Sophie Hannah - A Game for All the Family

Let’s get to know Ben Lourenco a shade better. I am told he is six foot four, has big blue eyes with laughter lines around them, slightly scarecrow-esque dark blond hair, and a dimple on his chin so deep that if you were his loved one, you’d be tempted to try and scoop dust or grime out of it on a regular basis with the corner of your handkerchief. Yes, it is what you might call a substantial dimple. It’s a dimple that you’d notice and think, “That dimple really ought to be someone’s responsibility.”

Ben Lourenco has never been the star in anything, but he’s been a valuable not-quite-main character in many TV dramas that see maladjusted and overlooked-for-promotion police detectives frowning their way around cloud-addled Yorkshire moors, litter-strewn London government housing and antiseptic white mortuary corridors. It’s fair to say that, in his capacity as non-lead-role player, Ben has shone—so much so that he was shortlisted for Best Supporting Actor at the 2012 BAFTA awards. To nobody’s eternal surprise, he won. Hurrah for Ben!

The performance for which he won this accolade was not his usual fare at all. Instead of a police drama, it was a TV movie, a romantic comedy called The Future Sex Diet. It sounds intolerable, doesn’t it, from the title alone? I wish I didn’t have to describe its plot and themes but I’m afraid I do. I promise to be as compassionately brief as I can.

The Future Sex Diet : written and directed by Freddii Bausor, a well-known television and film director who has occasionally ventured as far as Hollywood. But in case her well-known-ness doesn’t extend to you, gentle reader, fear not, for enlightenment is on the way. Freddii is a woman now, but hasn’t always been. Or rather, her body hasn’t always been, though her essential self has. Hence the need for masses of surgery, the net result of which is that Freddii is now a woman in all senses of the word.

The Future Sex Diet was a great success when screened on UK television. It’s the story of a young, confident career woman who is quite happy being single, sleeping around in a fun and resolutely uncommitted way, and looking like an ordinary woman and not an overly made-up Barbie doll, until . . .

Have you guessed? Are you guessing? Shall I put you out of your misery?

. . . until she meets a man at a work drinks party one night, falls madly in love with him on the spot and decides, after he invites her out for dinner in a way that pointedly implies sex for dessert, that she simply can’t take off her clothes in front of this man until she has lost half a stone in weight. For every other man she frolicked around in bed with, her body was perfectly all right and adequate in her opinion, but this man is so divine that she feels compelled to make herself perfect for him.

She erroneously supposes that the only thing wrong with her is the extra half stone, and not the fact that she becomes a blithering idiot the moment a gorgeous man hoves into view, but we must leave that aside for the time being since we were not invited to offer our editorial opinion, and in any case it is much too late. This film has aired, baby, as they’re bound to say in Hollywood and BAFTA circles.

Our brain-bypass heroine accepts the dinner invitation from this hot geezer, and off they go to a restaurant. Sure enough, after the meal that the heroine has done her best to eat only the perimeter lettuce of, the hero, in a charming and winsome way, suggests that fornication should follow. Oh help! What a predicament! The extra half stone! He can’t be allowed to see it, or he might run away screaming! What can our hapless lass do to avert disaster, yet still keep this good prospect hooked?

She has a brilliant* (*wholly moronic) idea. She remembers, from many a romantic legend she has imbibed since the year dot, that men are supposed to prefer women who don’t joyously leap into bed with every halfway appealing chap that turns up. Men positively like women who make them wait and beg and suffer and petition, because they have all bought into the virgin/whore distinction (first coined by Sigmund Freud, points out the heroine’s intellectual best friend with whom no one in the movie wants to have any sex at all because she’s always lugging around a heavy book). Men think that women who are too easy are worthless, and only ever want to marry the ones who withhold sex for ages.

Our heroine sees the solution to her problem. It’s staring her in the face! All she has to do is pretend to be one of those women for six months, while secretly dieting like mad. By the time the six months are up, she’ll be at her ideal weight, and her romantic hero will like her all the more because of all the time and effort he had to put in.

This superb* (*utterly abysmal) plan works swimmingly for a while, until disaster strikes in the form of a chance encounter with a group of men in a bar, several of whom have done the deed of darkness with our mildly padded protagonist. These men all promptly say things that no one would ever say in reality, but that are needed to advance the plot in fiction: “Making you wait, is she, mate? She must have changed since we all had her! She couldn’t wait to get our boxer shorts off, I tell you—wouldn’t even let me finish my pint!” (The real dialogue is even worse, no doubt.)

Damnation: our heroine is revealed as a fraud! Our romantic hero is bepuzzled! What goeth on? thinks he. She admits to lying, finding herself with no choice, but does she take this excellent opportunity to tell her hapless chap the truth? Why, no. She invents a new and quite revolting lie. She pretends she recently escaped from an abusive relationship, and even bribes one of her male friends (yes, this nincompoop has friends, surprisingly) to play the role of the aggressive ex-partner.

This hoax, too, is eventually rumbled in the most sidesplitting and cringeworthy of ways, and the romantic hero dumps the heroine for being an unparalleled buffoon with appalling values. That’s where the film should end, in my opinion. Freddii Bausor evidently disagreed, because the actual ending is: self-loathing and excessive promiscuity on the part of the heroine, much weight loss resulting from misery, eventual rescuing by forgiving hero who is willing to give her another chance. (Clearly, for some men, every ethically bankrupt laughingstock is an opportunity for improvement.) But the twist is—guffaw, guffaw—he says she’s too skinny and refuses to undress her lustily until she’s gained at least half a stone, and ideally a whole stone. The final scene is the two of them eating in a restaurant, and him shoveling profiteroles into her mouth in a way that we’re supposed to find romantic, but that will make all right-thinking people contemplate joining a terrorist organization if only for the hunger strike opportunities that might become available.

The Future Sex Diet is the sort of film my parents would never in a million years let me watch. I have to say, I can see their point in this instance, which is not something I am always able to do. They won’t let me watch most films, and squander their disapproval on anything they think of as too adult, or violent, or potentially upsetting in any way. And don’t get me started on their musical intolerance! They won’t let me listen to any pop or rock music. I think they honestly believe that all flutes and violins will immediately cease to exist if one of their precious children catches even a note or two of The X Factor .

If I ever have children, I’ll let them watch and listen to whatever they want—apart from The Future Sex Diet , which hopefully will have been roundly forgotten by then. Fairness obliges me to point out that the film did very well when it was aired, far better than most TV movies. It “won its slot,” as they apparently say in the world of TV, and slot-winning is the holy grail. It means more people watched it than anything else on television during that same time period.