Naked Sports on TV

This being Europe, they approach nudity on TV from a slightly different angle. The rules seem to be that the sort of thing that would furnish an R rating stateside, the occasional exposed breast or snippet of explicit dialog, is perfectly okay any time of day. No big deal. But then at midnight, it’s like some switch flips, and the channels, including he major networks, suddenly light up with soft-core pornography. All of the ads switch too, now promoting various intersections of the libido and wireless telephone service. In addition to the standard phone-sex come-ons, you see ads for pornographic background pictures for color cell phones (both of real women and of Japanese cartoon teenagers) and, most bizarrely, phone-text-message-sex hotlines. Now I can understand how smoldering love letters from the Victorian era could be quite erotic, but I feel certain that punching out “what r u wearing” on a touch-tone dial pad has to be missing a certain je ne se quoi. “9 44 2 8 …” just doesn’t do it for me, anyway.

One of the nudity-presenting pretenses Robbie and I stumbled upon was a special, no doubt inspired by the original Olympics, about nude sports competitions. The show ranked these in a top-10 countdown, according to some metric that wasn’t entirely clear but that did seem to correlate fairly strongly with the attractiveness of the competitors. This meant that the show actually got worse as it went on. Naked surfing and marathon running, visual aesthetics aside, really just don’t make for compelling television. But the program opened with fat old nudists vacuuming the living room or barbequing in their backyards in the buff. Indoors, the camera shot from down low, turning the participants into blobby pinkish giants shoving around enormous roaring obelisks of black and beige plastic. It was easily a strong contender for the funnies half-minute of television ever produced.