I am a massive fan of America’s Next Top Model, and the various national off-shoots it has spawned such as Britain’s Next Top Model and Australia’s Next Top Model. I could (and will) quite happily sit on my arse all day long, munching junk food and watching dumb skinny girls fight with each other over who vomited in the sink and didn’t clean it up. Recently, the BBC introduced a serious spin on all this worthless but delicious frivolity with its new show Britain’s Missing Top Model.
The show follows the same structure as ANTM and its ilk. A bunch of girls live together in a ‘model apartment,’ and grow to steadily loathe each other as they are put through bizarre tasks in the name of fashion, and are picked off one by one each week. The big difference with this show, however, is that all the girls in the competition are disabled.
When I first sat down to watch, I felt pretty uneasy about the prospect of watching disabled no-hopers attempt to break into the fashion industry - an industry, which in its shameless and stated pursuit of perfection, clearly doesn’t want them. But bless the BBC for not making this show into a freak-show spectacle. Everybody involved, from the judges (including the editor of Marie Claire and fashion designer Wayne Hemingway) to the Tyra-Banks-stand-in Jonathan Phang, clearly believes that fashion is ready for disabilities, and they’re out to find the girl to prove it.
The disabilities involved range from deafness, to missing limbs, to partial blindness. My favourite contestant by far, Sophie, is a paraplegic. She’s the favourite with the judges too, despite being the most obviously disabled girl, permanently confined to a wheelchair. I’m also fond of Debbie, a Norwegian girl with one arm who once posed for Norwegian Playboy to prove that one-armed girls are still sexy.
My least favourite is an American girl, Jenny, who was disabled in a variety of non-specific ways by a car accident. Jenny seems determined to go out and prove all the British stereotypes about Americans absolutely right, insisting on posing with a crucifix so that she can feel ‘closer to the Lord.’ The judges decided to keep her on despite her ‘personality issues,’ which is a nice way of saying ‘lets give the bolshie Yank another week to get over herself.’
I’ll definitely be tuning in next week to find out what happens to my favourites. But I already find myself rooting, not only for individual contestants to win, but for the show itself to win, and to make its point. I want these girls to be models and I’m pissed off on their behalves that the fashion industry has rejected them. If you too fancy a bit of moral outrage with your trashy-reality-TV-model-contest show, you can catch Britain’s Missing Top Model on the BBC iPlayer, or on BBC3 on Tuesday evenings.
My favourite moments from the first episode included Mr G (who once put on a musical entitled Tsunamarama - the story of the 2004 Tsunami set to the music of Bananarama) demonstrating inappropriate touching on a boy with Downs Syndrome. I also particularly enjoyed Ja’mie’s address to the kids of Summer Heights High, which included such inspired lines as, ‘Wife beaters and rapists are nearly all public school educated. Sorry, no offense, but it’s true.’ This diatribe was rounded off with the announcement that ‘I’m up to 1000 friends on MySpace but I could always take more!’
Have I mentioned how much I love the BBC’s iPlayer? Well I do. And not just because it enables me to catch up on shows I’ve missed. It also allows me to discover freaky weird little shows that I’d never normally hear about. Case in point: Taste of My Life, with Nigel Slater.
A History of Modern Britain is a documentary series looking at events in British history since the end of World War Two. It is presented by Andrew Marr, a man so clever that, as Jonathan Ross once pointed out, he could be Stephen Fry’s phone-a-friend. The first episode, which is still up for grabs on the good old 
I was working in a bookshop when The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith was first published, and I remember that there was some debate over whether we should shelve it in the crime fiction section or not. It did, after all, purport to be about a detective agency. But the jacket design (lots of bright colours and African prints) didn’t seem to fit in with the normal crime fiction jacket traditions (black cover, sinister picture involving blood and/or a disembodied eye). So, taking one for the team, I read the book and promptly reported back that it definitely didn’t belong in crime fiction. We shelved it in general fiction, and began recommending it to all women of a certain age who came in asking for ‘a nice book’. I sent a copy to my Mum - she loved it.
Minghella doesn’t entirely dispense with the light-heartedness with which McCall Smith imbued the books. The ‘characters’ are all there - Precious’s hopeless suitor Mr Matekoni is delightful in his steady devotion, and I was particularly fond of the secretary, Grace Makutsi, who valiantly struggles with two typewriters which both have several letters missing but combined can type the full alphabet. I was also delighted to see the wonderful Idris Elba (The Wire’s Stringer Bell) playing the villain, proving that he can be sinister, threatening, and yet still achingly cool, in any accent.
Before I say anything else about Lily Allen and Friends, the flagship show of BBC 3’s new lineup, in the interests of full disclosure I must declare: I am 27, and this show makes me feel old. It is just possible this may have coloured my opinion of the programme somewhat.
On the face of it, it sounds like a fairly cheesy premise - a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost live in a house together and try to lead ‘normal lives’. But the production is deftly handled and any potential cheesiness is completely off-set by some wonderful, sharp scripting and incredibly well-sculpted performances from the three main leads. They each reveal a deep sense of desperation and sadness underneath a thin veneer of sarcasm and witty banter.
