Pop Vultures

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.