KEY POINTS:
The images we see apparently go from the eyeball, down the optic nerve and are seared right on to our brains. After watching TV3's Thursday documentary Half Ton Dad you'll wish you could clear the grey matter just like a magna-doodle.
This companion piece to Half Ton Mum follows the world's heaviest man's preparation for gastric bypass surgery. Kenneth Brumley, a 40-year-old father of four, weighed 463kg when he was cut free from his house.
No doubt the producers of this show would say it's all about highlighting the problem of America's super-morbidly obese - there are tens of millions of potential Kenneths - or maybe they would say it is a documentary showing the bravery of an individual trying to save his own life in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
In reality it is a freak-show with a huge helping of surgery porn on the side. Kenneth has been bedridden for seven years and hasn't walked for four years. He is grotesque. Like a giant Jabba the Hutt, he lies marooned in bed depending on friends and family to deliver a greasy fast-food diet that sees him consume each day the same amount that an average man would eat in two weeks.
From the demeaning trip by fire truck to hospital to the actual surgery itself, no detail is too personal or too lurid to share. The surgery scenes are particularly hard to take, even when watched from behind closed fingers.
It's hard to believe the blubber comes from a human and just as difficult to understand how Kenneth reached this state in the first place.
Tuesday's TV One series The Big Food Fight: Hugh's Chicken Run also aspires to be public service TV, convincing us to change our food ways. Posh host Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, of River Cottage fame, is charming in a shambolic way but at least he cares. The first show sets up the three-parter by showing him undertaking stunts to get the residents of his picturesque village of Axminster to give up cheap chicken for free-range chooks.
But the stunts are just a sideshow to the main event where our food activist sets up his own intensive chicken farm to prove just how awful conditions really are. It's a big financial output and seems to be just as emotionally draining, if the preview shots of him crying are anything to go by.
I reckon he could have saved himself all the bother just by showing villagers a DVD of Half Ton Dad. After that they'd never want to overeat cheap and nutritionally dubious food again. I know I don't.
* Hugh's Chicken Run debuts on TV One, Tuesday, at 9.30pm. Half Ton Dad is on TV3, Thursday, at 9.30pm.
