Comment Archive:
Tuesday 1st April 2008
The Gene Genie
If you don’t know who Gene Hunt is then you’ve plainly had your head wedged so far up your own arse for the last three years that you’d be unable to tell a celebrity cop from your colon. Gene Hunt is the new social phenomenon. The new televisual giant. An un-PC legend for the new millennium on a par with DI Jack Regan from the 70’s and just as quotable. For some reason the character of Gene Hunt has set the television watching masses of the UK alight.
Don’t believe me? Gene Huntisms are even now proliferating in a pub / school / police station near you. Go to Amazon and you can purchase The Rules Of Modern Policing by Gene Hunt - a guide to extracting confessions from dirty no-good scrotes the Gene Hunt way. Really useful for when you’re serving endless burgers to spotty nosed kids in McDonalds...
Given the appeal of Gene Hunt this book may even aid you in your quest to pull the birds – or as Gene Hunt would say: a bit of fanny. Because at the end of the day, if you’re into Gene Hunt then the chances are you’re male, white and heterosexual. This is a rather limiting demographic but very telling. Not that Gene Hunt doesn’t have feminine appeal, of course, but I suspect that what is attractive in a fictional TV character doesn’t necessarily translate well into a real man in the real world.
But this is the key to Gene Hunt’s success. Yes he’s sexist. Yes he’s homophobic. Yes he’s racist. He’s every bigoted, narrow-minded, knee-jerk reacting bad-cop you’ve ever had nightmares about but he’s safe. He isn’t real. He’s on the TV and his role is to provide a comedic element to both Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes. Philip Glennister (the man behind the Hunt mask) might play it straight in the show but make no bones about it, Gene Hunt is essentially there to supply humour. Very dark, sometimes very ugly humour but humour nonetheless.
Which begs the question: who exactly is the joke upon?
It’s significant that in this increasingly litigious world of Health & Safety, Risk Assessments, Political Correctness, Universal Accessibility and Equal Rights For All, we fixate so easily and so enthusiastically upon the very antithesis of this. Maybe the joke is that Gene Hunt is highlighting the falseness and insincerity behind much of the modern world’s devotion to political correctness? Maybe we admire and celebrate Gene Hunt - for all his many faults - because at heart he is the one thing that most of us are not: totally honest about his opinions and where’s he’s coming from?
Now that’s a sobering thought.
Of course, we’d like to say that we laugh at Gene Hunt’s escapades from a position of superiority but - take a leaf out of Gene Hunt’s book and be totally honest - is that really the case? Because let’s face it, we don’t sneer at Gene Hunt. We admire him. We hang onto his every word. We want to see him kicking some thieving scrote in the knackers and down the stairs. We want to emulate his "just get it bloody done" attitude. Gene Hunt eats red tape and bureaucracy for breakfast and then spits out the pips into the face of the nearest namby-pamby, limply liberal, talking-out-of-his-own-arse do-gooder.
And we like it.
But maybe Gene Hunt is providing a valuable service in this straitjacketedly modern, pressurized world? He’s allowing us to live vicariously. To vent our secret frustrations and bubbling xenophobia in an environment that’s safe, contained and so far removed from reality that we can comfortably analyse our darkest impulses without getting our fingers too badly burned. Because we all have them, those mean, bigoted thoughts. Wear cardigans and shop Fair Trade all you like but the attitudes that Gene Hunt so eloquently expounds still exist in all of us today in varying measures and degrees depending on the individual.
In this sense then Gene Hunt is a true hero of the modern age. His elevation is truly justified. When he kicks a drug pusher down the stairs he’s doing it on our behalf. When he cracks a racist / sexist joke he’s doing it so that we don’t have to. Ultimately he’s saving us from ourselves.
Gene Hunt really is our worst nightmare. He’s ourselves as we suspect we are but dearly hope we are not. He embodies both the worst and the best of us but in a form that we can at least laugh at. And as we all know, laughing at something is the first step to understanding it, to diminishing it and finally to conquering it.
Gene Hunt’s job will be done only when we no longer need him...
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