One question for 15 Kids and Counting: Why? Why? Why?
IT has been a while since a TV documentary stirred such contrasting emotions as 15 Kids and Counting
This was about BIG families, not five or six kids more like 15 or 16 and, as it became clear at the end, there was no real sign of stopping there.
So we had Noel, an 80-hour-a-week baker and his wife, Sue, from Morecambe. Still only 36, she was the mother of 14 kids with a 15th in the oven. Her first child was born when she was 14 and she had, as a bit of simple maths will tell you and one of her younger brood indeed did: “I can‘t remember Mum not being pregnant”.
Seven kids go to primary school, for example, so the packed lunch isn’t a packet of crisps and a sandwich, it’s whole loaves of bread gone along with entire multi-bags of salt and vinegar crisps. Each mealtime resembles a Christmas lunch and the family are ferried around in a giant minibus.
Somehow – and this was one of the few flaws of the programme – they managed to afford all this on his wages and throw in a week’s holiday to Lanzarote for good measure. The scenes on the beach where Mum and Dad did sentry duty guarding their gaggle of children like parent meerkats was touching. As was the moment when, after the birth they brought the latest addition home and were watched lovingly and enthusiastically by all the newborn’s curious and delighted siblings. While we had an insight into why they had children – both parents were adopted at a young age and felt a clear need to bring up as many children into a loving family as possible – they seemed remarkably happy, not that tired and crucially, the parents of some seemingly very well-adjusted children.
And while there was some warmth for them by the end, the same couldn’t be said, as far as I was concerned at least, for Mike and Tania in Kent. Tania is awaiting twins to take her up to 11, but as born-again Catholics with daily family Bible reading sessions, their motivations were somewhat different.
What made my blood boil here was school dropout Tania insisting their children were schooled at home by her to keep them away from the corrupt influences of the outside world. So we watched her bumbling through a “history” class (pupils aged 4-12) which, amid all the distractions, focused on Hitler, not exactly reception class material.
By this point I was shouting at my TV. It may have been the editing, but the Kent children were far more absent and low key, popping up only occasionally to be, say, sick on camera or crying. I do not exaggerate.
I was left wondering how their children will end up as adults, cut off from forming relationships with non-family friends and, presumably, battling at every turn to attract the attentions of mum and dad. Both dads, by the way, seemed oddly subservient throughout). I hope it turns out right for them all, but I couldn’t help but ask: Why? Why? Why?
I’ve never got BBC3. Indeed if I was running the corporation I’d ditch it and spend the cash on a myriad of other, far better things. Everything this week seemed to be about sex because it’s BBC3’s Sex Season – a televisual car crash if ever there was, left in the hands of BBC3 – and therefore an excuse to serve up an array of woeful programmes this week and quite possibly far beyond, on sex. I watched two: How Sex Works was a wretched affair, a programme dressed up as “ejoocation” (sic), but more interested in ejaculation. So lots of pseudo-biological graphics about male and female arousal, STDs, asexuality and so on. I’m not sure who it was aimed at. There wasn’t much in there that the average GCSE student wouldn’t have known (apart from possibly the eye-catching factoid that sperm makes its exit at an average speed of 28mph). One girl who was highly promiscuous and proud of it actually looked quite tragic and would probably have been happier sat at home alone eating pies. Similarly terrible was Britain in Bed, a two-hour “red hot marathon session” in which, laughably, we were led through the key points in the sexual awakening of Britain in the past 50 years: The Pill (1961, tick), Aids (1981, tick), the internet (1991, tick). But how about, er, Sex on the Beach, 18-30s holidays illustrated with sizeable chunks of that 2002 ITV classic Club Reps, or Hugh and the (LA) Hooker of 1995 or George Michael in the (LA) toilet in 1998. Not to mention celebrity sex tapes (yes, calling Pamela Anderson, again). It was truly awful, two hours of life wasted.
Good to see Masterchef back to form and its original format with three prime time 9pm slots on BBC1 this week. What struck me in the opener was just how good these amateur cooks are these days.
Some really fancy ingredients behind some wonderfully presented nosh (standout chef, plasterer Tom turning round, for example, we were told “spicy salmon fillet served on a red kidney bean and potato mash with avocado mousse, a lime jelly, green pesto and a tomato salsa”).
He failed to serve his chorizo butter because he “ran out of time”. With just 75 minutes to play with, no wonder. You’ve got to admire these guys, thrown into professional kitchens and handling the intense pressure so well. Greg Wallace is great, encouraging company, less so John Torode. But who cares when it’s all such a visual feast. More please.
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