TV's Ulrika

TV (as in television not transvestite) nights can be healthy. A complete tv night is rare for me but enjoyable when I do it. So the other night it was a programme on Ulrika’s sex addiction followed by Marbella Belles.

I enjoyed one and found the other appalling and it may surprise readers to hear that I thought the Ulrika programme the poor one. It began apparently as a programme in which Ulrika would investigate the idea of sex addiction in others and how it can be overcome but quickly became a moderately titillating expose of Ulrika’s sexual past with all the juicy bits left out. It felt like the viewer was being manipulated and that the modest Ulrika expose was always in the mix. We got to hear about Ulrika’s need for love and attention and nobody made the observation that her doing this on television was actually fuelling this need explicitly. She had the option not to but chose to do so and so fed the Ulrika attention industry further. She can only blame herself.

In Marbella Belles we were treated to an apparently superficial group of people living in a world of spray on tan, ‘shampoo’ at lunchtime, vulgar jewellery and ‘drinks’. One of them freely admitted the vacuity of it all but amidst the froth were single mothers who had come here without a penny and had set up million pound businesses and others with a general ‘haveago’ attitude. Their values were certainly not my values in some respects but I admired the energy. The lady however who delegated all of her child caring responsibilities to the Asian maid and whose main occupation seemed to be smoking in a horizontal position was appalling. As she said herself she drops her kids at school has a couple of fags and then does nothing for the rest of the day. She was shady about where her husband’s money had come from (this may have been revealed in an earlier programme) and I was reminded of the quote about Brits abroad – those who live in France vote Tory, those who live in Italy vote Labour and those who live in Spain have recently held up a Post Office. Allegedly.

Music of the day: Catch-a –fire – Bob Marley