Cutting Edge: Special Needs Pets (Channel 4)

There were moments when last night’s Special Needs Pets looked more like an episode of Para-You’ve Been Framed, as the dog with the brain disorder fell over yet again, the pot-bellied pig with the mystery ailment weaved about like a drunk, and the sex-crazed parrot mounted the fluffy toy rabbit (not to be confused with the two-legged real rabbit). Reader, I confess that I laughed. But then, so did some of the pet owners.

Diehard animal lovers have never been very close to my heart, their fondness for fluffy or feathered friends too often turning out to be the flip side of an aversion to humanity. A documentary about the lengths that people will go to in order to keep their sick, disabled or psychotic pets alive and unwell seemed set to get my humanist goat. By the end, however, I felt more sympathetic to the stressed-out pet owners than to the TV producers who had set them up for a beasting.

Of course, there is something slightly weird about people who treat their ailing pets like children (or the children they don’t have), and who will go to any lengths to avoid having them destroyed, demanding: “Do we put disabled people down?” These owners paid for expensive prosthetics, mobility devices, drugs and physical therapy. They hand-massaged a cat to empty its bowels three times a day, hand-washed nappies for dogs, cats and rabbits, and tolerated a mad parrot pleasuring itself on their furniture or their head. It was all a bit barking.

And yes, it is risible to hear a merchant banker suggest that putting a shiny nappy on his incontinent cat helps him keep his sanity while the poor animal maintains its “dignity”; or the owners of a morbidly obese cat (from Rotherham — eat your heart out, Jamie Oliver) claim that they cannot let it leave the house because it might be bullied. But really, what harm are they doing to anybody but themselves? There must be worse animal cranks than those featured here, many of whom came across as nice people and were clear that they would have their pets put down if they were suffering.

As the programme recounted one whimsical tale after another of misplaced love, in places dragging as badly as the rabbit with useless hind legs, the question occurred: by what standards was this considered suitable for Channel 4’s Cutting Edge documentary series? What is cutting or edgy about making fun of some daft people and their disabled pets? If this is what now passes for investigative or challenging documentary-making, then TV journalism must be in as much of a mess as those soiled animal nappies.

If you want to have a go at the dangers of anthropomorphism, there are plenty of subjects worth getting your fangs into. What about the continuing campaign against vital animal research? Or the new government legislation laying down bizarrely strict guidelines on how people must care for their cats and dogs? (There is no shortage of unhinged animal-lovers in Westminster). Let us leave these owners to limp along with their special needs pets, albeit with the last words from the owner of a mentalist parrot squawking in their ears: “I love it to bits, but I wish I’d never been involved, I really do.”

Lead Balloon (BBC Two)

Somebody else who seems to have misplaced his cutting edge is Jack Dee, former hard man of stand-up comedy. Twenty years ago, at the Hackney Empire, I saw him tell very offensive but funny jokes about adult-child relationships (this was in the midst of the Cleveland child abuse panic), of a sort that a “dangerous” Russell Brand type would blanch at trying today. Now Dee is back on our screens as Rick Spleen, himself a celebrity comedian who has lost some of his mojo, in the continuing new series of Lead Balloon. To call it gentle comedy would be unfair, but hard man humour it ain’t. Last night’s episode, in which Rick’s family history was deemed too dull for a celebrity genealogy show, could almost have been self-parody.

Dee’s character is obviously based on Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which the Seinfeld creator Larry David stumbles through life from one awkward or mortifying moment to the next. Nothing wrong with that; much decent recent television comedy has been derived from the Larry Sanders Show, Seinfeld and Curb (even though none of those American classics was considered fit for primetime British TV). But there is something missing from Lead Balloon. The trouble is, it is just not embarrassing to watch. When David upsets, offends and insults the world, often unintentionally, it is so brilliantly excruciating as to make Curb Your Enthusiasm almost unwatchable. Lead Balloon did not once make me want to peep through my fingers or put them in my ears.

When Spleen started criticising the cleaner again, his wife complained: “Rick, stop it, you’re being Really Offensive.” His response was to shut up. By contrast, that would have been just the cue for a coruscating Larry David rant — or a cutting put-down from the old edgy Jack Dee.

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