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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Wife swap (ch4)

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12:04 / 22.06.04

It's a-brewin' again...

05:39 / 30.06.04

Pat and Lucy both intrigued me. It was clear that Pat was a bit too strict and Lucy was a bit too relaxed; but they both did a good job I think in showing the benefits of how they did things, rather than learning from their host family.

I was slightly disappointed that Lucy's points about having fun went largely unheeded owing, I think to the way she expressed them.

07:27 / 30.06.04

There wasn't anything very surprising there. I think everyone pretty much agrees with the too slack v too controlling, but what gave me chills was that Mrs Prison lady makes her children do the "I hope God kills me in my sleep" prayer: and the way she forced it on the new family. Maybe she expected them to be eaten by lice or something.

08:42 / 30.06.04

Yes, that was surprising - especially since Lucy's husband didn't seem to mind. I looked on the chennel 4 website and in her rules Lucy writes:
I couldn't give a toss about bedtimes. Tony would like more structure but me and the kids laugh at him, we call him The Grinch. When he comes downstairs, we go upstairs. He moans from morning 'til night. He's got plenty of views but he does sod all about it.
...so perhaps it wasn't surprising he got the kids to bed using Pat's authority to cajole them into it.

Um, and on a side issue, did anyone else think Lucy looked like an ugly Kate Winslet?

09:00 / 30.06.04

and the hubby had only met one murderer in his life. what kinda bitchbaby prison he work in? maybe if he got to shout 'LOCKDOWN MUTHAFUCKAS' at the cons every so often he wouldn't be such a hard arse to his wee kids.

anyone notice at the end when the prison lady was back home and law-laying once more - she said something about 'the people we see in our jobs'. now, was she worried about her kids turning into badduns and so determined to keep them straight and narrow, or was she worried about reprisals from people she's routinely unpleasant to at work, so keeping the kids to a schedule that would make 'getting' them more difficult?

09:22 / 30.06.04

At first I thought prison lady was right, and Lucy was wrong, but as the programme progressed it became increasingly clear that prison lady was a humourless bitch, and Lucy was a bit of a sweetie. Yes - I know she called her 'new' husband a cunt etc. etc., but did you see how she got the kids to bake a cake? They were sooooo excited about it. Plus prison lady liked to think she was soooo morally superior and upmarket, but she kept saying 'likle'. I hate people saying 'likle'!

ONLY NICE THINGS

09:50 / 30.06.04

Um, and on a side issue, did anyone else think Lucy looked like an ugly Kate Winslet?

I thought Days of Futures Past Sonia from Eastenders.

On "lickle"...hoom... I think that's cultural, rather than class-cultural - she had some (inherited?) Carribean dialect inflections, that being one of them. If you are suggesting that she should radically excise any signs of this in the interests of appearing classier... well, you wouldn't be alone, but I don't think that was quite what you were intending to say.

Incidentally, Gambit, I think he might have meant that he had only met one murderer who was as nasty as his new wife, rather than that he had only met one murderer. The rest were presumably nicer, although he may have policed a pretty quiet ward - at least one in which looking like the lost Chuckle Brother would not incur penalties...

I've never seen this programme before. It is utterly and completely ghastly. Ghastly people exchanging ghastly lives. The enforcement of the prayer regime was a low point, IMHO, and was also one of those moments where you are thinking "this woman has been given a week to drum into these kids that they are going to go to Hell if they die in their sleep without embracing Jesus, and then they are going to be dropped back into an environment where that terror will have no resonance. WHERE ARE THE FUCKING PSYCHIATRISTS?"

I mean, really. This is licensed child abuse, essentially.

As the programme went on, I started developing enormous sympathy for Toby - clearly as terrorised and brow-beaten by his "easy-going" wife, whose tyranny of irresponsibility must take some managing, but maintaining some sort of wry awareness. The bit where he had to ask for change so he could carry on feeding the swearbox was beautiful...

10:10 / 30.06.04

Ah - I'd assumed that the 'likle' thing was an attempt at being cute or something, rather than an accent thing. She did sound from time to time like she was affecting a more RP accent, but maybe it was just that her accent had a lot of different influences. In which case, I withdraw my complaint!

Didn't you begin to feel that Lucy was in fact much, much brighter than she appeared at first? I got the impression that she'd been trapped into her relationship with her somewhat feckless hubby by virtue of the fact that she didn't know how to change a lightbulb and was terrified of having to deal with those sorts of things on her own.

11:59 / 30.06.04

Some of the meedja hubbub around this new series was attempting to characterise Lucy as 'the new Lizzie', presumably on the grounds that she was sweary, had bad hair and might have a detrimental effect on neighbourhood property prices. I thought this a fatuous comparison: it was much more a straightforward Mrs Id versus Mrs Superego, more akin to the nightmarish KitchenRabbitGate WifeSwap of yesteryear, featuring the evil Jude and her autistically regimental husband.

Lucy was sweet, but irritating. Bouncy castles are fine, but as a child's affection-winning gambit, they're somewhat limited. You cannot, after all, have a kid bounce on your inflatable every day (even if you live in Neverland). The cake-baking was nice, though.

The Superegos weren't that bad (Pat appearing sli-i-ightly more sympathetic than her Honey, I Scourged The Kids publicity still) but, as Haus has already highlighted, the bedtime God-bothering was absolutely fucking out of order. For me, that crossed a line that no other WifeSwap has crossed, in attempting to warp another family's kids into fearing one's own Ultimate Superego. For that, Pat deserved a good slapping with Wolverine gloves - and if Feckless Id-Husband had had a little more feck, he might've stood up to such blatant head-fucking of his children. At that point, Mrs Superego had lost me completely.

