SOME RESIDENTS of the village of Harby in Leicestershire believe that a new BBC reality television show which will see most of the village’s women removed for a week and the men left to get on with life in a male-only environment is likely to cheapen and humiliate the village. I can’t see it, myself. That’s like saying that I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! in some way cheapened jungles, or that Big Brother humiliated prefabricated houses.

For it is not locations or cultures that are cheapened by reality television, but people. And then only if they choose to cheapen themselves. I believe that The Week The Women Left represents an opportunity for the people of Harby, who have until now been of no real use to the wider human project and would otherwise have been entirely forgotten by history, to make themselves briefly useful by taking part in an exercise of enormous social value.

“I don’t think this kind of tat is what the BBC should be spending licencepayers’ money on,” a villager, Paul Marshall,told reporters this week. “Just last week they were attacked for not showing enough public service broadcasting, and now they are spending money on this kind of rubbish. I have seen this kind of TV and nobody comes out of it looking good.”

Whereas Paul Marshall comes out of his decision to boycott the programme looking, what? Open-minded? Grown up? Or like a small-minded English bumpkin who doesn’t know who is going to cook his tea if his wife is lording it up in a hotel somewhere, getting drunk with her friends on BBC expenses and flirting with the film crew?

Come on, this is marvellous. This is exactly what the BBC should be doing with our licence fee: constructing small-scale eugenics laboratories in the middle of nowhere and playing mind-games with dispensable Midland grockles for the long-term benefit of human society.

A world without women? It’s an intriguing proposition. If it could somehow be made to work . . . well, it might just be the solution to everything. We haven’t had a good Utopic vision in years. Not since Wells, Huxley and Orwell spoilt the genre with their doom and gloom and all that irrelevant class stuff. But with society truly in crisis, it may be time to have a renaissance of the early modern fashion for positing hypothetical perfect worlds. At the very least, with the human race so corrupted and bad just now, eliminating half of it looks like a plan.

For a start, a world without women would eradicate at a blow the problem of all this binge-drinking they’re doing. Booze would once again come under the exclusive aegis of the people who can handle it.

As a result, pubs would not need to be open 24 hours a day to fuel the ladies’ drunken binges and there would be no need for alcopops or these special third-of-a-pint glasses which are designed to fool women into a little occasional sobriety. While the lager-ladettes of Harby are dancing topless on the tables at their hotel my guess is that the chaps will revert to a quiet sherry and a smoke in the pub, and then home by eleven to a nice calm house for reading and thinking.

In a world with no women, we could abolish football, since everyone knows that women are the only ones who are really interested in it now.

Likewise soap operas, daytime chat shows and problem phone-ins (because with no women what would the problems be?), and also cottage cheese, small cars, olive oil, cut flowers, scented candles, herbal tea, West End musicals, clothes for domestic pets, dimmer switches (men are happy with the range of options presented by an on/off switch), and then electric blankets, most forms of modern dance, The Guardian, steamed vegetables, Bridget Jones’s Diary, glossy magazines that conveniently fit in a handbag, handbags, yoga, moisturising creams, tennis, mineral water, those bum-tightening machines they have in the gym, mouse-traps, heated train station waiting-rooms, hairdryers and white wine.

And, of course, with no romantic comedies being made, the studios could put some real money into action movies and pornography. And think how many more public loos would be available at any one time. No more confusing signs on the toilet doors. No more pretending to be a woman when the gents is occupied. And, of course, if there were no women then you’d be able to have a urinal in your home. In the telly room, if you wanted. And gentlemen’s clubs wouldn’t have to embarrass themselves with their admissions policies.

On the downside, yes, there would be nobody to do your ironing, but then you wouldn’t need to iron any more because only women know what exactly is wrong with having creases in your clothes, and when the women die, that secret will die with them.

Kelly Webb-Lamb, the BBC producer of The Week The Women Left, says “I think domestic chaos will ensue”. I’m sure she hopes it does. But she forgets about Plato’s Republic, the very first Utopia and one which, like the Athenian state for which it was construed, did not need women. Because it had slaves. In a womanless society, you see, the Alpha males will simply enslave as many chavs as are needed to do the domestic stuff, leaving themselves free, as in Ancient Greece, to lie around naked, talking about philosophy and having sex with each other.

I think the experiment in Harby is going to make compulsive viewing.

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