Watching this show is a disconcerting experience for me: doing so causes me a feeling of great unease deep within - an ever-growing sense of unease, as if something terrible is imminent; it is akin to watching documentary footage of the rounding-up, and subsequent mass murder of Jews in World War II, I suppose.
I have, however, found myself compelled to watch every episode when i've seen that is on - not with an intention of 'rubbernecking' (for I never experience gratification, or satisfaction - however morbid - when watching this show, and the terrible fate befalls me, rather than those I am watching) - but because I need to understand what this feeling is, and why I feel it.
Well into the third episode, I at last found myself writing - writing what was the verbalisation of my confused, dark, foreboding thoughts - and I felt slight relief.
What follows is, with some minor alterations, what I wrote.
I know that the purpose of this show is to mock the mentally infirm/intellectually sub-normal. I know this. But the process - medium, if you will - is tedious and horrific!
We, the viewers, are placed in a Sisyphean hell: the protagonists are slower than a lobotomised tortoise, and as passive agents, the viewers are beholden to them - we must wait for them - we must wait for them to interact, to pontificate; a process akin to pulling teeth - except there is no necessity, no anaesthetic, and you do not emerge relieved and grateful for the experience afterwards.
Resurgence: is the humble mongoloid seeing a return to
prominence in public life...?
In terms of a historical, anthropological document, this could possibly be considered exquisite - if such a hell on earth exists (and I believe that it does) - but in terms of entertainment, or comedy - which is what it is (...intended to be) - it is diametrically in opposition.
I can't figure out the basis of the title characters' relatioship: they enjoy seeing one another suffer, and pursuing their own interests at the expense of the happiness of the other - it's horrifying.
There is a scene in which 'her' eats 'his' 'best ham', or some such nonsense foodstuff, while he is in another room; she later lies to him, when he asks where it is, telling him that he ate it the previous night, when 'drunk'...laughter was heard nowhere when this punchline was delivered, stillborn, through television sets across the country. So what reaction - besides contempt, horror, bafflement, or depression - should greet this atrocity...?
Sisyphus would have chosen pushing the boulder over hanging out with these cunts.
(Don't) Watch She and Him on the BBC iPlayer
