Eratosphere - New Statesman -- Satiation Games winners

No 4225

Set by Leonora Casement
Following the enormous box office success of the film “The Hunger Games” – in which teenagers compete in the eponymous games, killing each other for the amusement of the rulers of “the Capitol” – and the outrage felt by some parents due to its 12A rating, we asked compers to send in the plot summary and casting ideas for a subsequent film, “The Satiation Games”, including reasons why it, too, should receive a 12A rating. As you might expect, reasons for the point and rating of “The Hunger Games” found their way into print: the Independent thought it was a comment “on the American appetite for reality TV and the confections of celebrity”.

This week’s winners
Well done. The four winners get £25, with the Tesco vouchers going in addition to Chris O’Carroll, for added merit.

Food for thought
This star vehicle for Georgia Lock and Tyger Drew-Honey is a romcom set in the thrilling and controversial world of high-stakes competitive eating. Two attractive young champions, Cantina and Krisp, discover an irresistible erotic chemistry as they vie against one another to gulp down record-setting quantities of jellied eels, Cornish pasties and other competition foods.
Idolised by hordes of clamouring fans – who sometimes come to blows as the two compete – and sponsored by rival snack food corporations that insist on playing up an artificial enmity between them, Krisp and Cantina struggle at first against their forbidden love, then yield to it with the voracious appetites of a modern-day Romeo and Juliet. The use of food consumption as a visual metaphor for sex (surely we all recall how effective that trope proved in Tom Jones?) allows the script to achieve maximum audience titillation without transgressing 12A guidelines.
Chris O’Carroll

Silent but violent
Pleasure beyond measure: four coprophiliacs indulge in a mindless spree of brutal sex and assassination, while eating and drinking as much as they can and trying out as many illicit substances as they can lay their hands on. In this wacky teen comedy, which makes Ai No Corrida look like a church picnic, the tension mounts as it becomes clear that they will turn on each other and that only one can survive. Starring the award-winning Richard Attenborough, Lauren Bacall, Olivia de Havilland and Herbert Lom, and using the latest in prosthetic technology, the film is fashionably filmed in silent mode, with subtitles in Volapük, and through a de luxe smear filter, so that most of the action is only dimly visible. The soundtrack is also deliberately and amusingly misleading. Its blend of action and nostalgia and its revolutionary art-house techniques make the film perfect for a 12A classification.
Bill Greenwell

A trifling matter
The setting: Britain in the 22nd century, where 99.5 per cent of people are obese and the other 0.5 per cent own 99 per cent of the wealth and pursue a lavish lifestyle. The games are designed to amuse this 0.5 per cent.
The film begins when a trifle-eating contestant, Rory (played by Julian Fellowes), glimpses through a window one of the kitchen staff employed to prepare trifles. Kathy (played by Ann Widdecombe), in a crisply starched apron, captivates Rory, although relationships between kitchen staff and contestants are forbidden.
Yet Rory sees Kathy as someone he could bounce ideas off, or even himself. The film deals with his unsuccessful struggle to resist temptation, Kathy’s growing ardour, their betrayal and ultimate separation. The frank depictions of the abuse of trifles justifies the 12A classification.
M E Ault

Fat of the land
The Satiation Games takes place in a thinly disguised America called Phattland. Obesity affects 98 per cent of the population and the government has started a contest in which two participants are force-fed enormous quantities of hamburgers and ice cream until one of them explodes. The survivor receives a free trip to the country’s only remaining health farm.
Over the course of The Satiation Games, the two principal characters fall in love but their huge bulk prevents them from getting sufficiently close to each other to consummate their passion. Elsewhere in the script, however, there’s plenty of explicit, perverted sex, appalling violence and foul language. Despite this, the censors intend to rate the film 12A, in the hope that it will encourage children to eat less.
Johnny Depp is currently rumoured to be trying to eat his way into the male role but the female role is expected to be computer-generated. The DVD version will be in widescreen only.
Brian Allgar