Botox treatment involves injecting a chunk of botulinum toxin, the most deadly
protein known to mankind, into a vain woman’s face so that it might resemble
one of those garish fright masks you can buy in Blackpool joke shops. And
then telling them they look lovely — no, really, it’s very subtle, darling,
you don’t look at all like a cross between William Shatner and a block of
precast concrete. Subjecting gullible and insecure women to germ warfare
experiments, for which they pay through the recently reupholstered nose, is
a fairly recent development in the beauty industry — but stand by for the
quick-fix Agent Orange depilatory gel, the five-day anthrax diet and the
“Give Your Luscious Lips a Real Pout” VX nerve agent programme. If you want
to see Botox at its best, check out Dannii Minogue on The X Factor
(Saturday, ITV1). You could run 50,000 volts through Dannii while she sits
in that chair and the viewer wouldn’t know a thing until the smoke started
pouring out of her ears. She is absolutely incapable of registering any form
of emotion. As such, she is a profound contrast to her colleague Cheryl
Cole, who exists in a permanent state of tearful hysteria — the consequence,
one assumes, of being married to the lovely Ashley. But rather that than
Dannii’s implacable, spooky, motionless mask.
The journalist Kate Spicer investigated the Botox business in a
participant-observer capacity in Super Botox Me (Sunday, Channel 4).
In other words, she dissed the whole concept while persuading Channel 4 to
fork out for a whole bunch of slashing and burning on her poor face —
several thousand quid’s worth. Botulo toxins were injected into her cheeks
and lips by America’s most renowned and gilded cosmeticians, people who turn
the rich into plasterboard facsimiles of themselves — blandly reassuring
types who in some cases themselves resembled Hallowe’en fright masks, with
their eyebrows now somewhere near their coccyx and a permanently startled
expression. And then lasers scorching away at her eyes, leaving her horribly
bloodied for five days.
Spicer was a terrific presenter; honest, deluded, a touch hypocritical,
utterly unselfconscious, witty and occasionally befuddled by painkillers, as
she sought to choose between those two competing voices inside her head: one
saying, ah, you could be beautiful again, and the other, the ghost of an old
feminist ideology, saying, this stuff is so wrong. That was the point of
this fine programme: the ambivalence, the yearning to be beautiful versus
common sense. Spicer revealed that she is nearly 40 years old, smokes and
drinks too much, but wishes to continue shagging rather younger men and is
increasingly worried that the bags under her eyes, the sagging downturn of
her mouth, the creases on her forehead that seemed to multiply daily, might
dissuade younger men from accompanying her in this activity. And so, in the
end, the dumb voice won: she got Botoxed and zapped by the star wars lasers
and ended up, from a distance, looking youthful, clear-skinned and
“confident” (that disingenuous word was used a lot). And close up she looked
like a cross between William Shatner and a block of precast concrete. That
old feminist ideology was not, as Spicer put it at one point, a load of
bollocks — it was dead right. Throughout the programme one cringed at the
cruelty and unfairness of the beauty industry, at the pressure heaped upon
women to look ever younger, ever “better”. At one point, Spicer was told
that the work she’d had done on her face was incredibly subtle, you wouldn’t
notice it at all — but then you looked at the face of the woman who had made
this observation, a block of pine somewhere in the centre of which lurked
immobilised lips that appeared to have been repeatedly hit with a trowel.
We could have done with Spicer cropping up somewhere in David Hare’s
three-hander My Zinc Bed (Wednesday, BBC2), to add a little wit and
warmth to the interminable and wholly unbelievable proceedings. They had
assembled a big-name cast to hack away at the overwrought and yet somehow
wooden dialogue; dragged Uma Thurman over from the United States, persuaded
the excellent Jonathan Pryce to deliver an extremely convincing impression
of the former Conservative party leader Michael Howard and — worst of all,
in a way — turned one of our most interesting and dependable youngish
actors, Paddy Considine, into a sweating ham of flared nostrils and facial
tics. To be fair, Considine had already admitted in an interview that he did
not much enjoy the part. “It’s not my world,” he said, and complained, among
other things, that the dialogue was “written in a very middle-class way”.
Well, indeed, mate — no kidding.
Considine’s character — a jittery ex-alcoholic poet perpetually on the verge
of rage who sort of falls in love with the errant wife of a multimillionaire
businessman — was afforded less of a script and more of a Hare manifesto. In
fact, none of the three characters spoke how people actually speak; they
barked soliloquies, homilies, aphorisms at one another and occasionally
broke off for a bit of how’s yer father now and again. It was excruciating
stuff, show-off verbal pyrotechnics that were neither sharp nor telling.
There was no room for the usual things of life — a sliver of humour here, a
moment of calm there. Nor was the subject matter, the heart of the play,
remotely illuminating (which one would have at least taken as a kind of
recompense). Addiction — ooh, it can be a bad thing, can’t it? But it lets
you know that you are truly alive, doesn’t it? Got to have a bit of passion
in your life, what? But then passion’s dangerous, innit? Thurman kept her
clothes on throughout, too, which was disappointing, although probably made
it all a bit cheaper for the licence payer.
Maybe Hare is simply something that I can’t get along with: one of those
cultural artefacts that everybody else admires and from which I feel
excluded. Much like Lawrence Kasdan’s film The Big Chill, in fact, which
always seemed to me the most ghastly baby-boomer Yankee whinefest — and not
improved by the fact that it has spawned countless imitators down the years.
The latest one is Mutual Friends (Tuesday, BBC1), written by the team
that brought you the Kumars and starring every British actor-comedian you’ve
seen on TV in the past five years. As in The Big Chill, a bunch of
university friends are reunited at the funeral of a friend, Carl, who has
unexpectedly killed himself. At the funeral reception the thoroughly
unlikeable Jen (Keeley Hawes) tells her mild and cowed husband (Marc Warren)
that she had a brief affair with Carl and this unwelcome news precipitates
their break-up; the script revels in their misery and at the unfairness of
it all. It is probably true that there is nothing much original in the idea,
and that the various characters are little more than thumbnail sketches and
that we’ve seen this sort of thing before countless times. But, believe me,
it worked. The writing was better than one could have hoped and at times
quite beautifully observed, and the acting — especially Warren and Hawes —
is lovely. A comedy drama it may be, but it felt a hell of a lot more
realistic than My Zinc Bed and contained more in the way of subtlety of
dialogue.
AA Gill is away
