THE
CRITICSJAMES COWENTELEVISION
Beware this
column has
nudity, drugs
and goat sex
Pam & Tommy Disney+
Mary Beard’s Forbidden Art
BBC2, Thu
The Teacher
Channel 5, Mon-Thu
And Just Like That...
Sky Comedy, Thu
This week’s column begins
with the usual set of trigger
warnings: nudity,
inappropriate language,
drugs, goat sex and many,
many penises.
It is the same, of course, for
nearly every television show
now, especially ones on
streaming sites, which are
routinely prefaced with a
neurotic shopping list of things
to cry about and be scared of
before you have even started.
What amazes me is that they
never tell us about things that
matter. Who was ever worried
something might contain
“sex” or “nudity” or even
the baroque “inappropriate
coach/player relationships”?
Why don’t they warn us
about things that might
actually ruin our night, such
as bad acting, or the fact that
there is literally no plot in
Pam & Tommy, a breathlessly
lightweight eight-part drama
about the marriage between
Tommy Lee, the Mötley Crüe
drummer, and Pamela
Anderson?
Eight parts! There is
nothing to say about this
couple, not one interesting
thing about him or her — but
Disney, the children’s channel,
has valiantly built an entire
show around this pair of
toddler inanities, using many
candyfloss wigs, accessories,
wild prosthetics, plus the
grungiest, maddest extras
with their stump teeth and
greasy locks. And what can I
say? It’s a lot of fun to watch
— top marks for energy.
The show’s central
attraction is a pair of fake
tits worn by the actress Lily
James, who is playing the
Baywatch bombshell. You
spend most of your time
zooming in on the screen,
wondering how they got them
like that. Anderson’s breasts
are, of course, legendary:
plump gravity-defying globes,
shown escaping from a variety
of inadequate garments, while
James — no great actress
— must grapple with a set of
immobile drag appendages as
she throws herself around
hotel suites and yachts.
She pouts, rolls over,
giggles — the makers seem so
delighted to have dreamt up
this series, they tease her out
like an exciting mythical beast.
In the first episode there are
only snatches of her — as if
they are introducing the
monster in Godzilla. By
contrast there couldn’t be
more of Sebastian Stan as
Lee, in a nonstop stream of
ever tinier silky posing
pouches as he storms from
room to room in their
huge house in Malibu.
Accosting the
long-suffering
builder, played by
Seth Rogen, he
berates him over
the positioning of his
bed. “I don’t give a f***to think how much money
ended up going to empty,
egomaniacal people like this,
who spend it all on waterbeds.
Not a single person has an
estimable feature. It is like
watching a load of Andrex
puppies wee everywhere.
If you are coming for a
more serious portrait of how
Anderson felt when the
builder stole and leaked their
sex tape, then you might be
disappointed. This show
couldn’t be further from
feminist polemic — it’s all
about the camera playfully
riding over Pammy’s curves.
James makes a brave fist of
impersonating Anderson, but
she never really looks like her:
her nose too sharky and she
never seems comfortable with
her huge Baywatch gnashers.
Mary Beard is back with a
new two-parter, Forbidden
Art, about depictions of sex,
nudity and death. I switched
on expecting the usual stream
of rudderless “woke” nonsense
— but it was by turns hilarious
and outrageously hard-core.The first half of the
programme required Dame
Mary to inspect a range of
paintings and sculptures
showing penises, breasts and
what streaming sites might
call other “mature themes”,
which she then ruthlessly
tried to intellectualise. This
alone was worth the licence
fee: Beard, inclining her head
like a country vicar, was
presented with a Roman
sculpture of the demi-god Pan,
looking not unlike Tommy
Lee, shagging a she-goat.
“This is a half-goat having
sex with a whole goat,” Dame
Mary intoned, not words I’d
ever thought I’d hear from her
— or anyone on the BBC. She
then plunged into a bold,
luscious, occasionally
repulsive look at taboo art,
interviewing artists about
their work, including the
ridiculous Martin Creed, who
won the Turner prize for
shutting a light on and off in an
empty room. Sitting in a movie
theatre, with a clothes peg on
one ear and squiggles all overabout cost,” Lee roars, as your
eyes drink in the ratty locks,
the whippet-thin abs, the
nipple rings, the strange,
sock-like thing stuck on his
penis. “I sold 50 million
albums — I can’t afford
to move a f***ing bed
10ft to the left?”
For fans of
celebrity excess, it
is an effervescent,
comical, nostalgic
romp — it is shockingIf only trigger warnings were useful and
told us about bad acting and terrible plots
The show’s
central
attraction is
a pair of fake
tits worn by
Lily James
Nostalgia romp Sebastian
Stan and Lily JamesCAMILLA
LONG
12 6 February 2022