I really really like this programme, although it contains a lot of elements of which I disapprove. It's Reality TV show, 'documentary' with very little of substance to be documented. It's a show that features people, and their weaknesses, without - I assume - paying them a wage for their time. It's a programme that shows some extremely bad behaviour but also illustrates the people who behave that way.
The last point applies especially to the headteacher, Mrs Hardcore. I have seen few people on TV - or in life - more snobbish than her. Her utter disdain for the behaviour and attitudes of the 'girls' (women, actually) even when it is moderate. Her knicker-wetting excitement that a dinner guest was a Baronet - a man of no distinction except being a successive elder son of an elder son of someone who bribed his way to an insignificant facsimile of a title centuries ago. I also don't like the voice-over commentary which describes the 'Eligible Batchelors' as 'Notorious Society blah-de-blah' which to my mind is loud, drunken, boorish and out-of-control, in other words, just like the common, female ladettes but male and posh. Or those twins being described as 'handsome' on account of being Ugly Trustafarians.
I had mixed feelings about the 'girls'. There was one who on the first day, after being told off, cried into her clandestine mobile phone and Mummy came to pick her up. She was on a Final Warning from Beauty College, and I was led to conclude that throughout her short and meaningless life she had been given her own way at every turn, and never been urged to stick at anything. There was the woman barred from every night club in Basildon (Basildon, I ask you!) who had never worked in her life. Jimmy wondered who was paying for her boozy lifestyle (over-indulgent parents); I wondered how inept one has to be to be unemployed in Basildon, not able even to hold down a basic shop job in Lakeside or the City.
Then there were the two Welsh women. One a nightclub bouncer, the other in the Territorial Army. Both jobs require a certain something. Bouncer, the ability to judge a situation, not to over react. The TA don't take just anybody. It requires discipline and taking orders, and staying cool under pressure. I could not understand why these women were so incapable of transferring those skills to everyday life.
I was troubled by the two youngest. They were both 18 and thus legally perfectly able to consent to being on Reality TV. But I did wonder whether they were old enough or mature enough to understand the possibly profound consequences of living under the gaze of the camera. And yet, these are the two who probably benefited the most from the programme. The young woman from Sheffield who wanted to be a lawyer yet kept deferring her A-Levels. It turned out that she was in emotional toil - meltdown - following an abortion and subsequent relationship breakdown. I felt the compassion with which Hardboiled Mrs Hardcore, and the cookery teacher Rosemary, handled her was exemplary.
And then we have Nicole, the ASBO'd ex-Druggie from Romford. Initially, we learnt that two brothers had died when she was young. I thought 'car crash' or somesuch. Turns out they both died of natural causes two years apart. Gradually, we got more and more hints at the impact of that unimaginable grief. As the weeks progressed, we saw a different person emerging, a hurt little girl becoming a woman. We saw her rediscover a previous love of horses, and I was delighted when she won. I found Mrs Hardcore's compassion to be immense, causing me to reflect that compassion and intolerance often go hand-in-hand. In order to be compassionate to the hurt and broken, one needs to have an instinctive understanding that they cannot help themselves. Which would make one impatient at people whose self-destruction is caused by laziness, greed, indiscipline or other human venalities.
All the ones that survived into the latter stages will take something valuable away from that. I am just very uncomfortable with two people's grief being exposed to hundreds of thousands - millions - of strangers. I also pause and wonder at how destructive some parents can be when they don't set boundaries, don't impose discipline, don't correct misbehaviour and don't make their children keep on trying for seemingly impossible goals.
I hope none of them actually turns into a Lady, because it's pretentious poppycock. But I hope that that sense of a goal and achieving something, and learning how to behave in public, and take the sensibilities of others into consideration, will make them into women of substance. I can see Louise the Glamour Model with the boob-job becoming a formidable business-woman. Nothing about her as shown on TV made me warm to her, but there seemed a steely determination hidden inside. Kelly from Basildon kept displaying behaviour that ought to have irritated me, but I couldn't find myself disliking her. The staff referred to her sense of humour, and it struck me that she was a warm person, a potential people's person, who would always be the life-and-soul of the party (for better and for worse...).
I don't like the premise of the programme, and I am frequently gob-smacked at the lack of life-experience/awareness that most of them display. So many object to be told what to do, oblivious that this is the reality of working life. Few of them can cook, nor do they seem to have have any knowledge of food. Or knowledge of anything. But then I look at the Posh people, and they are even more blinkered.
It seems so full of contradictions and it really must count as low-rent telly. But for some reason - editing, producing? - it manages to illustrate some fascinating aspects of the complexities of human nature.
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