Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Scale models
POSE! Britain's Next Top Model, Living TV, 9.00pm
The American original of this show has been something of a staple of the messageboards for several weeks now, and it's only right that we get our own set of British wannabes to bitch about. It's anybody's guess at this point whether this is a format that will translate well - The Apprentice, for example, did it seamlessly, but Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Not so much. There were a lot of things we loved about the original: Janice Dickinson, for starters, and her cheerful outspokenness at judging ("you look like you have a penis in this picture", as she said so memorably to Kesse in cycle one); the increasing bizarreness of the photoshoots (underwater? Animals? The Seven Deadly Sins?); Tyra's frequent attempts to promote whatever it was she had to promote at the time, be it her new single or her upcoming talk show; the inability to speak the English language (famous examples being "that skank ho poured the beer on my weave!" and "I see...maybe...dirty...in her underwear"); and the speech that Tyra gives announcing the prizes at the end of every episode that even the most infrequent of watchers now knows by heart. What are the credentials of the British version? Well, the Tyra-in-chief role is taken by one Lisa Butcher (no, we've never heard of her, and we don't know if the chant of "Lisa mail!" is likely to catch on), and our vote for most-likely-to-Janice goes to regular judge Marie Helvin. We do, of course, have two similar formats to compare it to: Channel 4's Model Behaviour (pretty good) and Five's Make Me a Supermodel (pretty appalling). We can judge all we want (and indeed, as viewers we will), but only time will tell whether the format will catch on in its remade version. In the meantime, you don't know how long we've been wanting to say this: Anne. Claire. Edwina. Hayley. Jenilee. Lucy. Marina. Marisa. Naomi. Shauna. Steph. Tashi. Who has what it takes to become Britain's Next Top Model? (Hilarously, the poll on the official site currently suggest that the answer is "None of them".) And who will be mercilessly photoshopped out of the group picture and told to "pack your bags, [y'all!]"? We can't wait to find out.
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