James May's man Lab, BBC2; Kids with Tourette's: In their Own Words, ITV
Taking a swipe at James May is a bit like criticising Winnie the Pooh. He’s meant to be slow-witted, bumbling, well-meaning, amiable: that’s the point of him.But Pooh Bear is endearing because he knows he’s a silly old thing. James May seems to think he’s a real TV presenter — and that’s embarrassing.
At one point during Man Lab — a show about rediscovering lost ‘male’ skills — May bumped into Clare Balding at Aintree racecourse, and the presence on screen of a competent, professional broadcaster highlighted just how much drivel we’d been watching for the past half an hour.
Boorish: Christopher Stevens doesn't rate James May's television presenting skills, especially when compared to Clare Balding
So,
although this feels as brutal as pulling the stuffing out of a soft
toy, some points should be made about Man Lab. It’s as if the producers
have set out to make something more inane and derivative than Top Gear.
The script sounds as though it was churned out by a computer programmed
with Jeremy Clarkson cliches. ‘I know bugger all about horses,’ announced May, at the start of a segment on the Grand National. ‘But luckily in Somerset there is a man who does. Apparently he’s so good with horses, he can recognise them by their faces.’
You shouldn’t have to be a champion jump jockey to know horses do have different faces. At least May managed to say all those words correctly, though, which wasn’t always the case: for instance, he pronounces ‘orator’ as ‘orayter’, like ‘oration’. The BBC used to have standards about that sort of thing.
Much of his chunter is simply crass. ‘You need bigger knickers or a smaller backside, missus,’ he muttered at a passer-by. Fortunately, the woman wasn’t real — she was part of a street scene being projected on the wall. It was still unpleasantly offensive.
Crass: May made offensive jokes that were inappropriate for television
‘Did
you know Whoopi Goldberg trained as a bricklayer?’ he announced to
cringeing laughter from his sidekicks. ‘That’s the only time in history
it has been acceptable to see a builder’s buttocks.’ Later he corrected himself: he meant Goldie Hawn. A quick trip to Google reveals that Whoopi was once a brickie — and Goldie wasn’t. May can’t even be sexist successfully.
No display of boorishness is complete without a gag about mental disability. While trying to learn a new memory technique, May chortled he was talking to himself ‘in the privacy of my own head’
Because he didn’t want to ‘sound like Geoffrey Rush in Shine’. Rush won an Oscar for his portrayal of a concert pianist whose obsessive tics make him groan, sing and blurt out words.
The sheer misery of such a condition was laid bare in Kids With Tourette’s, which followed three boys through six months of treatment at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Tourette’s syndrome inflicts involuntary twitches on the sufferer, including sometimes a compulsion to shout out foul language.
Nine-year-old Callum, who wants to be an astronaut, was jerked around by the illness like a puppet. His arm flew up, his leg lashed out. ‘If I’m crossing the road, it’s really hard,’ he said.
But it was 12-year-old Connor whose torments were almost too much to witness. Tourette’s was tearing him and his family to shreds. His tics made him slap his father, hurl objects at his mother, swear at his grandparents and spout extraordinary obscenities in shops.
‘Nanny’s a porn star,’ he told his grandmother as he hugged her. He flung juice over his grandfather and, as he struggled to apologise, could only say more swear words.
The family tried to deflect the pain with humour, but their hearts were clearly breaking. Connor was a sensitive, even poetic boy.
‘You have an urge to do movements,’ he explained in a moment of calm. ‘I call my Tourette’s Johnny because it’s him that shouts and swears and makes me do things that I don’t want to do. If I don’t do my tics, I get angry and cross and stressed. It’s like a volcano: if you ignore it, the world will blow up.’
There is no cure for Tourette’s. Behavioural therapy can help, though it can leave the sufferer feeling drained and helpless. Anyone seeing this programme would have felt the same way.