Married to the Eiffel Tower: Strangelove (Five)

The artist Richard Wentworth was describing his childhood in an interview with me when his eyes flicked to the rubber door-mat, with a concentric ring design, wedged under the café’s door. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said and took a picture of it. He was fascinated by a ladder leaning at a nondescript angle and some models of London landmarks in a shop window. Wentworth prizes the ephemera of the everyday and uses it in his art; the angles of paving stones, flyposting – all intrigue him. His unique perspective makes you see the city anew, dottily so.

But my passion hasn’t yet blossomed to the levels of the “objectum sexuals” featured in Married to the Eiffel Tower: Strangelove (Five), women (no men) who fall literally in love with buildings and objects. They have sex and relationships with them; their passion as ardent as any human relationship.

The title was no lie. Erika (surname: La Tour Eiffel) had married the Parisian landmark the previous year. Revisiting the girders where the ceremony took place, clutching her wedding veil, she gyrated against the structure. She could feel the cold of the Tower meeting the warmth of her body to produce an “equilibrium”. But if object-love really was like human love, then Erika was putting it about a bit, because she was also having a torrid time with the Golden Gate Bridge and the Berlin Wall, fragments of which she called “my boys”; the Eiffel Tower she called “she” – maybe she is a bisexual objectum sexual.

At the Golden Gate Bridge she agonised about the two of them ever being alone, what with the traffic and sight-seers. “Our love is no different than the love between two beings,” she claimed. Erika wanted to be an object, not human; her friend Amy was proud never to have been touched by another person (although she did hug Erika).

Amy was in love with the Twin Towers and the Empire State Building, whose flank she nuzzled and whispered sweet nothings to, until a security guard asked her to clear off. So she started loudly exclaiming her devotion – “Chaaaa-CHAAAAA!” – instead. Asperger’s and autism were mentioned as possible conditions underlying the women’s passions, but the only thing they shared was a history of abuse and abandonment. Erika had been discharged from the Armed Forces for refusing to stop sleeping with a ceremonial sword.

You did watch this and think: “The joke’s on me, right? Late April Fool.” But apparently not. On the streets of New York, with its riotous sensory overload, the women were almost delirious. When they went to a fairground to visit a ride with which Amy had fallen in love, things got seriously mucky. Amy had sex with the ride, praising – in the way you might a sexy pair of legs or pecs – “his elegant gondola”. She was beside herself: “After five months, it’s so good to see you – so proud, so noble, so strong,” she rhapsodised, before disappearing under the ride, smearing her face with grease. Erika found a fence – lock up your fences, she really likes ’em – and began straddling and kissing it.

The sex wasn’t as strange as some of the self-analysis. Erika said she felt like the Berlin Wall. She mused that someone must have loved the Wall to bring it into the world; what made them not love it now? Political history meant nothing to her, the Wall was a simple victim of neglect. She didn’t care if people called her “cuckoo”, and while the programme could have easily done that and turned the women’s stories into a guffaw-a-minute freak show, somehow it strove for understanding. There should have been easy laughs, but instead it was moving – particularly when a priest counselled Amy after finding her sexually communing with his altar rail. This was absurdity not treated absurdly – and the Empire State Building did look mighty thrusting and fine.

Location, Location, Location (C4)

A far stranger relationship exists between Phil and Kirstie, no surnames required, whose banter somehow manages to be familial and flirtatious. The presence of Location, Location, Location (Channel 4) feels a little defunct in a stagnant housing market. But they found a freelance community artist (a job like “international car trader” someone will have to explain to me) and a professional couple wanting to move to the country who, after the usual resistance and churlishness, fell for Phil and Kirstie’s persuasive bossiness.

When Phil, grizzling over the hard-to-please professional couple, suggested “a change of tack” to Kirstie over a coffee, she offered, “Suicide? Murder?” Crikey. Do what they say, Britain. Or rent.

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