And yeah, if Mr Superego (the aptly-named Spike (Up My Arse)) has met only the one murderer who said 'cunt', then he's led a pathetically-sheltered life for a prison warder. This struck a chord with me, because it reminded me of a closer-to-home instance of religious fundamentalists comparing stuff they happen to dislike to murder. Silly, crap-moustached arseviolin (Mr Superego, not my aunt...).

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

16:43 / 30.06.04

Oooh, I'm always late to this party!

When is it on? I missed the first one.

Tryphena Absent

18:46 / 30.06.04

the bedtime God-bothering was absolutely fucking out of order. For me, that crossed a line that no other WifeSwap has crossed

Definitely. I was fuming in my seat, no one has the right to enforce religion on another person's children and I would have been a little mad at Toby (was that his name?) but I think he dealt with the more immediate problem... the punishment. Sending anyone to coventry is bad but it's just cruel to treat small children like they don't exist. Their dad just bit right back about the whole nasty, archaic system and I was so glad. The woman was so authoritarian, I mean going on and on about lying when really it's pretty obvious that a kid that age should be reprimanded once about it and then the problem of throwing something expensive in the bin should be dealt with. It was pretty obvious that the child knew what was bad even if the intruder didn't.

08:52 / 28.07.04

Sam and Carol-Anne. AKA sporty outdoors type and couch potato fattie type.

My goddddd. Ian was just a sorry excuse for a father, sitting playing on ebay while his daughter played with rocks in her bedroom. "I bought this knife for 50p at the car boot sale,, now I'm going to put it on eBay for 2 quid and watch it fly".

I think the sporty mum summed it up best when fat mum said to her "open your mind!" and she said "to what?"

Felt really sorry for Alice, the sedantary's parents little girl. She was very sweet and I think Sam had it spot on when she said she thought she was lonely.

Another great weeks music as well. They always seem to put the right track to suit the scene.

10:59 / 28.07.04

My heart broke for Alice, what a sweet little girl.

20:03 / 19.10.04

Awwww, tonight's English-German swap was really touching. Mainly, I think, because the German couple were incredibly accommodating, but also because both couples were, in the final meeting, able to discuss their own failings/anxieties with disarming honesty, rather than immediately going on the defensive. No hairpieces either.

23:05 / 19.10.04

... which means it failed. You can't allow people to be able to learn from each others' experiences on a Channel 4 show! That would be like admitting people are generally decent and kind and.. err hang on...

I thought it worked very well, but it wasn't very Wifeswappy. I wonder how much of the lack of conflict was down to the language barrier pre-empting full on comprehensible strops from all concerned. The only time we saw any real rebellion was from the Deutscherin junger und vater who spoke English well enough to complain to camera and from the Englischer wain who was too young to comprehend what was going on. Everyone else seemed kind of scared and reverent. Until the TV got turned on, anyway.
The look of vengeful triumph on the face of that lass that got a whole strait-laced family to shout "Who the fuck is Alice" at a karaoke machne was priceless, wasn't it?

06:36 / 20.10.04

Was that triumph? I thought she appeared slightly shocked. And I didn't pick up fear/reverence from the participants; a degree of homesickness, maybe, but neither woman seemed shy about introducing changes to her host family, and both families (despite grumbles and tantrums) were open to trying something new. Ultimately, it was the degree of readiness to self-examine and accept criticism that made this seem unWifeSwappy, I think.

Tryphena Absent

11:22 / 20.10.04

I was slightly shocked too so I understood how she felt.

20:19 / 16.10.06

Because it's mentioned in a Conversation thread, and I'm finding this series as appallingly watchable (or watchably appalling) as ever. What gets me is, those involved seem surprised to be placed in families which are their polar opposites. Haven't they seen the previous runs of the show?

In this one, I really like Anti-Establishment Mum, and I think she's by far the most tactful, pleasant person on this week's show. I can't help but think, though (and I'm slightly ashamed at how bourgeous and conventional this makes me), would it hurt for her to wash her hair?

20:32 / 16.10.06

Have to say I do think Ollie is a bit of a cock.

19:11 / 04.05.07

Um, a woman (who seems fairly nice) just admitted that after the kids have gone to bed she and her husband smoke cannabis. Are they going to lose the kids?

Also, other husband just called that woman coloured, which was annoying.

20:00 / 04.05.07

Although the non-doped up mum paid tribute to the children she looked after by naming her new puppies after them. Which was nice.

21:06 / 04.05.07

Didn't manage to watch it all, I lost control over the remote. Was I right in thinking that the pro-cannabis parents turned out to rock?

22:33 / 04.05.07

Yeah, the weed smokers definetly came out better. At the end, when they chat to each other over the table the non-dope smoking, un-coloured wife exclaimed that she has been wanting to leave her husband for a quite a while - this looked to be the first he had heard of this.

I quite appreciated her horror at the thought of bringing up children with DRUGS around before lighting a ciggie.

The husband said he had given up weed since the swap and was spending the money on family excursions, which was nice, not sure about his wife.

Both families seemed to get really positive stuff from the swap and instead of discussing it the two wives attempted to shout each other down while the, now weed free, husband repeatedly tried to focus on the good stuff with about as much success as I'm currently having in discouraging my new cat from shitting on the floor.

The Aftermath is repeated on e4 at 2.10, I only seen snipets of it but if the pimms and lemonade holds out I'll be using it as a backdrop to the 'lith later.

22:35 / 04.05.07

Oh, and she also explained her racial tolerance on arrival by saying something along the lines of 'I would like to have an afro-carribean family move in to my area because they are funny'.

06:39 / 05.05.07

Trainwreck with flowers then?

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