4 - ‘Al fresco? That's up yer anus, innit?’ Shane Meadows and the Politics of Abjection

Summary

The body that figures in all the expressions of the unofficial speech of the people is the body that fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks [and] defecates … Whenever men laugh and curse, particularly in a familiar environment, their speech is filled with bodily images. The body copulates, defecates, overeats, and men's speech is flooded with genitals, bellies, defecations, urine, disease, noses, mouths, and dismembered parts.

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1965 [1984]: 319)

I'm full up with burgers! I've just eaten half a cow's crack, so I'm desperate for a big shit! And a nice piss-piss! I'm gonna have to sneak off in a minute and drop one! I'm gonna walk the wire cable! I'm gonna release a chocolate hostage!

Paddy Considine, A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) DVD commentary

As usual, it begins innocuously enough. Prompted by his friend Shane Meadows politely enquiring whether the actor has enjoyed his lunch, Paddy Considine's extrapolated digressions quoted above typify the enjoyably lewd and irreverent tone of Meadows' DVD commentary tracks. Casually expressing their mutual boredom at the laborious process of narrating on earlier work, the conversation soon descends into tangential disarray: a series of raucous exchanges including anecdotes about youthful encounters with pornography, being caught masturbating and Considine's cheerful description of Meadows' dog emptying his bowels. However, absent from this transcription of the actor's scatological stream-of-consciousness is Meadows' own contribution: an explosively reciprocal cackle which spurs the actor to further exaggerate his euphemistic non sequiturs.