Saturday 30 May 2009

Too Fat to Live, Too Rare to Die




A short and entirely un-scholarly look at the future of human evolution

On Monday 01 June 2009 ITV1 will broadcast a documentary entitled Supersize Teens: Can't Stop Eating, a documentary on tennage obesity. A Radio Times billing for the programme summarises the show's content thusly:

"We follow two morbidly obese teenagers as they risk everything - including their lives - in a bid to lose weight. Laura is a 24 stone 13-year-old, and is one of the youngest patients ever to have the high-risk gastric bypass operation, while Victoria is 14 and is paying 25,000 dollars for a reversible gastric band."

These are shocking cases of morbid obesity in two very young children, but more remarkable still is the fact that, in this day and age, such stories are commonplace. 2009 alone has seen the likes of Georgia's Story: 33 Stone at 15, Gok Wan: Too Fat, Too Young and Extraordinary People: The World's Heaviest Man grace mainstream, prime-time UK television. The digital channels, particularly those aimed at women or themed around 'health' abound with endless weight-loss comptitions of freak-show documentaries about whale-like Americans. Indeed, to mention our cousins across the Atlantic isn't to score cheap laughs, it's to highlight the extent of the problem. The Radio Time continues about "the situation in America, where more than 200,000 children a year undergo weight loss surgery."

This is staggering! Why has this occurred? We, the human race, have mastered this planet. We've tamed the beasts of the wild, we've explored and documented each and every nook and cranny of the lands of this planet (and a good deal of the waters too), we can predict the weather, communicate golbally, we have knowledge of physics, biology, mathematics... In short, we understand this working of this planet and have carved it to suit our needs. Why, then, have our very bodies failed us? Why have they, to paraphrase an episode of Transformers, become weakened and totally useless?

Think of any technological development you like and ask yourself what purpose it serves. All technology is designed to overcome the shortcomings of our physical or mental abilities. The chair, something we all take for granted, overcomes the cumbersome nature of our physical form, overcomes fatigue and serves as the best possible means to rest a body 'in neutral', as it were. The roof over your head prevents hypothermia. The car you drive propells you to your destination far faster than your legs or horse ever could. I could ramble on; the point to bear in mind is that everything we have developed from the knife and fork to the microprocessor is in some way intrinsically connected with our biological needs.

However, nature has been developing technology for far longer than we have. Think of your body, comprised as it is of limbs, a torso, a skeleton, a myriad of senseory receptors, an internal communication and electrical system in the form of the nervous system and so on. Each part of your body serves specific funtions. Think of the arm and the hand. These are your body's primary tools. Consider the versatility, sensitivity and ingenuity of the human hand and contemplate the many functions the hands perform. These are tools carved by evolutionary need.

But sadly evolution, being a crude process of trial-and-error, has not made us perfect. We can marvel at the human eye and ponder the wonders of its workings but we know, categorically, that our visual spectrum is very limited. One only has to blow a dog whistle and watch the reations of any nearby canines to know that we perceieve but a fraction of the audio signals around us. Our sense of smell is nothing compared to that of a dog. And these shortcomings are nothing compared to those that instinct forces upon us: hunger, thirst, sexual desire and more abstractly chemical moods like anger, misery, despair and so on. Schopenhauer was correct in proclaiming that we are all slaves to insatiable desire and will always remain so.

Since we have taken our evolution into our own hands, as previously stated, we have developed an alarming array of technological solutions to our various biological shortcomings, and herein lies the problem. We have been too ingenious too quickly. Our minds, natures, technologies and so on are of 2009 but our bodies might as well exist in the Stone Age. And it is for this reason that we are stagnating and in danger of degenerating.

Our young are fat because food is no longer a challenge. They do not have to pick it or hunt for it, they no longer slog it home or exist in states of perpetual feast-and-famine. It's not their fault; it is perfectly sensible to streamline the production and availability of something as biologically essential as food, but the abundance of food, and often refined and alien produce at that, has unwittingly caused a problem. Our prisons are perpetually full to bursting with rapists and drug abusers, all of whom are merely retreading crimes perpetuated since the dawn of man, but crimes borne of their own chemistry rather than conscious malice. We no longer have to move now that we have the car, and so on, and so on...

