Off Screen

THAT OLD scapegoat for all of society’s ills has reared its ugly head again: the Video Nasty. As soon as the guilty verdicts were returned on two young boys for the brutal murder of Liverpool toddler Jamie Bulger, politicians, policemen, priests and parents began casting around for someone to blame.

And when they were through blaming each other they settled on a dull, derivative little horror movie called Childs Play 3, in which a toy doll called Chucky goes on a homicidal rampage before its batteries run flat, or something like that (I have been looking for a doll like that for my own kids. I figure that fighting for their lives in the playroom is about the only thing that might actually keep them quiet on Christmas day). Apparently one of the boys may or may not have seen this film some time before the killing.

Sounds like an open and shut case to me. Conservative MP Sir Ivan Lawrence, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, leaped onto one of his favourite hobby horses to declare that it was becoming “daily more obvious” that “the constant diet of violence and depravity” fed to youngsters through television, videos and computers was a major reason for the rise in crime. No blame should presumably be attached to his government’s 14-year-long assault on the national health and education systems, reductions in social welfare eligibility, acceptance of rising unemployment as an economic necessity and espousal of a get-rich-quick entrepreneurial creed that virtually abandons everyone to their own fate. All we need to do to save society from itself is to ban violent videos and insist on the youth of the nation watching educational films instead.

With this in mind, I have been conducting some research on what is available in the world of educational videos. And the answer is: anything you care to imagine (and a lot that you’ll probably wish you hadn’t). With the right video, you can teach your child everything from personal grooming (Haircutting At Home, the essential guide to achieving that ever-fashionable pudding bowl look at very little cost to anything but your dignity) to how to masturbate (Better Orgasms, in which a doctor coolly instructs on technique while a black stud with a huge dong jerks off into the camera).

The wide range of self-help videos available means that no one ever has an excuse to be bad at anything any more. Inviting titles like How To Build The Nutshell Pram leave little to the imagination, and once you’ve mastered some practical techniques you can move on to How To Leave Your Job And Buy A Business Of Your Own (perhaps manufacturing nutshell prams).

No home should be without the pithily titled How To Fly The B-17: Emergency Procedures And The Airplane In General: 50-Hour Inspection Of The B-17. You never know when it might come in handy. There you are, hitching a ride on an American bomber, 40,000 feet in the air, when the pilot accidentally ejects, the co-pilot has a heart attack and there’s only you and your video between salvation and certain death. And if you’ve been having problems with the foreign help leaving your shirt collars unstarched, then look no further than House Cleaning (How To Instruct Your Spanish Speaking Housekeeper (with English Subtitles).

There are even videos to help you improve your bad habits, such as Casino Gambling, The Video Guide To Home Brewing and the intriguingly titled How To Pick A Jury. Apparently the latter was made for would-be lawyers, although it has gone on to be the most requested video in prison libraries. Would-be muggers might like to take a peak at Effective Kicking Combinations. And then there is what must be the saddest video title of the lot: How To Party.

If you really want to learn how to improve your social life, you could do worse than rent New Age Miracles: Fact Or Fraud? Hosted by a John Anderson, a self-proclaimed former psychic (what happened, did he fall on his head or something?) It unmasks mystics by demonstrating how to bend spoons, stop your heart beating, eat a broken light bulb, walk over red hot coals and perform psychic surgery (involving a fake, blood-filled thumb). Once you’ve mastered these skills you’d be a hit at any party.

Other new age video classics include Attunement For Personal & Planetary Transformation: A Full-Spectrum Experience (the video equivalent of dropping a tab of LSD and thinking you’ve discovered the meaning of life); Contact UFOs (I bet those people at NASA never realised it was this easy); and Should Oceans Meet? (And if not, what exactly do you intend to do about it?)

