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Charlie DimmockWhy men love Charlie Dimmock - a woman of many parts!
From an article by reporter Charlotte Raven- ('The Guardian' April 20th 1999)" ..... her thighs are too big ..... her tits (too small) .....her arse (far too substantial)." This is how Charlotte Raven from Guardian Newspapers sees Charlie Dimmock. Most men seem to love her anyway and women often admire her. Read the full article below to find out why. Click the small pictures for an enlarged viewPictures appear in a new window that can be moved
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| ...her thighs are too big |
...her tits (too small) |
...her arse |
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Charlie Dimmock is a pretty unlikely pin-up. The co-presenter of TV's Ground Force is a qualified horticulturalist whose grooming routine involves a wash and a clean pair of jeans. By her own admission, Charlie is 'pudgy' - a size 14 in the winter, going down to a 12 in the more active summer months. When she bends over, as she does very often in Ground Force, we are treated to lingering shots of her figure. |
Her thighs are too big. They may be muscular rather than flabby, but by any modern standards of female beauty they are hardly up there with the best. Other problem areas include: her tits (too small), her arse (far too substantial), her age (32!) and her hefty biceps. Unsurprisingly, Charlie is bemused by her status as the nation's favourite garden ornament. 'I find it fairly difficult to think of myself as sexy,' she said in a recent interview. 'I've never been called that in my life before. At school, I was fat and pasty and known as Carrottop.'
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| ...her thighs are too big |
...her tits (too small) |
...her arse |
Incongruous though it might seem, both to her and to those of us with an interest in observing male behaviour, Dimmock has become famous for her assets. The phenomenal popularity of Ground Force - a gardening make-over programme on the model of Changing Rooms - was based, in no small part, on Dimmock's perceived accessibility to men who would not look twice at more conventional TV totty. Key to her appeal to this libidinally-uncatered-for constituency was her status as a 'real' woman - a euphemism for someone who could conceivably come within their orbit. If Denise Van Outen and the rest seem unavailable to your average Terry Wogan listener, Charlie could well just pop in on her way to the garden centre. The central conceit of Ground Force bears this out.
| Alerted to a neglected plot by a relative or friend of the 'surprisee', the team turn up on the doorstep in the knowledge that this person will be away. When he or she returns, Charlie and the rest leap out from behind the dustbins and proclaim the plot 'transformed'. As the surprisee begins to come to terms with the gazebo he never asked for, he may take time to reflect on the fact that 'her off the telly' has been tramping his suburban sod. |
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Since the early days of Ground Force, Charlie's male admirers have been fulsome about her attributes. She is, they say, a 'genuine person', a stranger to all feminine wiles. They say she makes a refreshing change from vacuous models and bimbos who do not have calloused hands. They whisper how hardworking she is and how sublimely unselfconscious.
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But mostly, they just talk about her tits. Charlie's tits have made her famous. If she hadn't felt uncomfortable in a bra, I wouldn't be writing this column. Instead, she is an icon of bralessness or, as Loaded puts it, a 'bra-less slapper'. In a twist on the feminist hope that burning your bra would somehow put men off, Charlie's unfettered breasts have become the toast of middle England. |
From the outset, this peculiar fetish has been cloaked in Carry-On humour. People who would feel uncomfortable leering at page three are happy to refer to a pair of Dimmocks.
| Half-joking, half-serious - these men are performing the classic trick of appearing to be having a laugh while they are really ogling a young woman who is not there for that purpose. Much of the humour seems to come from the fact that Charlie isn't there to be objectified. The fact that you weren't supposed to notice her tits makes referring to them endlessly seem funny rather than crude. Everyone participates in what is, by now, a national pastime. |
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When the Observer talked to her this week, it didn't baulk at asking her, a TV presenter, not a stripper, to explain why she chooses not to wear a bra. Would they ask Trevor McDonald why he favours sensible underwear rather than a leather thong? For some reason, men believe their good taste in favouring a 'natural' girl over some pneumatic tart excuses them from misbehaviour. In liking Charlie rather than Kathy Lloyd, they think they are being more enlightened and consider themselves exempt from any charge of gross indecency. There's more than a whiff of self-congratulation in their efforts to elevate Charlie above common pin-ups. In doing this, they cast themselves as progressives, fighting the 'real' woman's corner against the fantasy constructions of Loaded culture.
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They shouldn't be so deluded. There is nothing inherently radical about preferring your bird without make-up. Men down the ages have said they do - but it hasn't stopped them looking at everyone with the same pornographic eye. Why should they be applauded for having the good taste to go for Charlie if they then have the bad taste to discuss her in a way that would dishonour a table dancer? |
According to AA Gill, writing in the Sunday Times, 'Charlie should have the seed packet instructions tattooed on her bottom: Hardy annual, doesn't need much attention. Good in shady spot. Keep moist and tie to stiff post.' The piece is billed as a eulogy to Dimmock. Really, it's an example of transference, where all the nasty stuff that you can't get away with saying about models for fear of appearing a cad, is applied to poor old Charlie. That Gill goes out with a model and has previously shown no preference for horny handed daughters of the soil only confirms my suspicion that Charlie is less important than her role as an acceptable site for unreconstructed male desire.
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Implicit in all the praise of her is a barely disguised disgust for women in general - the painted hounds who wouldn't give a courteous answer to a perfectly innocent underwear enquiry. Gill complains in his piece about the 'cloned, beddable, dyed, smoky-eyed bits of totty who are endlessly offered up to us from the covers of men's magazines, catwalks and billboards as being what men are supposed to want more than the use of their legs'. |
So it seems men are bored of leching after women who don't deserve it. Lucky old Charlie - to find herself the only woman in Britain good enough to be treated like a tramp.
Text by Charlotte Raven - Guardian Unlimited ©
Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
Images © BBC Television
If you're not happy with the pictures above - modify Charlie using computer technology! You can always reset her to the Charlie loved by men and admired by women worldwide! Or, how about a Charlie Dimmock gnome?
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