Best show on the TV. Annoyed we missed the first in the series.
Very mixed feelings about the people; Ithink that's what they call thought-provoking. Or, at least, conversation-provoking.
We love Cook; she has people-skills. She can persuade and win respect because she listens and empathises yet does not tolerate nonsense. We laugh at Flower-Arranging Woman. Shame she can't talk proper; string a sentence together. Shame she's so stilted and awkward.
Some of the stuff they teach is rot. I mean, flower arranging. Isn't that what bored housewives do when they're too broom-up-their-arse to have an affair, even when hubby's screwing the secretary. My view, either put some nice flowers in a vase, or pay a professional to do it.
Flower-arranging woman is stuck in the Fifties where Nice Ladies married City Bankers. In the Noughties, Nice Ladies become City Bankers. Or whatever. The 'Ladettes' lack a sense of appropriateness, a sense of what impacts on other people, and an ability to adapt to context, to read a situation.
I had a brief thought of what would happen if some of my friends and I did the Ladettes to Ladies course. Presented with the public school oikish chinless wonders, quite a few, myself included, would go dyke. I can imagine quite a few exclaiming over the lack of vegetarian alternatives and coldly explaining to The Ladies Who Lunch that in 2006 a lack of veggie alternative, perhaps pre-negotiated by email, or a lack of regard of food allergies, is Plain. Bad. Manners.
I'd like to run a finishing school. Turn girls into women. They'd learn how to run a Residents Association, what to do when they break down 200 miles from home on a dark rainy evening. How to deal with insolent Twunts in Call Centres. How to adapt. (Overheard outside the Royal Opera House 'she's gone to change from her evening dress into cycling gear'). How to survive in the workplace without being exploited. How to make choices that aren't fashionable. And most of all to feel the sense of achievement. Of anything. Anything that needs a struggle, anything that's a challenge.
But if I ran telly, I'd do a programme that converts public school twats into human beings. Men mainly. But Miss Flower Arranging, too. I'd take her to a football match, on a pub crawl, on a week's hill-walking. On an audit to dockyards and Public Enquiry Offices and subsistence-level hill-farms. Or a Community Law Centre, to Rehab.
Trouble is, programme is commissioned by kinsoles. Coke-sniffing public school twunts with pony-tails. Know nothing about life. Want to take the piss out of people who've not had their chances, who've not had Daddy open the door so that they can sit on their fat arses earning Stupid Money.
Or what about Lads to Citizens. Teaching Grunts a bit about respec'. Starting with Self-Respec'.
Woah, stop it there. Laughing at blokes. Woo, might make my willy shrink. Koff.
