lowculture.co.uk

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Reality check

WTF! So You Think You Can Nurse, Five, 8.00pm

When lowculture isn't busy watching television, writing about television, dreaming about television, or occasionally, having sex while thinking about television, we like to come up with new reality show formats. In much the same way as The Daily Mail-o-Matic or The Julie Burchill Random Recycler, reality TV show titles (and to a similar extent, concepts) seem to stem from the art of taking seemingly unconnected words from a set group of enablers and skills bases and throwing them together until you come up with something that nobody's done yet. In our own endeavours, we were quite proud of Strictly Come Whoring (Jodie Marsh, Linda Barker, Rebecca Loos, Kate Lawler and Calum Best* learn how to turn tricks from professional hookers, one gets eliminated each week until the victor remains, with all profits from phone votes and actual punters going to charity) and How Do You Solve A Problem Like Chlamydia? (Gillian McKeith, Rebecca Loos (again), Jon from S Club 7, Joe Pasquale, and Gareth Gates* all try to come up with new ways to enhance the British public's awareness of STIs, with the person whose district has the lowest decline in infections each week getting booted off).

With that in mind, we were still rather stunned when we learned of So You Think You Can Nurse, wherein Gail Porter, Sean Hughes and Janet Street-Porter are recruited as nurses despite an apparent lack of prior training and expertise, and let loose on actual patients (we're assuming with adequate supervision, otherwise this would be lawsuit central, surely?).

What really flummoxes us about this is the title. We understood So You Think You Can Dance because a lot of people go through life under the misapprehension that they have rhythm when they don't. However, we have yet to be accosted by someone at a party who drunkenly assures us that they could totally be a nurse if only someone gave them the break. It doesn't appear to be one of those professions where people sit at home and think "tsk, those gadabouts. I could do better than that." Of course, the point of the programme could be to highlight the growing hardships faced by nurses working in the modern-day NHS, but then we can't help thinking that this isn't exactly the most effective way to tackle it. But then, what do we know? This got commissioned, while Celebrity Exorcism with Terri Dwyer is still stuck in development hell. That's TV for you.

* NB. The above celebrities have yet to be approached.