Day 2: Naked in the Monkey house
Mike: Our first job in the morning was to do a sperm test in the hospital. It's really difficult to try and get aroused in a clinical white room that you know has been used for a specific purpose thousands of times before. It's even harder knowing that there's a film crew waiting outside the door.

Zeron: The night before Nic warned us off pleasuring ourselves during the night. "No crafty wanks," I think his words were. We had to save it to produce in the Birmingham Women's Hospital. Doing it on demand is really not that easy. And I do feel for the poor blokes who have to produce because of possible infertility. Still, some of those guys are a bit naughty: I was told by a nurse at the clinic that men regularly steal some of the girlie magazines left in the sample rooms. It was good to get it over and done with and get back on the road to visit Dudley Zoo.

Mike: In the afternoon we walked around Dudley Zoo talking about animals and their prowess in the sperm game. We then made casts of our testicles in a chimpanzee house (which was weird to say the least) before talking bollocks with Allan.

Zeron: I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. We had to cast our testicles (for common decency we couldn't show our actual testicles on TV) in the monkey house. The monkey house was cold. The testicle mould was cold. And the female chimps watching were unimpressed. But hey, I got to show my ass on TV.

Secretly Mike and I had been prepped for that Lab Rat stunt, because we had to shave off all our pubes. I pity anyone - male or female - who makes a mould of down there and does not take the precaution of clean shaving first!

Mike: We filmed the results of our sperm tests. Zeron and I were trying to work out why our sperm counts were a bit disappointing. Allan told us that we should look back three months, because this is about how long it takes to make sperm. Three months ago, we were filming another programme for the series, so although we weren't ill, we were very tired from the long days. Allan lent me a scientific paper about testicle volume. In it was a graph showing testicle size against sperm count. Zeron's testicular volume was 55ml, which should give him 180 million sperm (give or take 10 million) per ejaculation. My testicles had a total volume of 65ml, which should give 300 million sperm per ejaculation (again, give or take 50 million).

Zeron: Forget the science: Mike has bigger balls than me. Rats!

Mike: This was the first time that we had heard the results of any sperm tests that we had taken, but of course the programme makers had checked us out before (to make sure that we had something to make a programme about), and we had allowed them to keep the results secret from us so that we would genuinely hear our sperm count for the first time when on camera. However, in the light of the televised results, in which Zeron (the father of three kids) was told that he was sub-fertile and would need treatment to make a woman pregnant, we now wanted to know our earlier results.

Zeron: I was told that I was sub-fertile and would have needed treatment if I was looking to father children. Since I'm not, it didn't really bother me - I already have three stunning daughters.

Mike: When we looked into figures taken from the earlier samples, we found out that Zeron routinely produced 60 million sperm per ejaculation, which is a little lower than expected from his testicle size but well into the normal fertile range for men, and I managed between 270 to 300 million sperm per ejaculation before filming, which is 'right on the button.' After a lot of thought (and questions to Allan), we came to the conclusion that our counts were lower than normal when most recently tested, because we had produced a 'sample' only the day before so that we could see for ourselves what our sperm looked like under a microscope. After emptying my testicles so late the night before, I'd guessed my count may be a little lower than it would normally be, but not as low as I was told it was after the hospital test. For us it was a shame that the unusually low figures would be shown on national TV, but that's television.

Zeron: Back at the hospital, Allan did point out that a low sperm count doesn't mean you are less of a man - you could well have spirited sperm who are fighters. Or you could have an army of the critters who are lazy and can't be bothered to go egg hunting. So he said the sperm race was still on as it would pitch Mike's hordes against my minions to see who has the more virile sperm cells.

  < previous   next > Page 3 of 7

Content last updated: 24/08/2005