My favourite character in The Real Housewives of London (Hayu/Now), which is ultimately a programme about how we should seize the means of production, redistribute hoarded wealth and erect gibbets in our city parks, is a poodle named Monty True Madness.
I’m sorry. There’s a lot to parse in that first sentence. Monty True Madness is his real name, the one that hovers before his fluffy face onscreen and the one that’s presumably on his driving licence.
And, true to that name, he has the rattled, nervous disposition of a character in an HP Lovecraft story, one who has been to the edges of reality and communed with the Old Ones. In a way he actually has communed with the Old Ones (the Housewives) at the edge of reality (Chelsea), and he’s not been right since. You can see it in his quivering doggy face.
Yes, the Real Housewives are just as ageless as the Elder Gods, although I think Lovecraft meant to suggest the Dread Cthulhu was literally immortal and not that he had had work done. (I think he has had work done: his betentacled head is suspiciously unwrinkled.)
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Also, in fairness to Cthulhu, he works for a living, attempting to re-establish his dominion over Earth, and most of the Real Housewives ... do not. They already have dominion over Earth. In the first episode, Panthea (one of the Housewives, not one of the Elder Gods) retreats to bed after breakfast, saying to her husband, “I don’t know how you people work. I’m just shattered the whole time.”
Monty True Madness, on the other hand, is a fancy little gentleman, and he is working it. He wears a little shirt and sometimes a turtleneck, like a man. It’s possible he was once a man. But nowadays he spends his life being carried around by a make-up mogul named Amanda, who has an office filled with framed photos of herself and once inspired the strange newspaper headline “Who is the longest legs in Belgravia?”
Spoiler alert: Amanda also has a torso, arms and a head (though if a pair of huge, disembodied legs were bestriding Belgravia that would indeed be an important news story).
Oh, the things Monty True Madness has seen. He has seen one woman wear a glittering gold dress with an Elizabethan ruff for no good reason and another wear a huge bow on her shoulder as though she were an elegant present for a hungry giant.
He has seen Amanda ordering around the migrant workers she has hired to serve canapes and clean toilets at a special party she’s hosting to celebrate International Women’s Day (Amanda’s International Women’s Day party conjures up images of Marie Antoinette’s International Women’s Day party or Imelda Marcos’s International Women’s Day party).
He has seen Andrew Ridgeley, of the exclamatory pop combo Wham!, for Amanda once dated him (though whatever terrible pop secrets Ridgeley shared with him go unspoken).
He has seen grown adult humans with animal names like Tiggy and Cookie and animals with human names like Portia.
Indeed, one of the Housewives is called Nessie. Nessie runs a cake business and, from what I can gather from Google, formerly lived in a lake in Scotland. If her house is anything to go by, there’s a lot of money in cakes. Though Nessie’s husband, Remy, works in the mining business, so he probably helps out too.
In many ways this is a kitchen-sink drama, and we frequently meet the various housekeepers and maids who slave before that sink. (Someone should make a documentary about them.) I expect Remy to stumble in any day soon and say, “There’s trouble down diamond mine.”
Speaking of trouble down mine, Karen, whose husband formerly owned West Bromwich (I’m unsure if she means the soccer team or the place), boasts of her own fancy address with the words, “Margaret Thatcher lived down the road from me, may her soul rest in peace,” and not the “Hell’s too good for her” mantra that’s more familiar on this side of the water.
Watching Real Housewives is basically like visiting a rich-person zoo where we can ooh and aah and point at all their crimes against taste and good sense without being quite sure how self-aware they might be
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about our cultural tolerance for disgusting levels of wasteful wealth in the face of inequality, poverty and capitalistic exploitation and how we’re seemingly done with concepts like selling out or being remotely ethical about how we make our livings. Shame is a pretty necessary concept. It’s seeming absence from shows like this suggests we’re on the tail end of something – reality television or social democracy or maybe just civilisation.
It’s possible we’ve now gone too far with our enlightened attempts to abolish shame. It’s possible that the idle, parasitic rich should feel shame every day of their lives and shouldn’t be elevated into celebrity as a means to offset their ennui and should, in fact, be mocked and jeered for having far too many shoes.
I know. I’m no fun. Look, I too find myself strangely drawn to the Real Housewives franchise. It’s basically like visiting a rich-person zoo where we can ooh and aah and point at all their crimes against taste and good sense without being quite sure how self-aware they might be.
I watch it for all the same reasons you do. I just also watch it so that I can get a sense of the floorplan and work out the codes to all their safe rooms. And not to give the game away, but I have a sanity-troubled dog on the inside who said he’d help me out when the time comes.
Over on Disney+, the antipodean hunk Chris Hemsworth is engaging on a journey of self-discovery in the documentary series Limitless: Live Better Now. He’s doing so with the guidance of a neuroscientific nerd who reels off loads of information about the brain and how to keep it sharp.
Hemsworth, who plays an elder god (Thor) in the Marvel franchise, must undertake a series of challenges to stretch his celestial mind grapes. His first challenge is to resist bullying the nerd, which must be difficult for him as a luscious lunk. There is an alternative programme to be made that’s just called Nerds! and that involves him circumnavigating the world to put nerds in their place.
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Luckily the neuronerd’s advice is good. In the first episode Hemsworth must learn a new instrument, so he decides to learn to play drums in time to join his famous chum Ed Sheeran live on stage in Bucharest. In the next episode he goes to South Korea to hang out with some monks and/or army men. Yes, this is all totally relatable stuff attainable to all, and I see no problem whatsoever with all TV and film now being commissioned by people who own their own islands.
Noah Hawley’s Alien spin off Alien: Earth also began on Disney+ recently. A typically nuanced and textured remix of Ridley Scott tropes, it presents us with a genius trillionaire who, faced with some ethical questions about both uploading the brains of children to robots and co-opting dangerous alien creatures as bioweapons, thinks, “I’d be a fool not to!”
In short, he meddles with nature, plays God and tempts the fates, a full hubris bingo card. By the end of the first episode it’s all working out fine. I don’t need to watch more. I’ve got what I need.
