Mongrels
BBC Three
With my recent luck, by the time you read this a fox will have done something so terrible to a child so young that the BBC will have pulled Mongrels on the ground that it makes light of vulpine crime. But I’m reviewing Mongrels anyway because it is the most radical take on furry animals since The Itchy & Scratchy Show. Its twin jokes are to imbue animals with the worst rather than most charming human attributes and, second, to challenge the convention that puppets are fit only for children. Mongrels, which (I hope) began an eight-part post-watershed run last night, is the dirtiest puppet show since Zippy made a foreskin joke on an in-house Christmas edition of Rainbow.
Actually, Nelson, the fox, was one of the gentler beasts among the creator Adam Miller’s dark menagerie. A lonely Boggle cheat, he was a gentle soul whose greatest crime, initially, was to pretend on a dating site that he was Toby Anstis (a former star of CBBC, you know). But then his date, Wendy, lied too. For one thing she was a chicken. For another she was married — she claimed to a “wife-pecker” who abused her so badly that she mislaid. “It was,” she said, “like giving birth to an omelette.” Intimacy becomes an issue for these DNA-crossed lovers. When a fox and a chicken kiss it looks like the fox is having supper. In the end, tiring of her lies, Nelson cuts off Wendy’s head with a plastic knife in an inner-city Mississippi Fried Chicken restaurant.
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Nelson is still nicer than the bitchy Afghan bitch Destiny who at a Strictly Dog Dancing session with her widowed owner remarks that most people have to fly a plane into a skyscraper before they are surrounded by this many virgins. (Tina Humphrey of Tina and Chandi fame may, or may not, wish to take legal advice; so may the Muslim community.) Meanwhile, Marion the cat is well on the way to becoming a serial murderer of old ladies. Harold Shipman got a mention, as did Anne Frank. Mary Whitehouse once complained about an episode of Pinky and Perky. She would have had a field day with this. Best taken with a couple of pints of lager, Mongrels is a hit even if you’re sober. Surely, though, it should be called Creature Discomforts.
True Stories: Best Undressed
More4
I know, I know. Best Undressed, a documentary about the 2008 Miss NudeAustralia beauty contest, sounds like a programme that I should pay, rather than get paid to watch. The director Martin Taylor certainly did not short-change his customers when it came to showing flesh (all of it white, incidentally). But the girls, though nice enough, were slightly, and you might say, predictable dull. The wittiest of them was Ellashaye, aka Miss Nude Tasmania. She came off stage after a slippery bathtime routine saying that she hoped the sponge would respect her in the morning. The only people under any illusions about the pornographic intent of the contest were its organisers, one of whom assured the hopefuls that the judges would be not be looking for “the biggest breasts, nor for the longest legs, nor the tightest ass”. Fact: the competition is broken down into the following categories: best legs, best buns, most luscious “lungs”, hottest body and most sensuous woman. Ellashaye has since quit the business, robbing the stripping world of its entertainer of the year and leaving the sponge feeling used.