Jo Brand on Kissing BBC 4

Jo Brand is a comedienne. She is quite funny. She is not someone you would want to kiss. I don’t want to get familiar with her, but Jo looks a bit like a truck driver with lipstick. Perhaps that was the idea of the programme. An hour devoted to laughing at kissing and Jo. An hour is quite a long time, so how did me and Jo fill it? Well, we found out that Jo doesn’t like that kind of kissing, you know, the one that goes on in public, people practically throwing the leg over and eating each other’s face off. God I’ve not seen that for years. I should get out more. So Jo doesn’t like it. We’ve got to know why. There’s always a bit of science and physiology as a fill-up. A peck on the cheek uses two muscles. A full on throatalectomy uses 34. Kissing also increases oxytocin. That’s the hormone that we produce when we see cute babies and say ‘ahhhh’. It decreases the stress hormone, cortisone and increases serotonin. The latter is of course associated with crack cocaine. So we should all really be going off our heads and ‘winching the face aff each other’. A woman actually said that she was going to do that to me once. Of course I didn’t let her, but that was before Brand’s programme. So, back to the scientific part, do other animal’s kiss? Yes they do and most of them also shag, but that was taking it a bit too far. We also had a bit where Jo meets an artist who makes sculptures of the inside of people’s mouths as they kiss. The woman artist had a strange kind of face. She should have been quite pretty but all her features seemed to have settled into the middle of her face, a bit too close together. Given a choice between kissing her and Jo I’d still have taken the artist. The ‘kiss’ sculptures she produced with the help of dental ‘concrete’ where, of course, complete rubbish. They were embossed in a see through square cube. Is this art? I don’t think so.