The Times, 20 February 2002, by Joe Joseph
"Television."
-----------------------------------------------------------

The male menopause is the age when men become paralysed by 
the fear that all women still want them for is opening jars. 
To the writer of *Manchild* (BBC2), it is something sadder 
still. His quartet of fortysometings are men who have 
reached an age when they are not attracted to a woman by her 
mind, but by what she doesn't mind. What she doesn't mind is 
dating a man who is twice her age and has half her emotional 
maturity. These men are as transparent as Cellophane. They 
are men who behave like men - decisive, bullish, and with 
the emotional maturity of sauerkraut. This is what distances 
*Manchild* from *Sex and the City*, its most obvious 
inspiration. *Manchild* is not funny enough for a sitcom, 
nor gripping enough to rank as drama. It isn't full of 
quirky insights. *Manchild* is an accretion of cliches. It 
falls to Nigel Havers - rich, dapper, divorced, rides a 
swanky, look-at-me-and-weep BMW motorbike - to deliver the 
Carrie Bradshaw monologues that thread through *Sex and the 
City*; and as superficial as most of Carrie's observations 
might seem, they can sound like Socrates compared to some of 
the quips Havers has to deliver. Such as? Such as: "Marriage 
is like buying stock: you gotta get in and you gotta get 
out. It's timing. Everything is timing. Get in too late, and 
all the good options are gone. Get in too early, and you 
just never know the true calibre of what you're buying." It 
is not funny, so it must mean something clever. But what, 
exactly? Here is another one: "A handsome, wealthy, divorced 
man with plenty of charm is just a shag waiting to happen."

It is no huge surprise, then, that Havers speaks his lines 
to the camera with the smooth but hollow-eyed conviction of 
a travelling salesman who no longer believes his own sales 
spiel.

*Sex and the City* acquires its sheen from passing itself 
off as a sounding board for issues about sexual mores, 
bedroom techniques, dating practice, and so on, which might 
be exercising the more liberated, self-centred 
thirtysomething woman in modern Manhattan. The topics are 
typical of the lifestyle featured in the flightlier women's 
magazines.

The concerns of *Manchild*, by contrast, are pretty much 
exactly as you would imagine (motorbikes with throaty 
engines and exhausts as thick as salamis become the symbol 
of the menopausal male: Viagra for the ego). And what it 
lacks in the originality of its insights it makes up for in 
trying to smuggle into the dialogue what it imagines to be 
raunchy words ("muff," "fanny magnet," "shag," "muff" 
again).

You can overcome most of these setbacks if you do it with 
enough conviction. But in *Manchild*, the foursome - Havers 
is joined by his lifelong mates Anthony Head, a rich, 
single, predatory dentist; Don Warrington, a never-married 
wheeler-dealer; and Ray Burdis, a long-married Essex boy who 
made a mint from garden decking - don't even seem easy in 
each other's company. Their banter is stilted, as if they 
are learning fundamental things about each other's tastes 
and attitudes for the first time, an oddity in such close 
chums. The four women in *Sex and the City* are, on paper, 
unlikely bosom buddies: but their success lies in convincing 
us that they are.

Some women have apparently detected a whiff of misogyny in 
this new series. You can understand why women might bridle 
at *Manchild*, but is misogyny really the right reason for 
them to sniff at this show? The men are painted as so 
unlikeable, as such pathetic patsies, that all you can do it 
pity them. So you could certainly understand if many women 
objected to being bracketed in the same species as this 
foursome; but that is almost the reverse of misogyny. In 
barely a generation we have evolved from a society in which 
women would object if they weren't considered men's equal, 
to one where women bristle if men are actually considered to 
be their equal.



-----------------------------------------------------------
                     Bentley's Bedlam
            http://www.BetsyDa.com/bedlam.html

This website is for information and entertainment purposes only 
and is not intended to infringe on copyrights held by others.