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Does anybody else find the Saturday evening juxtaposition of The Bachelor and Wife Swap USA heartbreakingly sad or have you turned off the TV and gone out to dinner?
The quest for love is the stuff of great drama and terrible reality television. If The Bachelor hopefuls just sat through a few episodes of Wife Swap, they'd realise that getting the guy doesn't necessarily mean winning. The fact that, on television, most awful marriages and most families' dysfunctional routines are train wrecks should make these dewy-eyed romantics run for cover.
I didn't get on board with this "bachelor" until recently. He's a divorced, ageing, Hasselhoff-like blond by the name of Byron and before I could work out why anyone would want his particular brand of damaged goods, his potential brides came up with the answer. The final six women who luuuurve him are 36, 37, did somebody say 39! Shut up! A 39-year-old, wiry, blonde, vaguely Swedish, drag queen look-alike called Cindy is desperate to become Byron's wife.
Historically, our lovely ladies, our vestal virgins, ready to scratch each other's eyes out for a single rose, are 22. Their stunning naivete, their willingness to believe that they are about to marry a total stranger on television, has fuelled the game. Now you can smell the desperation among these spectacularly maintained girls. For Cindy, every date with Byron feels like the barman has just called last drinks.
They are all horrible people. Horrible, damaged, very suntanned people who have been dating for 25 years. They must be exhausted, and little wonder Byron Hasselhoff is starting to look like an option. The creepy thing about Byron (it's a long list - I'll just go for the creepiest) is that he has about three romantic encounters every day that involve champagne, candles, picnic blankets and hot tubs with completely different women. With each woman he "makes a very real and deep connection" that usually involves his tongue. Any normal man would need a break and a nice levelling trip to the TAB, to be free of lip gloss and candles and very intense tanned women. Not Byron. He's a machine.
It doesn't matter who he picks. Eventually, they will end up on Wife Swap USA. Hopefully, it will be Cindy and she'll be a macrobiotic neat freak who has to go live in a swamp in Mississippi while a toothless slovenly God-botherer moves in with Byron.
These shows rely on expert casting and contrasts. This week, Sabrina, a very happy yet filthy animal lover from Texas, ruined the meticulous order of the most punctual family in Alabama. Meanwhile, super-duper neat freak Stacey had to abandon five children and a lifetime supply of Windex to move in with eight dogs and a goat (I think there was a husband and a daughter under all that laundry somewhere), who all ate, slept and pooped inside. (Poop is their word, not mine.) By the show's end, the animals in Texas slept outside and the kids in Alabama had a house filled with pets.
Every week the women are shocked. Every week the men rejoice in the return of their very own broken peculiar wife. And we are left with the uneasy notion that there is somebody for everybody. And probably several people for Byron.
We can stop scratching our heads over the proliferation of this fluff. While sit-coms such as The New Adventures of Old Christine continue to fly the flag of romantic inanity, no progress will be made. The superior comic talents of Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld's Elaine) have kept this banal series afloat. She even wins awards for bravely rising above such mediocre material.
But at its core this thing is rotten. Poor "old" Christine is a single mother with disastrous prospects. She confides her sexual failures to her little brother and her ex-husband, who has rather humiliatingly traded her in for a younger Christine - thus the wonky title. This week they help her battle an inclination to fall onto the futon with a moronic buffoon. There aren't enough drugs and alcohol on the planet to make this eunuch attractive, yet she can't resist.
Predictably, Old Christine is looking for love in all the wrong places, and so are we if we continue to turn on the television to find anything more sensitive and elevated yet slightly less tanned than Byron Hasselhoff and his bevy of ageing beauties.
The Bachelor Saturdays, 7.30pm, Nine
Wife Swap USA Saturdays, 8.30pm, Nine
The New Adventures of Old Christine Wednesdays, 8pm, Nine
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