Humankind is at a crossroads: we can either face up to the fact that our very natures (i.e. taking the path of least resistence in all situations) are incompatible with our physical forms in the world in which we now live and seek to use our technological developments in order to evolve, or slide into a state of increasing physical weakness and frailty.

Radical biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is currently seeking a means of prolonging human life through prevention of "the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us", and compares his view of 'repairing' human beings to the notion of a mechnaic replacing parts on a car. This is all very well in its way, but we have already proven that, by using technology, we have become capable of superhuman feats. With the telescope we can stare deeply into the heavens at any time we desire; with the motor car we can travel at huge speeds, we have learned how to fly, we have developed machines capable of great physical strength and versatility, as well as things such as calculators, communication technologies and the means to artifically maintain the health of bodily organs.

In my view, the next stage in humanity's development will be the widespread physical replacement of biological limbs and organs with technological equivalents. Indeed, think of the pacemaker, the prosthetic limb, the hearing aid and so on - such technologies are already in common use. Such a situation poses no end of philosophical problems: is identity something local to merely the brain, is it an illusion, what does it mean to be 'human', and so on but, in my view, if we are to finally overcome our biological and chemical dilemmas, we must now put into practice on ourselves the same technological mastery that we have wrought on the world.

Sunday 17 May 2009

Mutiny on the Buses



Like Viz comic, ITV1 seems to exist largely for the purpose of scrutinising working-class British life. Unlike Tyneside's best-loved bi-monthly magazine though, ITV1 doesn't apparently mean to be satirical so much as affectionate.

Take this Sunday morning, May 17 2009. I don't make a habit of watching soap operas, or indeed lying in bed knowingly wallowing in low culture (well, actually...), but on this particular Sunday morning I saw no particular reason to rise and lingered on for far longer than usual, the TV on for company. An omnibus of Coronation Street was screening when I fired up my set and the series's attention to detail of the banality and trvialities of everyday life was, frankly, both comforting and cursiosly enlightening.

The dull decor of the characters' homes, the shabbiness of the Rovers Return Inn, the George at Asda clothes sported by the cast, all of these serve as well-observed reminders that life isn't all Lily Allen and Hoxton Square. I say this not to sneer but to demonstate a genuine affection which rocked me as I tuned in and out of the show. Indeed, Jack Duckworth's worries about being seen with another woman after his wife's death were heartening in this epoch, in which 'fidelity' is seemingly something of concern only to hi-fi reparirmen, and the pain of regret felt by Norris (who I gather runs the corner shop - I'd never seen the show before) as someone special to him left the Street for a life of caravanning around the south coast was oddly moving.

Yes, the lives and concerns of the 'little people' of this sceptered Isle as depicted in Corrie tip a hat to the everyday, unglamorous side of life, so rarely seen on TV. But if Corrie depicts an unremarkable, vaguely grimy working-class life in 2009, nothing could have prepared me for the film which followed it, 1972's Mutiny on the Buses.

I've recently been getting into Carry On films, so the opening credits of this Hammer Comedy Classic (I couldn't help wondering if Peter Cushing was going to pop up any moment) compelled me to pull the duvet up closer and concentrate on what was on-screen. If you thought Carry On films were end-of-the-pier entertainment, you ain't seen nothing yet.

A quick Wikipedia search after the film's end informed me that Mutiny... is a spin-off of popular ITV1 sitcom On the Buses, which I'd heard of but never seen, and a sequel to a big-screen outing with the same title. But, like a Dickens novel, it's so much more than a bog-standard bawdy British comedy: it's a snapshot of an era of British life that is, materially-speaking, so far removed from today as to be almost mind-blowing, yet spiritually the cousin of Corrie.

