I spent this evening busy sorting out all my bills and mail and stuff. Normally I leave the TV on, with MTV or VH-1 playing as background music (no point having a real programme with my back to the screen.)

Tonight Jayne was downstairs with me, watching a procession of trash TV. It was bad enough when she started with ‘Charmed’, which she is hooked on, I had never heard of, but is already in its 8th series. Rounding the evening off with a number of real-life crime/forensic programmes was also pretty bad, but inbetween the naff series and the true crime was a programme so bad it was beyond the pale.

The show was called The Swan and the only thing which stops it from being the nastiest, most morally dubious, tackiest, least sensitive, most condescending and most worrying show ever, is the certain knowledge that some TV executives in America probably have something even nastier in production at the moment.

The premise is that Fox TV (obviously) take a number of self-professed ‘ugly ducklings’, give them a makeover and turn them into ‘swans’. For each show they take a couple of women, change them beyond recognition and then choose one to go into an end-of-season beauty contest.

The makeovers are not just a bit of slap and a new hairdo. They involve liposuction, plastic surgery, cosmetic dentistry, fitness regimes, diets and therapy, all of which takes several months.

I don’t think I even know where to start on the list of the reasons this show is just plain wrong! For a start there is the reinforcement of some sort of beauty ideal, and anyone who falls short is worthless. The girls at the start are normal girls like 90% of the US audience, and the message from the show is that they are hideous – so that’s really going to do a lot for the self-worth of anyone watching.

The girls don’t even get a say in what the transformation involves: they just let someone else decide how to modify their bodies. The subjects are just a commodity for the TV production line. No wonder they include therapy as part of the process – if they didn’t need it before they will need it by the end.

At the end of the 3-month treatment, the subjects are shown a mirror (having been deprived of any reflective surface for the duration). This is where the real fun starts, because two girls will have been turned into a fake beauty, and then one of them will be told they are still not good enough for the pageant! So one of them will still feel bad about themselves. The other girl will have to wait until the end of the season before (probably) finding out that after all that surgery and therapy they are not good enough.

The word ‘exploitation’ doesn’t even start to go far enough to describe this pile of crap. I don’t think you have to be a radical feminist to find the whole thing deeply disturbing, but because it full of human interest, it got commissioned for a 2nd series, and even a third (I think).

The link above was a bit of an eye-opener too. I searched on Google and came up with this site called Reality TV World which is devoted to reality TV shows, and I didn’t realise there were so many of them. I had only heard of one or two, like The Apprentice, American Idol, Wife Swap etc. but there are dozens of others with names like Boot Camp, Boy Meets Boy, Surf Girls and Next Action Star. I didn’t want to delve any deeper in case one of them did actually look to be worse than The Swan.

I wonder if its possible to reprogram the Sky box so it only receives football, music shows, the news and Dr Who?