Studs of Suburbia

Channel 4

 

“Every woman adores a fascist” wrote Sylvia Plath “especially if he’s got a really fit arse” (the qualifier viciously scrubbed from the finished poem by serial shagger Ted Hughes). And ain’t it the truth that the dames go for the guys who are worse for them? What’s up with that?

“an old-fashioned Yorkshire gentlemen with a certain amount of world weary charm who couldn’t help coming across like Pat Mustard, the lothario milkman from Father Ted”

Studs of Suburbia followed around some kitchen-sink poon hounds and probed the secrets of their excess.

Show stealer was 52-year-old Alan who lived with his mam in a small Yorkshire village. You can think of Alan as an old-fashioned Yorkshire gentlemen with a certain amount of world weary charm who couldn’t help coming across like Pat Mustard, the lothario milkman from Father Ted. (“I’d better get going because milk gets sour. Unless its UHT milk but there’s no demand for that. Because it’s shite.”)

Alan once managed to get three women pregnant at the same time. You feel churlish pointing out that this is less a success of animal magnetism than it is a failure of contraception. No matter – don’t forget that he’s from the North of England where birth control is one of the many things considered optional when it should be compulsory.

Cut from similar cloth was Clive, a 55 year-old Welshman who at least seemed to have a system to his pie pursuit – spamming the shit out of dating websites with field tested material. A friend once asked one of his beaus (“a proper posh bird”) the secret of his attraction. “He’s hung like a donkey and goes for hours” came the response. As Sid the Sexist once once wisely noted, “Posh burds are all dorty, man”

Tristan was a young walking haircut with terrible dental problems, struggling with minge fatigue and a mobile-phone SIM overloaded with numbers of his conquests. He complained that his non-stop tail chasing was turning into a chore. Still, if he gets one of them pregnant he will get free dental treatment and he can sort his fucking teeth out.

Then came Michael, a member of the London Seduction Society (last seen getting nil points in a BBC speed dating experiment) was the human form of Kaa, the snake from Jungle Book .”All ssssseduccccceerrsssss have reassssonsss for doing what they’re doing”. Erm, thanks Mike.

Plainly the top student in the class Ssslimeball Sssleazing for Sssseducerssss, we didn’t actually see Michael with any women – either because they don’t exist or because they were all beneath his floorboards with snakebite wounds to the neck.

” exactly the kind of one-dimensional Sixth Form Debating Society biological reductionism you expect from a man who slithers around on his belly and sheds his skin every six weeks”

Michael ssssaw the attraction game asss played out between alpha malessss and beta malessss which is exactly the kind of one-dimensional Sixth Form Debating Society biological reductionism you expect from a man who slithers around on his belly and sheds his skin every six weeks.

Perhaps most hilarious was Howard from Cardiff – only 28 and has been engaged about 20 times. His mother jokes that he has the engagement ring on a piece of elastic (perhaps the same piece of elastic Top Cat has his tipping coin in the credits?)

So what did we learn? Nice guys are boring and women like a man with a bit of devil in him – nothing new there.

If we did learn something it was that that, looking at the women involved, that a lot of these guys get their success by targeting women who just aren’t very attractive. The cruel market forces of human relationships apply and it’s all about supply and demand.

That ain’t game, Jack. That’s Economics 101.

The best thing about it: Clive’s collections of girls’ underpants.

The worst thing about it: Tristan’s gnashers – sort it out, boy.

The verdict on Studs of Suburbia: There is nothing like a dame.

Marks out of 10: 7