Doctor Who, Top Gear and Obesity

Last night I caught up on yet another episode of Doctor Who. “Voyage of the Damned” was a special Christmas episode, and not exactly one of the best. I’m noticing a pattern in the episodes featuring the tenth Doctor. They are either incredibly dark and creepy and cerebral (Blink, Planet of the Ood), or they are campy as all hell. “VOTD” falls into the latter category; the plot had good intentions but the characters and dialogue were a bit over the top and the entire production was too campy for my liking. In a plot that combined components of The Poseidon Adventure with Titanic, the only memorable moments were David Tennant looking stunning in a tux, and the fat couple who served as the archetypal buffoon – too fat to fit through the tight passageways on board the collapsing ship, eventually falling into the ship’s nuclear reactor engine because they were too heavy to traverse the rickety scaffolding spanning across the engine chamber. At least the fat woman took one of the evil possessed Host androids with her when she plunged to her fiery death.

My first reaction to the fat couple characters was “where did they find two morbidly obese actors in England?”
If you’ve watched any of the television series from the BBC, you’ll notice an interesting phenomenon – there are about 10 actors in England, and that is basically it. Which makes sense, I suppose, seeing as it is a country the size of New England. I guess with limited means you do what you can, thus we see the same actors in everything from As Time Goes By to Being Human to Doctor Who. You see them again and again, in every series. VOTD was a virtual who’s who of British acting talent (with some Kylie Minogue thrown in for the boys in the audience), but I couldn’t get my mind off the fat couple.

Which leads me to the Monday edition of The Boston Globe, featuring this article about legislation passed in Massachusetts to measure and report children’s Body Mass Index scores.

I think it’s a fine idea – as an exercise physiologist, I am well aware of the obesity epidemic striking this country and it’s impending effects on our health care costs. This article in The Globe recognizes that some states are identifying childhood obesity as a problem and are actually trying to do something about it. Although, calculating BMI isn’t exactly a new and exciting measuring tool. It isn’t a complicated procedure. It’s very simple – weight (in Kg) divided by height squared (in meters). My guess is you could pull records from school nurses dating back thirty years and run these calculations. So the inclusion of BMI isn’t new, it just involves some basic math. We’ve always had the data, we’ve just never done anything with it.

Reading the comments to the Globe article was an exercise in restraint for me. I don’t comment on public forums, especially those like The Globe, because the average intelligence of the commentors is such that trying to make them understand a cogent argument would be like trying to teach differential equations to a roll of paper towels.

But the comments, oh the comments. First there are the people who argue that BMI is not an accurate measure because it does not take into consideration body composition. People with a large amount of muscle mass – people, like, NFL football players – would be inaccurately categorized as obese based on BMI. However, the last time I checked, elementary school age children were not exactly heavily muscled. If a school age child scores a BMI over 30, there is a 100% chance that the number is accurately categorizing the kid as fat.

Other commentors worry about the emotional effect that being labeled as obese/overweight/BMI over 30 would have on their precious little cherubs. They worry that ‘if the numbers get out’ other kids might tease their fat little urchin.

Apparently parent’s didn’t realize that we can tell just by looking at the kid if he’s fat or not. Children don’t need to know your kids’ BMI to figure out your kid is too fat. The reason the state is providing the measures is so that you are made aware of your kids’ fat status – because as long as we have parents making excuses for why little Johnny is fat (he’s got big bones, it’s genetic, I don’t want to give him a complex, etc), no one is going to take responsibility for it.

Which leads me back to the BBC. I watch Top Gear. I watch it a lot – in fact, I probably watch it as much as I watch Doctor Who. And without fail, Jeremy Clarkson manages to find a way to poke fun at fat Americans in nearly every episode. Here’s a sampling of some of his better comments:

“Now as you can see I lost the battle to have two engines on the  back because of three very important reasons. One: weight. This is 600 Lbs and that’s the same as having a whole American sitting on the tailgate…”

[To a female audience member, asks where she's from, and she replies "the States"] “You’re American? You can’t be, you’re far too thin.”

[On Segways] “They’re made in America, of course, so fat Yanks can go to the fridge without expending any energy.”

And, let us not forget the American Road Trip episode, featuring the Stig’s American cousin, “Big Stig.”

So, Americans can whine and complain about fat acceptance and genetic predispositions and being inaccurately labeled as fat, etc etc. And the Brits will continue to laugh at us. I wonder if I am the only one who finds the fat American jokes on Top Gear hysterically funny?

The Stig's American Cousin, Big Stig