Meet Tom. He’s an Essex geezer with all the charm of a used toothpick, whose idea of romance is a cheeseburger on a bench in the Sainsbury’s car park. He can’t hold down a job, spends all girlfriend Cherelle’s money down the bookies, and expects her to cook, clean and run his bath – once she’s finished working two jobs of course. Enter the gum-chewing, ratings-chasing BBC Three guardian angel, ready to solve the problem in the most dramatic, exploitative and tabloid way possible. With the help of three “inspirational” female mentors, Tom must repent, change his wicked ways, and learn the secret of How To Live With Women.
Let’s just pause on that title for a moment. For a programme with basically the same premise as E4’s more bluntly named Tool Academy, it seems a curious spin to put on things. This is an out-and-out wastrel (no nuance please, we’re BBC Three) who doesn’t need to learn how to please his woman (who is, by the way, both attractive, absurdly tolerant and devoted to her horrid boyfriend) but rather how to be a functional member of society. Gender doesn’t really come into it. So it’s hard not to smart under either the sly little dig of that title – the suggestion that the female of the species is so capricious, demanding and generally unfathomable as to require a guidebook – or balk at the series’s broader suggestion that all men are hygienically challenged layabouts with too much attitude and not enough endeavour. “I think it’s a bit over the top”, says Tom, “but that’s women for you.” No, that’s docusoaps for you.
Before I’m shouted down with cries of, “It’s just a bit of fun!” I should point out that it’s actually not (fun, that is). As someone who has never met an MTV reality show she didn’t like, who can sit through Take Me Out with something approaching pleasure, I’m no television snob – but this misses the point.
Where naughty little brother Tool Academy gamely pulled down its contestants’ metaphorical trousers, pointed and laughed, it also made no bones about the competitive element. The men and women were there not to embark on some journey of self-discovery, but because they had the chance to win £25,000. The BBC version prudishly drapes its subject in a loincloth of social responsibility and morality (one of the mentors is a vicar) and ends up looking both awkward and disingenuous.
There are a handful of good moments. Tom returns victorious with a carrier bag of vegetables for the church kitchen (“I’ve never been shopping my life - it’s a massive responsibility”). “You can have a Blue Peter badge for that,” quips one of the elderly ladies. While Rev Alison is frankly too saintly to be entertaining, Scouser beautician Kate is far more forthright, and it’s hard not to feel that the fake tan forcibly administered to Tom, dodgy shower cap and all, is punishment enough for his misdeeds.
I’m not really sure what the point of BBC Three is. Hotter Than My Mum; Snog, Marry, Avoid; Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents: the channel’s raison d'être seems to be as the BBC’s backdoor, the concealed entrance through which folk normally safely confined to The Jeremy Kyle Show and Trisha can squeeze and claw their way into mainstream viewing. Joining this noble stable of shows, How To Live With Women offers more of the disposable same.
Having drunk a bit too deeply of the Loose Women philosophy that it’s OK to bash men because as long as you do it with a smile it’s not sexism, the show does stick in the throat a bit. Redress is probably to be found however in the Brownie points that men across the country will earn simply by being less offensive than these hideous specimens of manhood.
- Watch How To Live With Women on BBC iPlayer
