The title of this post is a quote from Diana Trent on “Waiting For God,” where she asks Tom what the point is of hiring “cotton-tailed bimbos” to do the weather report. Tom does not find this choice mysterious.
The “whose fantasy” question has been stuck in my mind since using a couple Acorn-exclusive shows as nursing marathon binge-watches. British and reruns, but more recent vintage than my usual. I started with “The Other One,” clicking on it because it features Siobhan “Janice from Benidorm” Finneran (also from “Happy Valley,” “Downton Abbey,” and much more), and because the plot was something about a second secret family, which is always promising. (I think one of my distant relatives had one, irl? Anyway.) The show is about the two mother-daughter pairs left behind when a mainly-offscreen, generic-seeming gent by the name of Colin Walcott drops dead. He named both daughters “Catherine Walcott” because (per googling) the show’s creator read a real-life news story where a man did something like this. Anyway the show is primarily about the two 30ish (?) daughters. Siobhan Finneran plays one of the mothers, The Mistress, and does the most one can do with a character description that’s basically ‘lower-class agoraphobe.’ The slightly more fleshed-out ‘main’ mother character, The Wife, is played by an actress who looks like she could be related to me, and who’s apparently Jewish and Welsh so, why not.
Alas this show was not good, at all. The entire premise of the show is that the ‘legitimate’ daughter, Cathy, was uptight and engaged to the wrong man, and hanging out with her layabout half-sister, Cat, Taught Her Lessons about chilling out for a change. The last episode of Season 1 (a Season 2 is apparently forthcoming) literally has her saying that she learned this lesson. Everything is intensely one-dimensional. The only surprise comes in the final ep, where Cathy’s about to hook up with a chiseled-torso rando at a pub, only to discover that this Callum fellow is the third Walcott half-sibling. Oops! This is set up as a surprise because the ladies meet a fellow Catherine at that pub, a white girl who you think will be the alluded-to third Walcott, so you do not expect the black guy she’s about to make out with to be the sibling.
“Delicious” is the same show with higher production values. (At least I think that’s what that expression means?) Not a knockoff as it began in 2016, so a year before “The Other One.” Here, a shared-ex-husband figure looms larger still: a hot-shot professional chef died suddenly, leaving behind two grieving widows: his Beautiful Blonde Thin Younger (But Still, Crucially, Middle-Aged) Wife, and the Earthy Ex-Wife he was still sleeping with, played by (also Crucial here, for several reasons) Dawn French. The actor playing the husband narrates the show, and his memory (?) or ghost (?) makes regular appearances. Dead or alive, the world revolves around… I have it seems forgotten the character’s name. (He’s meant to be handsome but is no Steve Pemberton. And yes that was a reference for the devoted readers of this newsletter.)
At first, “Delicious” appears to be about tapping into the fantasy that one might identify with an older Dawn French, and thus get a vicarious thrill out of seeing the man who ditched such a woman having been Actually All Along in love with her, and not with her younger, slimmer, blonder replacement. Oh and also, the Dawn French character is the secret culinary genius behind the dead chef-husband’s career, because of course she is.
Intertextual trivia digression:
1) On “Benidorm” there’s a scene where Donald and Jacqueline are doing a crossword by the pool and the clue is something like “who said ‘everything in moderation except moderation?’” which they attribute to Dawn French. This is a (possibly fatphobic?? but I don’t actually think so; see her character on “The Vicar of Dibley”) reference to French as a symbol of indulgence. “Delicious” has her as this sensuous creature viscerally connected to the world of food, in contrast to her trophy-wife replacement (played by a thin actress, but also the character speaks of needing to diet to stay that weight) and ambiguously anorexic daughter (more on her later). But! French has actually lost a lot of weight in recent years, and is not fat on this show, merely non-emaciated, which… I don’t know what to make of the casting in that context.
2) French’s ex-husband irl is Lenny Henry, of “Chef!” fame. Gareth is basically the same character as the chef in this show, which is obliquely referenced in “Delicious” by a cameo of sorts from Caroline Lee-Johnson, who plays Gareth’s wife on “Chef!” What does it all mean?
/digression
But as with “The Other One,” the show is baseline about A Man being at the center of events. Which, ugh. Let me be clear: I am not pro-Bechdel-test. If this were about women thinking and talking about men, then fair enough! But both shows are about not one but two women hung up on a shared deceased lover/spouse. It’s not the odd conversation about the dude in question but everything. Whose fantasy, then, is this? Presumably a male one—to be so compelling that even in death, the two women you were simultaneously involved with have lives that revolve around you. But are men watching these shows? Or—and this is pathetic so I hope not—is it just that there are enough women for whom adoration of a cad is heterosexuality? Or maybe it’s not a fantasy at all, and is simply something women of the demographic clicking on these shows relate to, which, I don’t know.
The stranger element, is-it-a-fantasy-wise, is the shared quasi-incest subplot. “Delicious” does this in the form of a liaison between Dawn French’s character’s daughter and her barely-younger half-brother, a Jesse Eisenberg-looking “17-year-old” when the show starts, who of course looks like and I’m guessing is played by a muscular 30-year-old (but, again not my type). Why do they become lovers? Why does anyone on this show, apart from because they’ve been in a scene together and that’s the kind of show it is. It turns out—spoiler alert?—she’s actually the biological daughter of a man the Dawn French one had an affair with, so it wasn’t incest-incest after all, but if they thought it was when they embarked on it, does it matter? Is this taboo of particular interest to the British viewing public? (See also: the first “Midsomer.”) Or, per Dan Savage, maybe it’s just A Thing. Not one I get, but then again, I’m an only child, no strapping brother-from-another-mother to the best of my knowledge. (I’m quite sure I share no DNA with Steve Pemberton.)
The daughter character on “Delicious” is like if Daria were a chainsmoker (of various substances) with an unspecified eating disorder. She’s allergic to water which I have googled and does in fact exist. She’s a tough bad girl but also an injured bird. She’s fragile, which is indicated by her pitiful lack of body fat. She is, in other words, some sort of pro-ana fantasy, which probably is up there with ‘sexy half-brother’ in fantasies an algorithm might have told a TV show to showcase.
What else happens? Black characters have reliably supporting roles on these shows, a trope that I guess British shows have not yet decided is problematic (and that by definition isn’t ever an issue on, say, the more recent, more diverse “Midsomer Murders,” where all characters get equal billing), but which is, if nothing else, cringe. Black women: therapists, caregivers. Black men: eye-candy love interests. But still, better than the shows being all-white? I guess. I do not have the sustained awakeness level needed for awokeness analysis. These shows are good for one thing, which is to have on in the background, at low volume, with subtitles on, while nursing a newborn.