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The arts column

Stylish it may be, but Desperate Housewives is a

step back in time

Rachel CookeThe Observer, Sunday 22 January 2006

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In 2006, a woman is not supposed to take herself too seriously. Being po-faced - tight

of jaw and thin of lip - is just about the worst crime she can commit (unless she isoverweight). So I feel quite anxious about what I intend to write here. God forbid that

anyone should think that I don't have a sense of humour, that I fail to see the irony in

certain aspects of camp. But what I'm wondering is: why do so many intelligent women

enjoy Desperate Housewives? Doesn't it irk them? Don't they feel it's backward-

looking? Has it never occurred to them that if Teri Hatcher, who plays Susan, gets any 

thinner, the other housewives will be able to use her to floss their teeth?

The days of shared excitement at TV cliff-hangers the night before are meant to be

over. The theory is that, with so many channels available, the audience is too

fragmented for conversations along the lines of 'who shot JR?' I am not convinced of 

this. If it is the case, how come I'm always feeling so left out? Desperate Housewives is

a case in point. Recently, a friend revealed she was having a 'Bree moment'. It was

several minutes before I understood that this had more to do with control freakery 

than soft cheese. Then my heart really sank.

Everyone I know is crazy about Desperate Housewives, and I just don't get it. It's as if 

I'm back at school and, while all the other girls are busy lusting over some boy who is

obviously a complete bastard, I'm secretly hankering after the dork with an earnest

smile and a CND badge on his blazer. I ignored the first series, in so far as I could. The

title alone, which sounds vaguely like a specialist porn mag, was enough to set my 

teeth on edge. And on the few occasions when I did catch a brief blast, I was always

 bewildered. As another Housewife-aphobe, the TV critic of The New Yorker, Nancy 

Franklin, wrote 12 months ago, playing around with tone - with soap opera,

melodrama, and comedy - proves that the series' creator, Marc Cherry, has talent, but

it doesn't prove that he has artistry. Its scripts are pap: slick pap - but pap all the

same.

But worse than these faults of drama is the insidious way it plays on sexual

stereotypes. Its jokes, which are often funny, and the unbridled sex one of the women

has been having with her teenage gardener, and the female characters' sharp tongues

all act as a distraction - very handy, this - from the central thesis, which is that women

are mad, bad and dangerous to know. Their hormones make Hurricane Katrina look 

like a blowy weekend in Bexhill.

The second season began on Channel 4 last Wednesday; minutes in, and it had started.

Mothers-in-law? Boo! Childless career women? Boo! I am told that Bree, who is like

Martha Stewart on Ritalin, is everyone's favourite. Why? Because her rubber gloves are

 

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a vampish purple? Because the great, shining dome of her forehead appears to contain

so much Botox it looks like an ostrich egg with a torch behind it? I suppose you could

say that she stands as a kind of warning - that an unfulfilled life is a shrivelled life. But

if so, why does she get such great outfits? Even by the standards of this show, where a

 woman with a bum or a bust is not really a woman at all, she looks good. And looking

good, in Wisteria Lane, is just about the only thing that really counts. Cheekbones are

go!

The critics are kind to Housewives. They regard it as a bit of fun. 'Perkily malicious,'

says one. 'Preposterous glitz,' says another. But women get told that so many things are

fun; we're compelled to smile so often, and so hard, that our faces ache. In the series,

only Lynette (Felicity Huffman), a career high-flyer who became a full-time mother but

is now going back to work, betrays any sense of this; only in her do the strange, mixed

messages women receive, and the internal conflicts these messages ignite, seem to

have any life at all. Last week she ended up selling herself to her new boss while

changing her baby's nappy - which was, well, a bit better than the robot antics of the

other wives, for whom work seems to be about as appealing as flat shoes or pop socks,

 but still a bit dumb. Even as she 'multi-tasked', she looked disorganised. You see how 

 women cock things up? So, Lynette got the job. The question is: will she be allowed to

keep it?

Much of our culture seems to be so retrograde at the moment. It's like living in 1973.

Rachel Weisz wins a Golden Globe for a brilliant performance in a politically-engaged

film, and all anyone wants to talk about is that she and Kate Winslet - allegedly - are

not the best of friends. Well, no wonder - when our favourite TV is dolly birds in

suburbia. Do I have a sense of humour? I think so (though you should never trust

someone who tells you they possess such a thing). But do I worry? Yes, I do.

 When I watch the BBC's wonderful Life on Mars, in which a cop has been transported

 back to 1973, there are times when the sexism seems outlandishly shocking - and times

 when it seems just a little bit too familiar for my liking.

The language of love

Scientists in America have developed a computer programme which they claim can

forecast where a song will appear in the charts. They believe it will fundamentally 

change the way people choose the music they listen to. Hmm. I don't think so. Some

music just assails you; its very strangeness is what enraptures. The Arctic Monkeys,

the great white hope of British pop, are a good example of this. They do sound quite

 weird - though not to me. Impossible to describe the childish bliss I feel when I hear

them singing in the very particular South Yorkshire idiom with which I grew up.

 Words and phrases come at me like kisses from the past. I can't remember the last

time I heard someone say the word 'Neepsend', never mind sing about it. (Neepsend is

an area of Sheffield dominated by a vast gas works which, for some odd reason, my father, brother and I once visited on a day trip - we made our own fun in them days.)

Oh, the joy of a song called 'Mardy Bum'. I spent most of my teenage years being

addressed thus. Mardy is an extremely useful word, helpfully distilling as it does

elements of 'sulky', 'moany' and 'mopy' into one almost-onomatopoeic admonishment

(say it long and loud and you'll see what I mean). Part of me hopes this word will now 

 work its way south. Part of me hopes I can keep it for myself.