The main thrust of the film sees Stan Butler (played by a 50+ Reg Varney), a bus driver, attempting to put his affairs in order so that he can marry his conductress, move out of his mother's home and escape his oddball family, all the while getting through life shirking and having a laugh with his best friend Jack Harper (Bob Grant).

All the heartening British hallmarks of the late 1960s are present and correct: big double-decker buses, red telephone kiosks, sideburns on every male character, smokers peopling every scene and smutty laughs by the barrel-full. The remarkable things about this film, though, are the small details which wouldn't have seemed shocking at all at the beginning of the '70s but which are entirely at odds with modern sensibilities.

I'm not sure how much this film and the Carry Ons' insistence on marriage before sex as a norm was for comedic and farcical effect, but each girl Stan ends up with puts pressure on him to propose almost as soon as their liason begins, and so the sexual morality which runs through the piece is a curious mix of knowing nod-and-wink allusions to 'forbidden' sauciness, coupled with this hangover insistence on marriage as proper and expected. Perhaps it's this kind of eagerness and coyness in the national character which has given rise to our current culture of prurience and locker-room boasting, to borrow a phrase from the Americans...

The film's lackadasical approach to working life is both recognisable and refreshingly nihilistic: these men know that they'll rise no higher in life and content themselves with trying to wring as much fun and mischief out of their humdrum lives as they're able.

But it's the domestic setups which are really remarkable. Stan Butler is a man in his mid-thirties who lives with his mother, sister, brother-in-law and infant nephew in a small and vaguely tatty-looking house, which his mother shockingly suggests he move his future bride into. The house itself is blandly grotesque: a symphony of browns, beiges and debris, with the baby shitting at the dinner table while the other characters are eating. Such a set-up, I would imagine, seems astonishing to many watching the film today but was evidently unremarkable back in the 1970s.

Many of the film's locations and set-pieces are uniquely British too. At the bus depot a game of darts between staff and management gives the characters an opportunity to let their hair down, indulge in a few vodka and tonics and make spectacles of themselves, and the busmens' 'exotic' trip to a safari park toward the film's end both act as reminders of the simple pleasures we Britons delight in. Even the adverts which adorn the many buses in the film scream out 'Go Pontinental!' in reference to Pontins holiday camp.

Mutiny on the Buses isn't spectacularly funny. The physical comedy pieces are so contrived as to be utterly predicable and their execution is enthusiastic if not particularly well-done. The dialogue-driven humour's not much better: a decent example, from Stan's sister about her husband, is "Don't go to bed with him! The only thing he's got that'll keep you awake at night is his snoring!". No, the film's real appeal to a contemporary audience coming to it cold is the image of working-class Britain some forty years ago. The bonhomie and affection the characters show for one another, the proliferation of 'cor, blimey!'s and ''ave you gone ravin' mad?!'s, the grottiness of the film's locations and the obvious class schisms which are the source of much of the film's humour; all of these things mark the film out as ostensibly working-class British and proud and the product of a less self-obsessed age. Even the Carry On-style seaside postcard fascination with women in their undies is present and correct when Stan and Jack burst in on the ladies changing room at the bus depot.

As a cultural experience Mutiny on the Buses is up there with Carry On at Your Convenience as a snapshot of a golden-age of British low-culture now long-since past, but even to this day it is a film which cannot fail to produce a warm feeling of affection in a viewer. As a curiosity piece, it's fascinating to see how British life has evolved materially, and as light-hearted fun it's perfectly servicable.

ITV is a pretty beleaguered media company these days, and while a great deal of their output sickens me (Mr. Cowell's mob, Ant and Dec and The Bill to cite just three examples), it was fascinating to be given the opportunity to compare and contrast working-class British life in 2009 with that of 1972 from the light channel this morning. And while Corrie's peopled with gay characters, ethnic minorities and without a single cigarette or pie-and-mash shop on display, it's refreshing to see that, beneath the surface, the hopes, dreams, aspirations and general morality of the fictionalised working-classes have remained fairly consistent. Fans of bawdy comedy will find much to keep them amused in Mutiny on the Buses; future historians will see the film as an invaluable insight into the cultural history of the English people.