Fat Slags and Potato Men

I think the main historical gripe with Sex Lives of the Potato Men is that it received public money or lottery money or something. If it was lottery money, then that is quite appropriate, as the lives of the protagonists seem rather like those of lottery louts before they become lottery louts, and are therefore just louts. So if you subscribe to the view that the lottery is a tax on every fool in the country, this may well be the film for you. I personally do subscribe to this view, but I take part in the lottery anyway, by direct debit, out of some kind of extra layer of superstition, just on the off-chance. Only a couple of weeks ago I won £8 on the Euromillions, which effectively means I got a whole month of free disappointment. This is good, because I like disappointment, which is why I actively seek it out in every aspect of my life. So maybe Sex Lives of the Potato Men is the ideal film for me as well, because it is certainly disappointing. Yes, it is filthy, but not in any creative or joyous way, it's just tawdriness taken to its extremes, extremes which turn out to be just more of the same tawdriness, not interesting or exciting or titillating, but just dispiriting, depressing and off-putting, like an unwashed towel in a dingy bathroom with dirty grouting. Even this makes it sound better than it is. Scrabbling around to find good things about it, I could only really come up with one: Jasper carrot's daughter is in it, and it contains a sly reference to Jasper Carrot's accidental hit single, Funky Moped. I would like to think this coincidence was brought about deliberately to please or appease me, but it probably never even registered. Watched in a double-bill with Viz non-adaptation Fat Slags, this kind of serendipitous felicity starts to take over, grains of sand, sprinkles of satisfaction, in the ocean of garbage. In Sex Lives of the Potato Men, former MOTD 2 presenter Adrian Chiles appears as the towel-clad host of a sex party. In Fat Slags, his successor in the MOTD 2 hot-seat, Colin Murray, appears in his previous role of TOTP presenter. Two presenters, two programmes that are regularly referred to by their initials. The TOTP sequence is the highlight of this dreadful film, which is so bad it makes the Potato Men look like Brokeback Mountain.