Such penetrating questions are a staple of the video self-help market. It is almost a sub-genre in itself. Titles include Why Can’t I Fly Like A Bird? Why Don’t I Fall Up? Why Do We Still Have Mountains? Why Do Animals Look Like They Do? (a question I ask myself every day. The answer usually arrives in the form of a bill), Why Calibrate? Why Drown? Why Am I Afraid? Why Am I Doing This? Why Am I So Tired? And, of course, the inevitable Why Me? (and its ever popular sequels, Why Is It Always Me? and Why Is This Happening To Me . . . Again? I may be making a video of my own, which will answer some of these poignant queries. It will be entitled Why Not?)

For those idle moments when you just don’t know what to do with yourself, there are helpful titles like Cut-Pile Rug Weaving, Boning And Carving, Framing Needlework Volume 3 (I have no idea what happened to volumes 1 and 2, but they must have been popular for the series to have got this far), Fundamentals Of Squash, The Juggling Video, The Magic Of Paper Folding and Tissue Paper Art (pray you never get this bored).

There is an almost endless supply of fascinating animal videos, such as Wood Stork: Barometer Of The Everglades, How To Talk To The Elk, How To Find And Call The Wild Turkey and Soliloquy To A Salmon. For those of us who prefer our wildlife domesticated there’s Train Your Dog Before It Trains You and the moving documentary Puppy’s First Year.

For viewers of a romantic disposition, there is a video guide to Great Honeymoons, hosted by Zsa Zsa Gabor, who has been married eight times so she should know something about the subject. How To Make Love To The Same Person For The Rest Of Your Life is the kind of title that somehow manages to make eternal devotion sound like the worst kind of prison sentence. You might want to follow it up with the practical Surviving Divorce.

And there’s more, most of it simply unclassifiable: Hunting Sheep, Goat And Moose In B.C., Judging Market Swine, The Palm-Aire Spa Seven-Day Plan To Change Your Life, Spago Cooking With Wolfgang Puck, Martha Stewart’s Secrets For Entertaining: An Antipasto Party, Compulsive Shopping, The Economics Of Vertical Restraint and Soil: An Introduction. I don’t know what any of these videos are about but I can’t imagine how I’ve lived without them for so long.

But we were discussing ways to improve the mental health of the nation’s youth, and what better way than with the home exercise classic Dance! Workout With Barbie, in which the jerkily animated 10 inch doll demonstrates aerobics and shouts encouragement like “You look excellent. Keep going!”. Of course, the only way to achieve proportions like Barbie’s is through surgery, and even then you’re never going to fit into all those cute little outfits you’ve been admiring in the toy shop. I’m waiting for the inevitable follow up, in which Barbie meets Chucky and teaches him some social graces while he tries to dismember her with a pair of nail scissors.

I have to confess my own kids have shown very little interest in any of these fascinating video educational aids. The only title that caught their attention was Brentwood Home Video’s How To Butcher Wild Game. This video is hosted by a man who keeps a whole elk hanging in his garage. Well, you’ve got to put those rotting animal carcasses somewhere, I suppose. He proceeds to demonstrate how to skin it, sever its head, chop out the blood clots, trim the meat, sever the spine and generally hack it to shreds with a variety of knives, saws and meat cleavers.

The video concludes with some delicious and simple elk recipes, although by this time my kids, intoxicated with new knowledge, had already run off to practise their skills on some of the other neighbourhood brats. They say they’ll only come back in if I promise to rent them Puppetmaster II, in which a whole gang of toys go on a homicidal rampage. When I told them there would be no more over-18s, they yelled back, “Remember the Elk!”

In fact the only thing guaranteed to put my kids into a genuinely ugly mood is insisting they can only watch PG rated movies. An hour and a half with the Care Bears would be acceptable mitigation for any unspeakable act they could dream up. Well, what the hell. I’ve been watching horror movies since I sneaked into my local flea-pit to see Hammer horror lesbian vampire flic Countess Dracula at the tender age of eight. And I haven’t killed anyone. Yet! •