........to The Ridiculous.

Last night I was surfing away on here as per usual when I caught sight of a bizarre show on tv. I had the sound turned down low and so the basis for this show eluded me until I had seen enough to stop surfing and have a closer look.

"My Life As An Animal" is a new series of shows where 2 or more humans volunteer to experience life as an animal for 4 days.  4 long days I'd have think.  I'd happened to stumble on the first episode and it was about living as a pig.  Next week it's the turn of horses and then working dogs.

Now this series isn't being shown on some obscure cable channel at 4am or anything.  No, this is on the BBC for goodness sake.  Using my licence fee money no doubt !!!

I watched with mounting disbelief as 2 women who were obviously more used to pillow top mattresses and silk underwear got 'down and dirty' with a load of pigs. I don't mean these pigs were moved to a nice air conditioned studio either.  Oh no.  They were at home in their mud filled sty without a truffle in sight. 

The volunteers slept with them, ate their food, wallowed in their muck and even attempted to learn their language, if such existed. A pig's grunt is pretty much a grunt to me but I'm prepared to accept it's a language to them.  Just don't ever expect to see it as an option when translating this blog.

Then I must've zoned it out for a while as suddenly we were being shown a man volunteer helping a male pig to insert it's cork screw like 'thing' into a female pig (known in farming circles as porking *) as if it couldn't manage it itself.  Talk about 'made for tv' and I'm sure Mr. Pig was grunting a few expletives about not really needing any help in this matter at all. Where were the women when they were needed to do the translating ??  I don't think Mrs. Pig really cared what was going on behind her and I'm not sure we needed to see it up close in glorious HD either. But we did.

Then came artificial insemination and boy was that fun to see.  Again up close and personal.

Finally in this 'life as a pig' story, we got to see their final seconds of life before they were stunned, had their throats slit and then carved up to become juicy bacon slices or lovely chops with 2 veg and mashed taters.  At this point I could hear the clicking of dozens of PETA keyboards firing off emails to the BBC complaining about the whole process.

But my thoughts were about the volunteers.  I mean why bother having these people getting in with the pigs, eating with them, sleeping with them, helping them have sex, learning their language and all that good stuff........only to stand back at the very end and not be up there being stunned and sliced up with them ?   

I know that would be taking things a bit far but then again, what is the point of this series anyway ?  Well it's a bit like watching and then talking about a really REALLY stupid advert. The series has obviously worked as I watched bits of it.  If it had been a simple show with only pigs starring in it, I've have been on that remote faster than you could say gammon steak.  The human element DID get my attention, God help me, and I might even tune in next week (next Friday on BBC3 at 00:35 so set your recorders) as they showed a clip and one of the volunteers tries to be a bit of a horse whisperer and I donno what they whispered but the horse in question shot out a back leg and sent them flying.

That's gotta be worth every penny of the licence fee.  Hasn't it ?

(* I just made that up)