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Help! I Smell of Fish

A doctor treating a patient
  • Posted at 11:11am
  • 07 September 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

If BBC3's strategy is to boost viewing figures by giving their programmes preposterous titles that promise something akin to a 21st century freak show, they're doing a grand job. Alongside Help Me Anthea, I'm Infested, Dog Borstal and My Penis and Everyone Else's, we have Help! I Smell of Fish, a documentary studying three sufferers of so-called fish odour syndrome. They could have called the show "trimethylaminuria" – the medical term for the condition – but if they had, I probably wouldn't have bothered watching it. Clever folk, these TV producers.

"What's it like to be smelly?" pondered the Geordie narrator. "Erm, I wouldn't know, myself," I mumbled at the screen, surreptitiously taking a quick sniff of my left armpit. Of course, we’ve all had our smelly moments, but most of us are lucky enough for it not to be a permanent state of affairs.

The bad breath and acutely unpleasant BO associated with fish odour syndrome, however, is caused by a genetic inability to process certain chemicals within the gut. The problem is exacerbated by eating, amongst other things, fish and eggs. Thomas Barber, a lively primary school boy with the condition, particularly loves – you guessed it – fish and eggs.

His fantastically matter-of-fact mum lets him have fish on Friday evenings, knowing that on Saturday morning she'll have to brave the stench of her son's room, strip the bed and fling open the windows a bit wider than usual. "You can really smell the fish on his bedclothes," she said, wincing slightly.

Millions of mums of sullen teenage boys can probably identify with the horror of dealing with the stench of their unwashed offspring, but Thomas is probably the cleanest boy in his school. In fact, judging by this programme, the personal hygiene of those with fish odour syndrome vastly eclipses that of your average person, and I watched the TV thinking "surely they don't smell that bad?"

While frankness and openness was the order of the day in the Barber household, 42-year-old Carol Sexton and her family had a contrasting approach. "Our way of dealing with it," she said, "is not to talk about it." Indeed, the programme would have us believe that none of her close family or friends who appeared on screen actually knew about her condition when filming started, raising the question of how Carol explained to them the presence of a camera crew in her living room.

Rachel Collins, meanwhile, is 32 years old and has spent most of the last decade in Asia to get away from the British population's obsession with smelling of anything other than itself. If this were 1820, city workers would be savouring each other's stress-induced musk on the journey home from work, rather than getting a noseful of slightly toxic deodorant. We'd all smell a bit, and the likes of Rachel would probably feel a lot less embarrassed.

But let's face it – there's no turning back the clock to the time when unpleasant odours were masked with nothing more than a fragrant bunch of flowers. These days, we're expected to smell like Selfridges perfume counter. But don't you go trying to pass off any forgetful non-application of morning deodorant as an awkward medical condition. Not least because you'll have a hell of a job pronouncing trimethylaminuria.

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