agent sent the BBC (and, I think, ITV) my proposal for a series exploring whether a boyband could be manufactured from scratch, with the working… Read More »Puppetry Without Penis
Mark Simpson on the decline and fall of male modesty Telly seems to have been hacking my brain lately. The filthiest parts. Just when you thought ITV2, the people who brought us Love Island couldn’t get any more spornographic, and the underdressed, over-muscled guys they insist on making us ogle… Read More »Friends, Bromans, Countrymen, Lend Me Your Rears
This Summer’s smash-hit dating show is ‘a comedy of compulsory heterosexuality’. (Telegraph Men, 18 July, 2017) Utopian fantasies have long gripped the human imagination. Famous, brainy – but sadly, not very buff – thinkers such as Plato (in the 4th Century BC), Thomas Moore (in the 16th AD), and HG Wells… Read More »Love Island – ITV’s Primetime Spornotopia
Maybe I suffer from what Freud described as man’s tendency to devalue what he desires, but I find anything touched by TV survivalist Bear Grylls’ calloused-but-manicured hands difficult to take too seriously. But taken seriously he most certainly has been by the UK media with his currently airing C4 reality show The… Read More »‘Bare Thrills’ Strips Masculinity Down To Its Skidmarks