The Fight Network: All
Fights All The Time is the channel’s almost irresistible proposition, and while
during the day this is taken care of by re-runs of wrestling matches from World
Of Sport in the 1970s and ‘80s - pasty-faced English dough balls kneading each
other’s flesh in Dudley Civic Hall before an audience of grim-faced crones and
Brylcreemed spivs.
(I know memory
plays tricks, but I am sure the Seventies were never quite that beige) - in the
late evening the network provides what it fondly imagines to be more colourful,
racier, programming.
By
this, of course, it means women fighting each other, sometimes Japanese women,
sometimes Americans, and, for that niche audience with an interest in
Lithuanian women wrestling in honey, Amberlady Honey Wars.
This is not a great programme, but
whatever else you say about it, it does provide a genuine alternative to
Newsnight.
Bikinied
Lithuanian women, competing under names like Jungle Girl and Bronze Thumbelina,
slide around in an inflatable paddling pool half full of honey, and pretend to
fight.
They tend to be more lithe
than the American girls fighting under the Women’s Extreme Wrestling banner,
and I think it is safe to assume the chief attraction for its somewhat
specialist audience is the possibility of one of the combatants losing her top.
Do
not hold your breath, would be my advice.
The warning that precedes the female fight shows on the network – “The
following programme contains violence, sexuality, nudity, and coarse language.
Viewer discretion is advised.” – serves
a similar purpose to those newspaper bills you used to see proclaiming “Famous
Film Star Dies,” only to discover on buying the paper it was some no-mark who
played Robert Mitchum’s best friend in a B-movie in the 1940s.
The
most shocking thing you are likely to see in Amberlady Honey Wars is guys with
unfeasibly wide lapels in the audience smoking, although I was more outraged at
the criminal waste of honey.
At
a time when the honey bee is an endangered species, threatening us with
ecological disaster, and you can barely find a jar of decent stuff in the
shops, to have young women, however lithe, sloshing around in bathtubs of it,
seems profligate in the extreme.
Not at all erotic either.
As Sky commentator Stevo said yesterday morning about England’s
performance in the rugby league World Cup, “We needed fireworks, but so far it
has been a bit of a damp squid.”
Finally,
on the subject of television turning out to be not as advertised, Dermot
O’Leary promised Saturday’s X-Factor would “quite literally be murder on the
dance floor.”
Disappointingly, it
quite literally was not.