lowculture.co.uk

Monday, May 21, 2007

Abbey International

FIRST! Abbey and Janice: Beauty and the Best, Living, 9.00pm

Before we do anything else, we need to say a big "thanks very much" to friend of lowculture Diana (by which we mean she's an actual real-life friend of ours; it's not a euphemism for being homosexual or anything - at least not in this specific context) for texting us on Friday night and informing us in no uncertain terms that we needed to switch our TV to BBC1 right then because our glorious leader Janice Dickinson was on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, bringing her unique variety of terrifying eccentricity to a mainstream terrestrial audience. If you didn't see it, you missed a treat (although it's already popped up somewhere on YouTube, for sure): she kept trying to get herself a job presenting the show whenever Jonathan is away (Peter Fincham, if you're reading this: MAKE THIS HAPPEN NOW), she told us everything we ever needed to know about the size of Mick Jagger's penis, she refused to listen to anyone who told her that Andrew Lloyd Webber and John Barrowman aren't actually boyfriends, and she strode back onto the set in a crazy (presumably drunken) rage like the astonishing Amazon that she is when John Barrowman made a crude sexual joke at her expense. What a woman!

This improbable-but-brilliantly-conceived series sees Dame Janice teaming up with a woman who has, quite impressively, become just as well known for being the runner-up in series two of Britain's Next Top Model as for being porked by robo-dancing footballing beanpole Peter Crouch - Abbey Clancy. The conceit seems to be that with the help of the self-proclaimed World's First Supermodel (and at this stage we need to drop the obligatory gratuitous plug for Janice's autobiography, No Lifeguard on Duty, which tells you how this claim to be and is an utterly amazing read to boot), Abbey can take the international modelling world by storm.

We've all seen the sort of "constructive" criticism that's typical of Janice from her time on the judging panel on America's Next Top Model (sample quote: "You look like you have a penis in this picture."), so we can't help thinking it's very brave of Abbey to take on so much one-to-one time with Janice. Especially considering that Janice was apparently overheard during the filming of this show discussing the ridiculousness of the media fixation with the apparent evil of size zero, and how her job would be a lot easier if Abbey could just get an eating disorder already. Anything involving La Janice is always a guarantee of entertainment, however car-crashy, so we cannot recommend this highly enough.

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