Fat is funny. We grew up giggling at tubby Oliver Hardy and chubby Hattie Jacques. Anyone with a wobbly waistline was expected to be cheerful and jolly.
Even the language of fatness is light-hearted. You’re well-upholstered, a bit of a porker, with a muffin-top or a spare tyre or a bit of extra covering on your bones.
But as Big Body Squad revealed with nauseating footage, there’s nothing funny about being so fat that you cannot walk or even sit up unaided.
Fat
care: Mother-of-three Denise is so obese she needs the help of husband
Eddie, left, and two carers, right, just to keep a normal hygiene levelShock tactics are needed. Once a week before lunch, every pupil in the country should be made to watch some of these stomach-churning images.
More...
- Meet the Big Body Squad, the growing army of workers looking after the UK's obese people too fat to care for themselves
- Thandie's gone Rogue! Newton revamps her image with a VERY raunchy sex scene in her new TV show
- Mel B booed by America's Got Talent audience after hitting red buzzer on contestant who made 'racial joke'
Wilding was careful not to condemn the patients. One couple in particular, mother-of-three Denise and her husband Eddie, from Tamworth, were inspirational in the constant affection they showed each other.
But the physical effects of the illness were shocking and grotesque. It took two carers to wash and dry the folds and crevices of Denise’s body, and the consequences of bed sores could be horrific.
No
laughing matter: Big Body Squad showed Carol Davies, 52, who has not
left her second-floor flat for a year since she hit 20 stone and needs
help from a special team just to get outAs Keeping Britain Alive pointed out, what we expect from the NHS is ever-increasing. The money to pay for it isn’t.
This series, filmed at 100 hospitals around the country on a single day in October last year, discovered one doctor who deserves a show of his own. GP Chris Abell cares for the community of 3,500 people on Islay, off the west coast of Scotland.
Only the most serious cases are flown to Glasgow for treatment — everyone else gets the brisk, wry, expert attention of Dr Abell, and a dose of his mordant humour.
Demonstrating first-aid techniques to a village hall of elderly ladies, he showed them how to do cardiac massage for a heart attack victim, to the rhythm of the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive.
And for a patient with lung cancer, his prescription was simple: ‘What Barbara needs is love and respect; she doesn’t need anything else.’
Crippling:
Carol is so overweight she cannot get to the hospital without
specially-trained paramedics equipped to deal with obese patientsMeanwhile, downstairs in the morgue, the pathology technicians were a laugh a minute. One of them, Ruby, kept up a constant patter. Wrapping a corpse in protective sheeting, she talked happily to it: ‘Let’s get you tucked back in, mate.’
If hospitals were really this much fun, we’d all want to go.
What I would definitely not want to do, however, is get into a car driven by any of the teenagers in Barely Legal Drivers.
The teenage subjects know they are being filmed behind the wheel, but they’ve been told it is for a TOWIE-style documentary on youth culture.
One young driver, 18-year-old Kayla, and her friends were clearly playing up to the cameras, and that was putting their lives in danger as they veered around London’s roads.
Heading for a shopping spree in Brighton, the self-styled ‘Croydon Celebs’ were singing in the car, waving their arms, screaming and swearing. At one point, on the outside lane of a dual carriageway, they were even posing for photos.
Kayla, whose dad is a driving instructor, managed to stay on the road. But it is deeply irresponsible of the film-makers to encourage these vulnerable young drivers to act up. This show is a tragedy waiting to happen.