Why is TV giving men Cold Feet?

LAST Monday, my PMTV theory - that woman are taking over the creating, running and viewing of TV - took a turn for the sinister. In the pub that evening my friend Dave was enthusiastically telling me about the previous night's history of the spy plane on Five, when we were ambushed by a pincer movement of girls babbling about babies, swimmingpool hunks and gorgeous interiors - you've guessed it, Cold Feet is back.

Listening to them cooing at the return of this quintessential middleclass domestic drama, I could only assume they'd seen a different episode from the one I'd managed 50 minutes of. Theirs sounded fun and warm, mine was like a harrowing destruction of modern man's valiant attempt to deal with the challenges of fatherhood, divorce and second marriage.

The central theme of PMTV is that not only are programmes made specifically for a female audience, but that the men in them are demonised, and nowhere is this more true than in Cold Feet.

While it begins and ends very couply - the programme sponsor is Mini, a truly unisex star of a car, whose ads top-and-tail each episode - Cold Feet has undergone a not-so-subtle feminisation.

To summarise the men in Cold Feet (and most other PMTV shows): there's the Cheating Fop (Robert Bathurst), an ignorant, sexist idiot; there's the Mummy's Boy (John Thomson) - indecisive, under the thumb and a bit of a chump; and there's the Ageing Lad (James Nesbitt), whose struggle to come to terms with fatherhood is defined by him playing his baby his old Slade records.

On the other hand, the Cold Feet women are radiant. Mummy's Boy's new wife is all suntan and teeth. The Fop's ex-wife is better off without him, and Ageing Lad's missus (Helen Baxendale) is characterised as overprotective but ultimately sensitive to hubby's needs.

Like most PMTV, you wonder why they bother dressing the women in fashionable clothes - they should be wearing white robes, halos and wings.

It's Ageing Lad who is the most recognisable soldier in this wider televised battle for the sexes. His voice-overed resentments, frustrations and self-delusions were perfect.

I was madly identifying with him when the overtly neurotic Baxendale screamed: "This isn't parenting, it's child abuse" - because he went to the pub on the way back from the chemist.

I assumed that my wife would have seen she was a bit over the top, instead she commented: "He's so selfish."

It's unbelievable how two people can watch the same programme but see such different things.

This ever-increasing trend towards marginalising men's terrestrial television viewing may be payback for years of fighting and football, but it's also a serious attempt to hand over full control of the medium to our other halves.

You want proof ? Soap opera stars have been sent out to infiltrate drama like undercover agents - nowadays you can't watch The Bill, hospital dramas or anything by Lynda La Plante without former residents of Brookside, Corrie or EastEnders cropping up.

Soap is the storm trooper of PMTV, all dramas must have an undercurrent of a struggling relationship regardless of the subject matter, whether it's serial killers or fire fighting.

This isn't balanced TV, it's a new kind of female-friendly dumbing- down, where men are portrayed as stupid and constantly put down by their "better halves" - much as women were for decades.

The programmes are becoming like stylised mirror-images of Terry and June or The Good Life, where men are cretins and women rule the roost.

If television is going to continue in this way it will soon become compulsory to run contact details for relationship counselling anywhere the listings appear.

James Brown is the editor of Jack magazine.

Copyright 2003
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