Everything's bigger in America

Victoria Coren12 April 2012

Headlines tell us that Nigella Lawson's cookery show has been "slammed" in America as "gastroporn". The New York Times says: "Cooking dinner with Nigella looks like a prelude to an orgy."

Actually, it doesn't. I've had lunch on a porn film set in California, and even their X-rated stars are self-denying. What the prelude to an orgy really looks like is carrot sticks, wheat-free bagels and low-fat spread. "Low-fat spread", in fact, describes the American porn industry in a nutshell. Female porn stars make Calista Flockhart look like Roseanne: if you're size 12 or over, you have to work in "fat fetishist" movies.

Which is very cruel, given that the average American woman has a body like a houseboat. Rake-thin LA beauty obsessives are a very specific breed; there are also a few pinch-lipped, twig-thighed Manhattan socialites. But out in the Midwest, men are salivating over the coat-hanger bodies of Tiffany Mynx and Ebony Smiles in "Hot Go-Go Sluts Do Missouri" because their size-30 wives can't get up from the sofa and switch off the video. In regular Hollywood, of course, the stars are even thinner.

Yesterday's report from Marks and Spencer told us that the average British woman is now 5ft 4ins and 9st 6lbs; the average American woman is the same height and a stone heavier. The US National Institute of Health says that 55 per cent of their adults - around 97 million people - are "overweight or obese". The whole world is getting chubbier, but we're all still in the shadow of America's great backside.

And yet, the land of giant people must import their healthy-sized sex symbols from Britain. Flesh on a US screen is fine - as long as it's obviously foreign. So, we give

them Kate Winslet and they love her busty bloom, as long as they can stress that she is "an English rose". We give them gorgeous, curvy Nigella ("ripe" and "full" says the New York Times), sticking her fingers in a treacle pudding, and they'll love her too - but only after shouting "It's porn! It's an orgy!" as though they've never seen anything like it at home.

Their own Renee Zellweger was, of course, allowed to play Bridget Jones at a "normal" weight - but only after the whole world had been told that Renee had gone on a special diet to look like a Brit, and the pounds had come off at the end of filming. Back to "American shape". Very ironic.

All this 'arsing about' is such a fag

For the entire 1980s, Tories claimed that loony Left councils were refusing to use words like "blacklist" or "chairman". Phrases like "persons of restricted growth" caused hilarity on the Right for the whole of the 1990s. "I suppose my cleaning lady is a 'woman of ethnic origin who works as a duster and Pledge executive!'" they chortled for the best part of a decade. Ooh, it was the funniest thing since Jim Davidson told black comedy viewers: "I can barely see you there in the dark!"

In fact, there does come a point when a name has so many negative connotations you might as well cut your losses and ditch it. Take "hunting", which began again yesterday for the first time since foot and mouth nixed it in February.

It was a different world in February: foxhunting seemed, to urban sophisticates like us, a genuinely evil way to carry on. But we're at war now, more worried about the vulnerability of our tall buildings than the state of the countryside. So, supposing, instead of the seriously macho title of "hunting", practitioners referred to it as "arsing about in silly costumes". We simply wouldn't care at all. "Hunters" chasing poor little foxes sounds terribly sinister, but the sting would be removed entirely if the newsreader said: "Camilla Parker Bowles joined Prince Charles this afternoon to arse about in silly costumes". Or, "Silly costumes were donned today, as the arsing-about season began again."

Here in London, we'd just snort derisively and leave them to get on with it.

The Department of Education and Skills revealed this week that although one billion cards are sent at Christmas, "68 per cent bear little more than a name and greeting inside". How does it know? If every Christmas card we send has to be opened and read by the Government to check our literacy skills, no wonder the post is so bloody slow.

Three million people, apparently, are so embarrassed by their poor literacy that they prefer to leave cards totally blank inside. But are the messages in Christmas cards really worth writing anyway? We all know what they mean. "How are you all?" ("I can't remember the names of your family"). "Thinking of you" ("Just saw your name in my address book and groaned"). "Hope to see you in 2002!" ("Hope never to see you again!"). "It's been a pretty good year" (My life is an empty, monotonous shell). Those five per cent of Britons who leave their cards blank may not be illiterate at all - just more honest than the rest of us.

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