BLOKE TV
For the Canberra Times,29 August 2006


I can never leave my boyfriend. He knows how to work the remote control device. It's silver and aerodynamic (so useful in a lounge room), with a touch-screen to control the TV, the radio, the CD player, the hard-disk recording device, two ancient videos and a DVD player.

The man is an electronics engineer and needs to be available for tech support whenever the telly is on. He has programmed this thing with various instructions such as "Press (here) and point device at TV for ten seconds until this screen informs you to proceed". It's tempting to answer "Roger that".

In this way, one can adjust screen ratios, switch to high definition broadcasts (my, all those actors look a lot older and more tired than we thought) and record House while watching Spicks and Specks (in case Hugh Laurie is being repeated or trapped in an episode with a dud script. Sometimes it's hard to take his curmudgeonly, ponderous doctor seriously, not because he's a crap actor, but because he's the voice of our daughter's talking book of the Finn Family Moomintroll and every now and then I can't help expecting Dr House to order Snuffkin to get a CAT scan on the Snorkmaiden, stat.)

Men love our TV remote. When they come over to our place they look longingly at it, and stroke it. With a few exceptions, women, I can tell, secretly wish there was simply an on-off switch and the rest could be achieved by intuitive clapping, or voice activation, such as "Not another documentary on aviation safety!" or "Pipe down!".

And I suspect few women set their recording devices for American Chopper (Father's Day marathon this Sunday from 7.30 am to 6.30 pm and various other times on the Discovery Channel), a show about squabbling, hairy, tatty (in the tattooed sense), father-and-son Americans who tinker about with big-arsed motorbikey thingoes (technically speaking). Men are statistically more likely to watch a cooking show if it's Iron Chef on Saturdays at 8.30 on SBS, because of the element of competition and air of serious, imperturbable swagger.

Indeed, SBS, which used to be the suspicious multicultural station men watched only for bosoms and soccer (and why has nobody combined those two elements in a reality show?) now has the Bloke TV market cornered, with Top Gear on Mondays at 7.30 a blast of BBC engine fetishism (bbb.co.uk/top gear).

Top Gear has a huge budget and complete independence (read it and weep, Australian producers). It's all about cars, but because it's not influenced by the need for sponsors or advertisers, the presenters can, and do, say quite thrilling things like, "This Peugot really is rubbish". The team of three is the massively opinionated but amusing Jeremy Clarkson, the nerdy James May (wears a parka inside) and the fresh-faced cheeky monkey Richard Hammond.

The other big secret of Top Gear is fun. They get their mums to race a trio of new small cars. They play "conkers" using giant cranes to smash real caravans together because they hate getting stuck behind caravans on the road. They have "celebrities" and a disguised racing driver called "Stig" rush about on a dedicated racing track. Serving British Army snipers and tank units to try to "shoot" them while testing four-wheel drives or fast cars; they gleefully insult at the Porsche design team, and literally race across Europe, being rude to each other (and to the calm tones of satellite navigation systems in flash cars; Clarkson shrieks at a particularly inaccurate one that she's a "useless harridan!")

It is a tremendously engaging show in which you can complain about modern car annoyances ("it bongs at you every time you do something") or vicariously drive a McLaren Mercedes sports car at 260 kilometres an hour. The set is a warehouse so they can bring in several vehicles; it's a bit like the old Countdown, with a studio audience and the presenters sitting on bench seats torn out of real cars. I don't really know what horsepower is (except outdated as a concept, surely), or what a piston does, and I can do without jokes about travelling woodies, but I think I'm hooked.

SBS will effortlessly maintain its testosterone domination of Monday nights when this series of Top Gear ends by replacing it with a new series of the boy-magnet show, Mythbusters. (Older episodes are on the Discovery Channel Mondays at 9.30; dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters). If it were invented by a network, its presenters would be rock-jawed, muscly spokes-models, but luckily, this show was created by its presenters, a pair of oddly ginger, pale, American special effects dags who test urban myths (will a petrol tank burst into flame if you shoot it? Will you survive if you jump into the air just before your falling elevator hits the ground floor?). The Mythbusters use enough of their amygdala (the gut-reaction part of the brain) to enjoy blowing stuff up and just enough frontal lobe so nobody dies. Bloke heaven. Happy Father's Day.