‘J-Lo alert! Give me that bloody remote!’
‘Don’t be a telly Hitler, Mum.’
‘Am not. Can’t blame me for having taste.’
‘Tu sei molto cattiva, e molto antipatica. E molto bassa.’
Peter is enjoying learning Italian for a trip to Italy. He can call his mother wicked, grumpy and short in two languages now. I return the epithets in a more operatic accent, but forgetting to put the male ending on the words, he gets to gloat. Most of our altercations are about his calm assumption that the remote is his domain. I suppose he keeps me from fossilising by putting on MTV with Jackass and Dirty Sanchez, as well as the kind of music they play on that channel. Young blokes also seem to love cartoons, so in our house we also get a lot of Simpsons, South Park and Family Man. I like some of these and loathe others, especially Family Man. Where is the bridge over the generational taste-abyss? I am, despite slanderous aspersions from my offspring, a reasonably broadminded and curious person for my advanced age, so I find myself enjoying MTV when Gwen Stefani or Queens of the Stone Age come along. But I draw the line at 50 Cent and J-Lo and indeed any video clip that has herds of subservient ho’s waggling their reproductive facilities at arrogant, drug-fuelled males. This puts a lot of hip-hop and R&B outside my pale, because as Kath and Kim would say, they get up my goat.
But there are things we can all watch together without fighting. In March on the ABC there was that gorgeously grotty program The Bodysnatchers. Maggots being popped out of scalps and necks; tapeworm dramas; cautionary tales for the young fellers about the reason why you should never pee in the Amazon. It was all pity and terror with a lot of fear and loathing and EEEK! thrown in. Now that was good telly, there should be more of it: the whole family watched, spellbound, with only the weak-stomached protesting. One of my dearest friends, an 89-year-old retired missionary, and veteran of numerous bouts of malaria, loved it. It reminded him of his salad days in the tropics, helping people overcome these things. (Good missionaries were always just as concerned for their flocks’ bodily health as for their spiritual wellbeing.) Bodysnatchers was the perfect cross-generational program: something to disgust and delight, all without offending. A rare