My Marmoset, to get things done...

Aren't pets lovely. I mean seriously, aren't they. Look at their little faces, doesn't it make you all excited and gooey and make you want to dress them up in frocks and take them to restuarants pretending that they are your babies? No? That's because you are not mental. Unlike the subjects in Channel 4's recent sniggerfest 'My Monkey Baby'.

This is the latest from Channel 4's unending supply of documentaries that serve no purpose other than to provide us with a conveyor belt of freaks and misfits at which to point and laugh at like a Robert Ripley produced 'Generation Game' final. Make no mistake, I love these programmes and I am always excited when new ones are advertised. The trouble is, they are often a bit of a let-down, most notably in 'Tourettes Camp' where I was hoping for an hour of 'John's Not Mad' style tourettes-based hilarity, but actually got a fairly sensitive documentary about a group of children coming to terms with their problem. If it hadn't been for a lovely scene of all the kids walking up the driveway to Tourettes Camp, twitching and cursing as they went, I would have felt cheated.

So anyway, 'My Monkey Baby' is the story of various...wait for it...Americans...who, for a variety of reasons (most of which fall under a Darwinian umbrella) do not have children. They haven't let this get them down though as they have invested in the next best thing. Monkeys. Which they then treat as their offspring (the clue was in the title really), by dressing them in nappies and dresses and teaching them typical human behaviours such as drinking from cups, using the internet, going to restaurants and poking their tongue into their dad's mouth. Often the only non-human aspect of the relationship in fact (from the owner/parent perspective) is that they name the monkeys things like 'Butters' and 'Silly Willy'. Silly Willy? Seriously, if you're going to anthropomorphise your pets, call them Susan or Dave, not Silly Willy. Surely they cover that on day one of 'Being a Mad Pet Owner'?

Butters was actually quite a sorry case, the last we saw of him was his wide-eyed, terrified face having the features licked from its visage by a pitbull and a bull-mastiff. He had been in his new home for five minutes and he was already staring at the camera, pleading to be taken away from these bizarre people. "Ah his brother and sister are saying hello" gurgle the proud parents, not realising that they are actually trying to decide which pedigree chum best accompanies monkey.

It can't be denied how human the monkeys appear. At one point another 'mum' looks off camera and says "Maggie, get off the phone" and you find yourself being mildly surprised that when the camera pans around we don't see monkey Maggie slam the receiver down and slope off to her room like a sulky teenager complaining about how unfair she finds it all (instead Maggie hops from the telephone and disappears to have a poo in her cage), so it's easy to see how the parents can become a little deluded by the relationship. Having said that, I do feel that the lady who, upon being asked 'what do you think will happen when you get older?' replies matter-of-factly "well, Jesse will have to look after me" was being slightly optimistic.

The best (by which I mean most mental) parents are the couple who take their baby to a local restaurant, sit down and are perusing the menu when the restaurant manager appears and tells them, unsurprisingly, that monkeys aren't allowed to dine in their establishment. This outrages the couple, who secure their zoo exhibit back into its pram and storm out. "We'll not be coming back!" shouts the mum, having learned nothing from Rosa Parks.
Later the mum finds pills missing from her handbag. Worried that her baby may have eaten them she phones an Animal Psychic. I should point out that this is not an animal that is skilled at tarot, but a lady that can read animals' minds.

Over the phone.

"Can you ask him if he swallowed the pink thyroid pill?" says the mum, rather too specifically, and then holds the phone next to to her monkey, who tries to eat it. A few moments later she brings the phone back and the psychic tells her the good news.
"He said 'no I did not take that pill mommy, I would never do that'".
"Thank God" says mum, oblivious to the ridiculousness of it all.

At the end of the hour you are left with the overwhelming feeling that these parents, utterly insane though they are, still have tremendous hearts, but they are hearts bursting with delusion, and like so many doddery old lady cat owners before them, they live in blissful ignorance to the knowledge that if they fell off their perch, their furry darlings would not organise a flower-filled funeral, but would instead eat their bonkers faces.

I suppose it serves them right for standing on a fish in the first place.