A tempting menu of available bachelors, as displayed on Video Mate, circa 1983.

I know, it’s a tough call. Is it toxic waste guy? Data processing guy? Or maybe Fred has the edge, what with the Viking outfit. Via Protein Wisdom.

And we’re back, just about. While I get my bearings, here are two items featuring enhanced human anatomy.

First up is Japanese television’s Dogoo Girl with her deadly décolletage.

Germaine Greer shares her thoughts on the impending demise of Big Brother:

Let’s hope the final series has the Man himself dragged out of his hiding place, arraigned by the housemates who are the worse for the experience, and sentenced to condign punishment for perverting the nation’s taste. That I would watch.

Yes, of course, viewers must be the victims of unseen forces they cannot possibly comprehend. At least viewers of popular, commercial television. Viewers of, say, David Starkey programmes, not so much. But viewers of Big Brother? Their tastes have been perverted. Endemol and Channel 4 evidently took something of a risk by spending vast amounts of time and money on a programme for which no popular appetite could conceivably exist – not until the public had been suitably duped and perverted. And presumably Germaine knows this because she knows what popular taste ought to be. I’m sure there’s an irony in there somewhere.

Big Brother was one of those shows, as Friends was in its day, that young people watched in order to find out how to be themselves.

Did they, really? Is that what young people do? How does Germaine know this? Alas, she doesn’t say. She does, however, tell us:

Unfortunately what they learnt from Big Brother was that a girl who is plain or assertive is to be avoided. Any female who fails to hide the fact that she is more intelligent than the people around her is to be reviled. The feistiest girls are tossed out of the house, one by one, until only the meek are left. Of nine Big Brother winners, only three have been female, and that includes Nadia Almada (who had undergone gender reassignment only eight months before). Women get a far rougher ride from both housemates and viewers than do gay men, however waspish and over the top. Big Brother leaves us with a lasting impression that British misogyny is crueller and more pervasive than British homophobia.

This being the Guardian, nothing must divert Germaine from the obligatory victimhood hierarchy – it’s practically contractual – even if this requires some wild extrapolation. (Had the majority of winners been female, this could no doubt be construed as the result of some lascivious patriarchal gaze… and thus more damning evidence of pervasive oppression.) But wait a minute. Isn’t the Big Brother audience – and particularly the voting audience – disproportionately gay and disproportionately female? What then of the alleged homophobia and misogyny? And doesn’t the win by the plain, feisty and assertive Nadia Almada – in one of the series’ most rapturous and popular final nights – suggest something other than bigotry and hatred?

Despite Ms Greer’s own truncated appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, which she described as a “fascist prison,” and despite her grumblings about the series’ morally corrupting effects on those she considers “weaker than [herself],” the Guardian columnist saw fit to make subsequent paid appearances on Big Brother’s Little Brother and Big Brother’s Big Mouth.

Here’s Ms Greer in happier times.

Make way for Raquel Welch. She brings disco from the future.

From the 1970 TV special, Raquel!, in which Ms Welch displayed her various talents, including duets with Tom Jones and Bob Hope and a recitation of Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. Via Coudal.

And here’s Miss Brigitte Bardot performing Serge Gainsbourg’s Contact, circa 1968. The dress is by Paco Rabanne, who designed the costumes for Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, released the same year, and the sculptures are the handiwork of the late Nicolas Schöffer. Note this was filmed before Miss Bardot’s more recent excursions into space.

While I was at the coast yesterday, the Guardian’s Peter Jones addressed a matter of pressing import:

My girlfriend and I were watching TV at home when the advert for comparethemarket.com appeared on our screen. I had seen the ad before and not thought anything of it. However on this occasion, my girlfriend, who is Ukrainian, turned to me and said: “I don’t like this advert; it is very offensive to me.” I mentioned it to a friend who said his Latvian lodger also found it offensive.

The gravity of a claim to be offended should of course be measured by the rush to air it in the face of widespread bewilderment. It’s the modern way. In fairness, Mr Jones does go on to explain why the agency in question, VCCP, is propagating “racism”: 

The advertisement centres on the word “market” – a word that eastern Europeans/Russians pronounce “meerkat” – using talking CGI-animated meerkats. The sole point of this… is to highlight the idea that east Europeans cannot pronounce the word market properly when they speak English.

Wait a minute. Do Latvians, Poles and Slovaks really pronounce “market” as “meerkat”? Romanians too, and Ukrainians, and Russians? This is news, at least to me. Still, it’s good to see a Guardian contributor making such bold assumptions in the name of anti-racism. And aren’t meerkats – actual meerkats, not imaginary talking ones in smoking jackets – found primarily in Africa? The plot thickens.

It struck me how racist it was to parody what is now a significant part of the British population in this way… It is also the case that as so many people from eastern Europe were so new to the country that they would not want to be seen to be causing trouble. It then dawned on me that this ad was targeting a sector of the population who would be unlikely to fight back.

Ah. It’s targeted oppression, see? A watertight case. The fiends.

I once attempted an affectionate parody of a friend’s Brummie accent. No doubt that confirms my barely-latent hatred of all people from or around Birmingham. And viewers in Iceland, Russia and Scandinavia are doubtless still fuming at the explicitly racist horrors of “Beware the Judderman.”