As John Cooper Clarke once said, ‘It happens once and then it’s gone, leaving bugger all,’” says James May, closing episode one of his new Amazon series, Oh Cook! The end of the poem in question, Nothing, actually goes: ‘It’s like talking to the wall / I give you what I get / I give you bugger all.’ Cooper Clarke will, naturally, be spitting chips at May’s misquoting, mid-gaze at a baby sweetcorn. But in May’s televisual oeuvre, giving bugger all and playing the idiot has rather become the schtick.
The premise of Oh Cook! is that May can’t cook and needs to be taught. It’s set up as behind-the-scenes affair: his publishers (“by some miracle they’ve paid me to write a cookery book”) sit watching him, while cameramen film cameramen doing erotic close-ups of glistening peppers. A charming female publisher removes some garlic from his hair – very meta, very clever; you wouldn’t see that on Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat! – and the central gimmick is a home economist called Nicky being shut in a cupboard until May needs her to check something. “Nicky, I’ve screwed up,” he bleats, like a child beckoning a parent to deal with a shitty arse. Out she pops, before shutting herself back in, repeatedly. But this busy scene of people fussing and tending a poor-old-sod-who-knows-nuffin is a dead horse because May seems… fine at cooking. Completely fine. The pretence is as naked as skinned salmon.
There is no hiding from the currency of bumbling male ineptitude these days, not least because those in charge of the country wield the act with fervour. Boris Johnson has long maintained his unkempt, raffishness caricature – the ‘forgotten’ lines, the haystack hair, the shrugging – because a loveable chump is disarming; he gets away with murder. Male idiocy as an entertainment trope won’t die, either. Swathes of cinema and television is full of dopey husbands and divorced dads, lazy cops and incapable best friends, but I wonder if there isn’t something grotty about men actively pretending to be dumb.
If half-bored patter is your thing, the appeal of May’s lazy-bantering around Japan in his last Amazon series, Our Man In Japan (our man; our James), is understandable, but a basic reading of Oh Cook! could be that it reinforces the idea that domestic stuff just isn’t something the male brain can naturally handle, pushing the narrative of cooking being a woman’s work – with one locked in the cupboard, in an apron. But it’s just one example of cluelessness being elevated as something endearing. Carl Pilkington’s An Idiot Abroad series was essentially: clueless, grumpy man is shown how to have a nice time and be curious in a foreign country. Kids don’t get a break, either; when I last watched Peppa Pig with my nephew, the squeaky cries of “SILLY DADDY”, as Daddy Pig fucked up yet again, were like a chorus. Panel shows are rife with male comedians wearing shrugs and grunts like badges of honour. Why won’t it stop? What helpful stereotypes are we upholding?
Perhaps it speaks to the “down with experts” concept peddled by other members of the Tory cabinet for the last few years. In the run-up to Britain’s EU referendum, Michael Gove dropped a soundbite that gained considerable traction: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.” It may not be that tenuous to link this mindset, and the strange stigma of wearing one’s knowledge well, to the breadth of faux-ineptitude from men seeking an audience. Remember when Russell Brand said he didn’t change nappies because he had a more “mystical” and “reflective” view of parenting that eclipsed the basic, keeping-a-baby-alive-and-clean bits? Do we really believe it? Or is there a perceived intellectual superiority in being the man who can't do it all?
From the late 1990s to mid 2010s, there were so many complex male characters on TV; The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad were all centred on capable-but-disturbed, bad-yet-redeemable men having existential crises. There has been good TV since, of course. The evolution of a character like Alan Partridge is an example of writers continuing to build a man who thinks he’s it, but turns his gaps in awareness and desperation to be liked into bald vulnerability. It makes you love every pathetic word he says. Maybe the cult of the idiot is a logical counterpoint to that big era of cleverly flawed male characters. In the fickle worlds of TV and publishing, character types become products whose appeal will come and go like the seasons. But inelegance is a different game for women.
The enduring blend of snobbery and misogyny that still surrounds a show like The Simple Life, in which Paris Hilton’s supposed vapidness was carefully constructed, speaks of the ingénue still being fair game for ridicule. The gendered scorn directed at most reality TV, in fact, where female characters are edited to be Madonnas, whores or bimbos, tells a similar story. It’s hard to imagine any female TV personality being able to persuade a production company to make a series about her not having a clue. But if feigning the lack of basic life-skill is where the money is, maybe Claudia Winkleman should pitch something on struggling to mow the lawn. With a man hiding in the shed ready to explain.
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