Why is Channel 4 morbidly obsessed with super-fat Americans? Last night, it gave us Half Ton Dad, an hour-long documentary about 73-stone American father-of-four Kenneth Brumley and his struggle to shed the blubber by any means necessary. This followed last year's Half Ton Mom, a similarly prurient, half-horrifying, half-titillating film about the "fattest woman on earth" (the 64-stone Renee Williams, also American, of course), who died 12 days after having gastric bypass surgery to shrink her stomach.
It has also aired Fat Man's Warning, a film about a fat comedian in "the fattest nation on Earth" (yes, America), which warned that we Brits - who are "sitting on an obesity time bomb" - are only "four years away from being as fat as Americans". Scary. There was Fat Girls and Feeders, a documentary about weird little American men who deliberately over-feed their girlfriends so that they remain morbidly obese. And let's not forget Fat Beauty Contest, an "insight" into the world of plus-size beauty pageants in ... where was it again? Oh yes, in the fattest, most corpulent, junk-guzzling nation on earth: America.
Just to balance things out (a little bit), Channel 4 has also treated us to documentaries about greedy, fat Britons. In It's Not My Fault I'm Fat, shouty Sun journalist Jane Moore berated those fatties in "the most obese nation" in Europe (that's us), who blame their flabbiness on their bone size, age or metabolism rather than on the fact that they are human gannets.
Jamie's School Dinners did a great deal to convince British children to obsess about their calorie intake and thigh measurements - very healthy. And, of course, Gillian McKeith still likes to poke around in fat people's fecal matter so that she can tell them how smelly, horrid and diseased they are.
This is not educational documentary-making, or even "edutainment" - it is fat porn. It is designed to excite and disgust in equal measure the thin, health-aware, organic-buying Islingtonians who make up the majority of Channel 4's staff and a big bulk of its core audience.
These TV shows tacitly confirm that the obese - and, in particular, obese Americans - are the one group of people it is still OK to point at, laugh at and dry-heave over, just so long as you dress up your salacious interest in their grotesque proportions in earnest, documentary-style packaging. Where once western observers piled into Africa to gawp at mad tribes with spears, today they fly to America to stare in wonder/horror at the very, very large people waddling through malls and junk food restaurants. Welcome to the era of fat anthropology.
No doubt, Channel 4 will argue that it is making serious documentaries about a serious social problem: obesity. Codswallop. Its films about enormous Americans are thinly-disguised (no pun intended) morality tales about the disgustingness of modern America. Last night's Half Ton Dad did not treat Kenneth Brumley as an extremely unusual case (Brumley was so corpulent that he hadn't left his bed in four years, and bits of his house had to be demolished in order to carry him out), but rather as a symbol of a country that is "eating itself to death". Greedy, overconsuming, reckless America - don't you just hate it?
These programmes are also the closest thing you will find to a modern-day freakshow. We were shown extreme close-ups of Brumley's massive naked thighs as he lay spreadeagled and disabled in his bed. Doctors were shown lifting up the vast, pasty stomach of a morbidly obese teenager and looking beneath it for scabs or infections.
Now I know what it must have been like to attend a Victorian freakshow, which, as Rosemarie Garland Thomson points out in her book Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, frequently featured "ultra-obese" individuals. "The Fat Lady" would wear clothes "that reveal her extreme weight, while being seated in an especially small chair that enhances the same impression"; she was "exploited for possessing qualities that the audience regards as grotesque", writes Thomson. Not much has changed in 150 years, then.
Sections of the British liberal elite view fat Americans as convenient symbols of America itself. America, the nation, is seen as being too affluent, too awash with plenty, and too concerned with consumption, choice and having a good time. As the author Daniel Ben-Ami argues: "Obesity has become a metaphor for 'over-consumption' more generally. Affluence is blamed not just for bloated bodies, but for a society which is seen as too big for its own good." Where previous generations of snobs and elitists held up the "African savage" as a symbol of everything that was wrong with that oh-so-dark continent, today's snobs look upon willpower-challenged, constantly-scoffing, morbidly obese men in beds as symbols of America and its warped values.
At the same time, attacking super-fatness has become a way of attacking the greedy, slothful lower classes. It isn't fashionable today to pass moral judgments on the feckless poor; instead, one does it through the issue of obesity and "concern for health". As Richard Klein recently argued in the International Journal of Epidemiology: "Fat, in the media, is denounced in terms that are almost biblical in their moral disapprobation ... [the media] assigns ultimate responsibility for fatness to the individual in whom being overweight is a sign of gluttony and sloth, an index of humiliating personal failure."
Elites have always needed a group of people to look down upon in order to make themselves feel puffed up and superior, whether it be the underclass, the morally inferior poor or "black criminals". Today, for a liberal elite scared of making un-PC, moralistic judgements, the fat and the super-fat play that whipping-boy role, their supersized bodies seen as signs that they are gluttonous, lazy, wicked, and sinners against the new etiquette of healthy eating and living.
So, why is Channel 4 obsessed with fat Yanks? Because nothing makes a health-conscious TV producer in organic-cotton trousers feel better about himself and his life choices than freaky footage of his precise opposite: a disgusting whale-like American.
