THE KIDS ARE doing Ann’s head in, she says. Anthony needs a haircut, Daniel wants to go to the pub and Heather’s wearing a thong. She’d better have big pants on when she sees her boyfriend. Then there’s the Channel 4 programme in which Ann and her husband Jimmy, well, star. Have I seen it? I have.
“Bloody hell, will you post it to us? Promise? Tomorrow. They won’t send us a copy. Are we pretty horrendous?”
This isn’t easy to answer. I say it’s good telly. Yeah, right, says Ann. So why, I ask, did she and Jimmy volunteer to have CCTV cameras in their home for two weeks for a programme that revels in dysfunctional relationships? “No idea, bang me head,” she reasons. “Because when we watched the first series of Made for Each Other? we used to say we do stupid things like that. It was a bit of fun really.”
Ann, 37, and Jimmy Jones, 46, are both on their second marriage. They live near Stockport where Ann works in a doctor’s surgery and Jimmy is a driving instructor. He has two grown-up kids, her three teenagers live with them; they met ten years ago in a nightclub and married four years later.
Having spent a couple of hours in Stockport, watching them joke and snort with laughter I’d say they adore each other, but what attracted programme maker Talkback to them was their capacity to argue. For days. About whether Ann should have bought a bag of nectarines. Or why there are six toilet rolls in the upstairs bathroom on a Monday and none on Friday.
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“The other one was about garlic bread,” Jimmy says. “You have to go outside to the freezer and Ann couldn’t be arsed. So she put two on the table. I said ‘Two garlic breads? Have we got company?’ I’m one of 14, we never had garlic bread. When you see the kids wasting things you think they don’t appreciate them.”
How long did that argument last? “About a week.”
The format of the series is for footage of the couple to be analysed by Vanessa Lloyd Platt, a divorce lawyer, and Malcolm Stern, a psychotherapist. They then articulate the obvious — that Ann and Jimmy aren’t communicating — and suggest strategies to put things right. So Ann and Jimmy are instructed to say “I love you” to each other three times a day, to thank each other, to dance together and to have a romantic meal cooked by Jimmy.
Now it strikes me that if you film any couple for 400 hours you would be able to find 20 minutes that show them not communicating. Add to that Jimmy’s admission that he played up to the cameras, and Ann’s that she felt so self-conscious in front of them that she clammed up, and you can see that their difficulties are magnified and, arguably, distorted in the programme. But then if you volunteer to be filmed you have surely worked out that the producer is looking for tension. There is certainly no deception.
So what the programme achieves is not so much a newly blissful couple as confirmation of the accuracy of Caroline Aherne’s The Royle Family. Here we have an endearingly normal family who watch telly, demand cups of tea, have a go at each other. And a dad who loves them all but finds banter easier than soppy stuff. “Have you got superglue on your arse?” Jimmy asks Ann.
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“I think it’s [the conflict] a lot to do with stepchildren,” Jimmy says. “You daren’t say too much because you’re frightened of upsetting things but you need to say something. It’s a fine line you have to walk. But we don’t have a lot of rows about the kids.”
Enter Heather, Ann’s 13-year-old. She’s going out and asks for a coming home time. The three of them agree on 9.45pm. Heather kisses both of them and leaves and I can’t help noticing that around all the verbal fisticuffs in this household there is a lot of laughter, a lot of eye contact (very little of which makes it on to the programme) and there are three nice kids.
I’m not sure this is really such a dysfunctional family. There are many homes, including the northern one where I grew up, where you won’t hear a constant refrain of “I love you, darling”. It’s not part of the culture. It’s not that we don’t love each other, but we don’t go on about it. So when Vanessa Lloyd Platt tells Jimmy and Ann to say “I love you” three times a day she is misunderstanding them. Jimmy and Ann prefer teasing to gush. Call them emotionally constipated if you wish, but they are proof that psychobabble has its limitations.
Ann is still needling me for details of the programme. “Do I look fat? Do I look dead pathetic?” No, she doesn’t. But she has become more assertive as a result of doing the programme, she says. “I answer back now.” She turns to Jimmy. “I suppose it’s better to do that than to shut up.”
“Course it’s better,” Jimmy. says. “We don’t not talk for four days now. We make friends a lot quicker. Maybe two days, but it’s an improvement.”
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The ugliest part of the film is when Jimmy tells Ann that her name will never be on the mortgage. This was shown to them as part of the analysis and watching it distressed them. “I thought that’s really nasty,” Jimmy says. “When I saw it I had tears in my eyes. You’ve got your name on the deeds now,” he says to Ann.
She cried, she says, not because of what Jimmy had said but because she knew it would become public. “When you have an argument on your own nobody else knows and it’s the thought that now everybody will know the most horrible things that go on. That’s why I cried. Everybody else is going to see that now, like my grandad and my auntie. And it looks worse than it is. People do say nasty things to each other to get a reaction.”
The unanswered question is still why they volunteered to be filmed. The truth, I suspect, is that they know that divorce is unbearably painful. Are they are more determined to make their marriage work having been divorced once?
“Yes,” Ann says. “Put up with anything. Certainly not getting divorced again. It’s too easy to jack it all in, you need to work at it.”
“What do you mean, put up with anything, you cheeky sod,” Jimmy says. But she has. She’s even gone on the telly.
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Made for Each Other?, tonight 8pm, Channel 4