Society
Britain's Mrs Robinson will smack your bottom very hard
Published 13 November 2000
The woman in black stands, stiff and stony-faced, fixing her charges with a glare that reduces them to jelly. "John," she barks "you are the weakest link. Goodbye!" The shame-faced victim slumps off the set, looking for all the world like a wimpy client who has just been rubbished by Cynthia Payne.
But this is Anne Robinson on TV, not Cynthia Payne in her den; and where the Streatham madam plied her trade among a select few, Mrs Robinson does her titillating humiliation for 7.8 million viewers. Like Cynthia's clients, Anne's audience can't get enough. Nor can the BBC programme chiefs, who are rubbing their hands in glee at the ratings for the BBC's most successful new show in a decade.
The Weakest Link is no kinky spanking game. It combines the quiz element of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the scapegoating of Big Brother - whereby rival contestants gang up and oust, in as humiliating a manner as possible, the weaker ones.
Proof of the show's astounding success came with the news that American networks have started a bidding war to produce their own versions of it. There's a hitch in their plans, however: no one, no man or woman, in the United States seems willing to play the Anne Robinson role. And that is because Mrs Robinson is made in the peculiarly British mould of the strict nanny.
For the Yanks, this stern persona, with her butter-wouldn't-melt expression and severe uniform, has the Walt Disneyesque charm of Mary Poppins - a strict but fair bossy-boots with some tricks up her sleeve. But in terms of erogenous zones, she is no more capable of tickling them than Woody from Toy Story is.
In Britain, however, the nanny is the object of adolescent and adult fantasies, the erotic icon that turns the nursery into a thrilling memory to be revisited in an old people's home. Look at Baroness Thatcher, the nanny who became the state: just a photograph of her starched beehive and iron lady handbag can, according to recent research, get male politicians hot to trot.
The British nanny fixation is not in any way linked to the Oedipal psychology that Americans - or, indeed, any other nationality - are familiar with. The father figure doesn't enter into it, let alone dreams of murdering him in order to marry Mum. The nanny complex is rooted, instead, in the British male's sense of worthlessness - which makes him get his kicks from suffering humiliation.
Men who had a nanny suffer from the certainty that nothing they could do was ever respected enough to be private, or good enough to merit praise. Men who didn't have a nanny feel worthless because . . . well, because they didn't have a nanny, and in class-conscious, income-conscious Britain, this relegated them to a low rung on the social ladder. Humiliation, for these worthless souls, is not only expected as a matter of course; it is gratefully received as a genuine thrill. Nanny is precious because, both dominatrix and mumsy, she can shame her charges with impunity, smack their bottoms, then comfort their smarting little egos. This emotional ride from "Bad boy!" to "There, there, child" represents the pain-to-pleasure journey that comprises growing up for so many boys, and informs the fantasies of so many men.
British men think that shame and pain are their just desert. Hence their enthusiasm for the punishments meted out by Mrs Payne and the ritual debasing of some poor sod that Mrs Robinson offers. Their affliction kept the former in style, and is catapulting the latter to the top of the TV pops. But oh, what a pathetic national love affair this is: millions getting their jollies from watching someone re-enact that first smack or harsh word delivered by a woman paid to look after them.
Britons brand Americans infantile and their culture immature; but The Weakest Link offers the strongest proof yet of how childish men in this country still are.
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