There’s a large branch of televisual entertainment that relies on people doing strange and disconcerting things, either as some kind of challenge or ritual humiliation, or as the price you pay for being allowed to call yourself a celebrity when you aren’t really. Then there are those folks who do odd things off their own bat, because they’re odd. You don’t have to give them reasons or offer them money. You just have to find them.
World of Weird (Channel 4) is a series that does just that, and it’s a very sturdy formula. The only possible difficulty its producers might have faced is a global shortage of weirdness, but once they tracked down the man who paints pictures with his penis, I’m sure they felt they were away.
Tim Patch – AKA Pricasso – lives in Queensland in a house he built himself. He wears an outsize pink top hat and matching bow tie when he works, and not much else. He produces, he reckons, about 1,000 canvases a year, mostly on commission, although success in his particular discipline comes at a price. “I go through a lot of skin,” he says.
It has been said that half an hour spent in the company of someone who is good at his job is never wasted. As a corollary to that, I would suggest that 15 minutes spent watching a guy paint with his dick will make you feel a lot better about how you waste your own time, with the possible exception of the preceding 15 minutes.
To say that Pricasso paints with his penis isn’t completely accurate; he also paints with his balls and arse. He has a method for doing the canvas edges he calls “the credit card swipe” that, I must confess, I’m still a little haunted by.
Pricasso’s paintings are mostly portraits, either of famous people or paying sitters. The best thing I can say about them is that they’re not bad, considering. Presenter Joel Dommett had a go at producing a still life using only his member, which proved, if nothing else, that it’s harder than it looks. I thank you.
World of Weird also turned our jaded attentions to Texan vampire Michael Vachmiel, who is part of a subculture dedicated to combining gothic fashions with total nonsense. The programme claimed there might be as many as 5,000 vampires in the US, although I would suggest the true figure is much closer to zero.
Vachmiel calls himself a “sanguinarian”, which means he drinks blood. His source – a “black swan” in pretend-vampire parlance – is a 29-year-old woman who goes by the name of Blut Katzchen. It’s a consensual relationship, although it was unclear what she got out of it, and even less clear after she explained. “For me, it’s a spiritual thing,” she said. “It’s an exchange of energy. It’s growing your own energy ... and one of the ways to regrow energy is by giving it out.” I think if that explanation made any more sense it would violate the first law of thermodynamics.
One of the pitfalls of televising weird people is that you could end up with people who are just being weird to get on television. Obviously, publicity is a big part of the dick-painting business (as seen on TV!), but I had the feeling that everyone involved in World of Weird would persist with their niche enthusiasms whether or not they attracted wider notice.
That might not be true of Jackie from Texarkana, who keeps a capybara as a pet. Even as she extolled the joys of having an 8st rat about the house, Jackie seemed to be starting down the long journey toward accepting her mistake. Chico the capybara is ungovernable, prone to escape attempts and occasionally aggressive. “Chico doesn’t necessarily like Jeff,” said Jackie, as Chico cornered Jackie’s husband in the kitchen. It was obvious that Jeff didn’t like Chico either. In a few years, Chico will weigh more than Jeff, and Jackie will probably have a choice to make.
World of Weird made for an entertaining, if not exactly edifying hour. It has a tolerant, live-and-let live attitude toward its subjects, and it was occasionally very funny. At the end, Vicky Pattison of Geordie Shore undertook an investigation of the Japanese practice of zentai, which involves shy people dressing up in skintight, all-body Lycra costumes for anonymous erotic encounters. Gamely perched on the edge of a bed where a zentai threesome were slithering about like snakes, Pattison decided it was time to make her excuses. “I don’t think it’s too long before one of these geezers is wearing this lass like a hat,” she said.
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