Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [32]
So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that an American version of Ladette to Lady called The Girls of Hedsor Hall was in the works. I actually considered developing alcoholism, a love of self-tanner, and a penchant for yelling “Woooooo!!!” at the top of my lungs at any and all occasions in order to fulfill the “ladette” requirements. Then, once accepted, I could gradually slough off all of my crude pseudo-habits, until I’d be the most improved student, and the belle of the ball I never, in my real life, wanted to attend. But though The Girls of Hedsor Hall shares the same concept and some of the same instructors as Ladette to Lady, it is a very different show. For one thing, it’s produced by Donald Trump, that world-class connoisseur of reality-show cheese. For another, it airs on MTV and unfortunately adheres to that network’s tiresome reality-show blueprint: melodramatic elimination ceremonies occur with regularity; petty sniping about the other contestants in interviews is wholeheartedly encouraged; the production values are so low, it looks like it was shot in a fiberglass approximation of a mansion; and the ultimate goal of the show isn’t self-improvement, but a cash prize of $100,000.
In the first episode of The Girls of Hedsor Hall, each of the extension-clad, over-tanned party girls is dramatically presented with a strand of pearls. The necklace is a symbol, Jill Harboard reminds them, of their aspiring ladydom, and as such, it must be relinquished if they are asked to leave Hedsor Hall. The girls, however, aren’t so impressed by the reality-show trope being fastened around their necks. “I don’t really care about the pearls. It’s bullshit,” one astute, though orange, girl named Brianna tells the cameras. “It’s about our attitude, not about some freaking pearls around our necks.” Over the course of the next few episodes, Brianna is proven right. It isn’t just about some freaking pearls around their necks; it’s also about stomaching ox tongue, removing the entrails of a pheasant, and learning falconry (yes, falconry) in the name of self-improvement. Only after all that does it become about a change in attitude, a new sense of self-confidence.
Watching Brianna rip the feathers from a pheasant carcass, I understood that I had already been where she was—not literally, as I don’t use up at least 78 percent of the world’s supply of self-tanner, I don’t have my own adult Web site, and I’ve never touched a dead game bird. But my own reeducation happened a long time ago, in manners classes and Mardi Gras balls and curtsy drills. I went into those things a shy, slouchy, awkward child, and emerged on the other side a woman with excellent posture who was self-confident enough to opt out of further deb-ifcation, and poised enough to execute a perfect curtsy at seven a.m. in ridiculous raver wear. No debutante ball needed.
9
SHELLY
Ben Mandelker
WE ARRIVED AT CBS AT THREE O’CLOCK wearing black. Or was it blue? Either way, the tickets told us to come dressed “business casual,” and if I do say so myself, I was looking cool. Cool enough, that is, for me to potentially end up on camera, take a screen grab of that, and then post it on my blog and Facebook profile.
My friends and I were at a live taping for Big Brother, the CBS reality show that places a bunch of strangers in a house filled with cameras and lets them go at it for an entire summer. While I don’t know who would submit themselves to such torture, I guess when it comes to money and fame, people will do just about anything.
And thank God for that, because, for the entire time Big Brother has been on the air, I’ve been infatuated with it. A lot of my more cerebral friends—the PhDs, the investment bankers, my mom—are completely perplexed