Fetish Dayz

THE WEEK IN PERVERSITY/3: FROM PANTS TO ANTS

In the news in the past week — a selection of items not necessarily perverted, but definitely perverse…

NURSE, STOP SHOWING YOUR PANTS! An Essex hospital has banned its nurses from showing cleavage while on duty. Southend Hospital’s new uniform rules also outlaw G-strings peeking over trousers or skirts. Seems, though, that the hospital has fallen short of banning other aspects of traditional Essex dress such as white high heels, luminous orange legs, micro-length skirts and no knickers. Presumably that would be asking just too much.

FAITHFULL TO THE ORIGINAL I’m sure all our hearts go out to Marianne Faithfull, who has just been diagnosed with breast cancer. And obviously when you’re a 59-year-old woman facing such a thing, what you want is for the Daily Mirror to publish the story alongside a big picture of you in your prime posing seductively in stockings and a basque which shows off your cleavage, and a quote claiming you have pledged to ‘bounce back’. Unfortunately for Marianne, who was famously Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the 1960s, her name is still linked in the minds of tabloid journalists to one particular sex myth involving the Stones’ singer. But I’m sure that was not what the Mirror sub-editor was thinking when, in the same story, he captioned an inset pic of her and Jagger: “With Mick in 69”.

That’s not supposed to be us in that TV show, is it?

GREETINGS FROM A PARALLEL UNIVERSE  Did you know that whenever you see a bizarre, non-sequitur or just downright substandard episode of a long-running TV sitcom or drama series, it means the main writers have gone on vacation and the stand-ins are in charge of the plot? Ever since I found this out, I’ve been looking for examples — and I think I just found two contenders, one from the USA and one from the UK. Has anyone else been wondering what has happened to The Sopranos, whose news series just started airing in the UK on E4, or to Spooks, which returned to BBC1/BBC3 last weekend? Neither of these usually gripping dramas appears to have kicked off its new run on the same planet the rest of us inhabit. Tony Soprano’s hospital coma dreams and Spooks’coup attempt on the British Government were both beyond belief. Did both series’ regular writers decide to take their holidays early this year?

(DON’T) WAKE ME UP BEFORE YOU GO-GO  So Ant and Dec, UK Saturday night TV stalwarts and hosts of such televisual milestones as I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here, have each taken out insurance against the other dying. The exact sums insured haven’t been revealed but supposedly run into several million pounds. Dec said, “I just know that if Ant kicks the bucket, I get a massive payout.” Similarly, if Dec should go first, Ant will benefit. And if both should happen to die at the same time? Well in that case, obviously, everybody wins.   

THE WEEK IN PERVERSITY: FROM ASS TO Z-LIST

Three irresistible (but not necessarily fetishistic) press stories that caught my eye in the last week…

THE LAW IS AN ASS  Local councillors in Dallas, Texas are proposing a ban on the wearing of low-slung trousers that expose underwear. One of them, Ron Price, has called the fashion “embarrassing and disgusting” and says he’s “against people walking around with their pants below their buttocks”. How often he’s against them is not revealed. Nor is whether he’s just against men doing it, or whether he is also pressing for women to drop their pants-parading habits. Funny isn’t it, when you think of all the other fashion crimes that the word ‘Dallas’ evokes, flaunting your Calvins really doesn’t seem worthy of that much fuss.

GETTING AHEAD OF THE PACK  A British mum who bought a pack of hot and spicy chicken wings from the supermarket found it contained an unexpected bonus — a chicken head, complete with beak, eyes and a bit of neck. “I just feel sick every time I think about it,” said Anika Cummings of Cardiff. “I won’t buy another chicken in my life.” Too right — who would ever have guessed the little f***ers once had heads, eh? Anyway, my advice to her is to pop along with a freezer bag to Downing Street, where a whole cabinet full of headless chickens will soon be going cheap. Meanwhile, another supermarket shopper has just discovered a three-legged frog — alive — in a packet of watercress. Efforts by the store to persuade the customer that this was considered as lucky as finding a four-leaf clover have so far proved unsuccessful.

THERE’S GOTH TO BE AN ALTERNATIVE  As the autumn arrives and brings the goth look to a high street near you, we’ll be faced with the prospect of a lot of extremely ungothly Z-list celebs undergoing moody makeovers that their personal stylists assure them are necessary if they are not to fall behind in the fashion stakes. So it was predictable that after Victoria Beckham ‘went goth’ with black-painted fingernails a couple of weeks ago, that other shopaholic WAG Coleen McLoughlin (aka Mrs Wayne Rooney) would want to go further. Colleen duly appeared done up in black from the tip of her lace-up stiletto kneeboots to the top of her top hat in a photo shoot for celebrity rag Closer, who tagged her story ‘I’m a secret vamp’. Yes, of course you are dear.  Please, make it stop now.