Find Me the Face

Find me the face is a BBC3 program billed as a “documentary series in which two of the UK’s top model scouts, Becky Southwick and Jody Furlong, compete to find new talent.”

And I suppose it is, but the BBC’s description fails to convey what excruciating viewing it is thanks, primarily to Ms Southwick.

In the search for models (pronounced mod-duhs) who fit the show’s brief (lingerie, catwalk girl, beauty girl, etc) Becky and Jody take to the UK’s cities. Jody chuckles his way through encounters with pretty girls like a baby watching its mum making goo-goo noises and silly faces, while Becky grumpily proclaims that she’s just really pissed off because “This city is full of mingers” or “People here have been eating all the fucking pies.” Bless her.

Becky, who’s no size zero beauty herself, approaches her targets as if they were cattle at an auction. First she asks them if they’ve done any modeling before. If the answer is yes, cue a tantrum and the explanation – if the girl is lucky – “you don’t fit my brief.” Becky then talks to camera while the bemused girl wonders what just happened.

If the poor thing is lucky enough to get over that hurdle Becky will set about examining her. Sometimes their hips are a bit big, other times they have mild acne, but whatever is wrong with them, we can be sure that Becky will announce it to them, and to the audience, lovely chap that she is.

When the lovely Gok Wan – of How To Look Good Naked fame – calls a woman taking part in his show “my girl” it’s endearing. In fact, I have oft wished that one day I might be Gok’s girl (preferably without having to first experience the crippling insecurity and then the shame of stripping down to my m&s pants on TV that all his other girls endure.) But there’s something sinister about Becky calling the contestants she has picked her girls, you get the feeling she may have just taken ownership of their souls.

Anyway, the contestants are gradually whittled down to a final two. One each from the girls Becky and Jody have found. At this point Becky’s malignant attentions turn. She’s clever enough to realise there’s no point complaining about the one she’s left with. She now declares her girl the best and starts dissing Jody’s model to camera.

If the unthinkable should happen and Jody should win, Becky manfully takes it on the chin… along with cries of “they’re not looking for the right thing,” “I’ve been in this business for 12 years,” and “it’s just not FAIR.”

Alcoholism: One for the golden oldies.

While supping on a Lidl’s gin and tonic at a party a while ago I was told by a friend that his gran drinks gin as a thirst-quencher, “she’s not an alcoholic,” he stressed.

Why not? I wonder. I fully intend to be an alcoholic when I’m old. I don’t really care about the addiction side of things, I’m going to be drinking so regularly that it’ll hardly matter. There’ll be no point looking after my body which is sure to have all but given up, and chances are my mind won’t be up to much either.

I’m also contemplating developing a drug habit. Probably when I’m about 80. I plan to collect my pension from the post office, nip round the back to meet my dealer then hobble home with a gram of smack in my cheek.

I will not be the only oldie drinking myself into a stupor. I’m following the lead of people like Patricia, a contestant on Come Dine With Me who started her evening with a glass of sherry and put it in every dish, and Jennifer Patterson of the Two Fat Ladies who ended each show with a stiff drink and whose food rivaled Nigella’s in fat content.

With the Two Fat Ladies in mind, I’m also going to gorge myself silly on whatever the hell I want to eat. And the brilliant part is, I won’t live long enough to get too fat. I’m going to reward myself for a youth of eating moderately, and eshewing substance abuse with an old age of decadence and hedonism.

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UPDATE – 3/02/08

My uncle Peter Rice is a psychiatrist specialising in alcohol and drug abuse. He has been calling for an increase in prices of alcohol to decrease its appeal. His arguments are extremly hard to disagree with, sadly.

He used the term “Saga Louts” to describe oldies who overindulge in the sauce last year. Here he gets laid into by a bunch of tories.

Brand, Walliams and Ross die on their feet at Morrissey gig

Russell Brand, David Walliams and Jonathan Ross took to London’s Roundhouse’s stage on Friday night after Morrissey abandoned the gig because he lost his voice.

According to ol’ Russ on his BBC Radio 2 show on Saturday the three comedians had gone to the show together and decided to get up partly to appease the baying crowd, and partly out of a shared passion for showing off.

Rather than being pleased that the announcement that Morrissey wasn’t able to come back on was given by arguably two of the country’s finest comedians (and Jonathan Ross) who were clearly willing to do some impromptu stand up, the crowd booed and pelted them with coins and bottles until they were ushered off the stage. After which, of course, there was no entertainment to be had and everyone had to go home.

Apparently Ross and Walliams got attacked outside the gig too.

Morrissey fans are mental.

YouTube footage

Too many Nigellas spoil the BBC

Nigella was bad enough. It took me a long time to stop hating her stupid, vacant face and to accept my mum’s explanation that she’s calculatedly hamming it up to give (idiot) men what they want. Now my sister has started using her cookbook I can confirm that her food is truly delicious (as anything with mountains of sugar and butter in it tends to be). What’s more we can be fairly sure that she’s not actually a halfwit as she has a degree from Oxford and you have to be awfully clever to go there. I know. I didn’t get in.

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Well watch out Nige, cos there are some new kids on the block. And they have got your looking-sappily-at-the-saucepan-whilst-stirring move down to a T as the photo below demonstrates.

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Anjum Anand (above) is essentially “Indian Nige”. Indian Nige has a cookery column – just like Real Nige once did – and the Times refer to her as a Domestic Goddess – again, just like Real Nige. She – like (you guessed it) Real Nige – presented a show on BBC 2: Indian Food Made Easy. Unlike Real Nige, Indian Nige cooks curries instead of traditional English fare. Men like curries. Perhaps Real Nige is missing a trick.

Perhaps the most irritating Nige (in a hard fought contest) is Rachel Allen (below). Or “Blonde Nige”. Blonde Nige presents Rachel’s Favourite Food for Living on Saturday mornings on BBC 1. She is Irish and according to her biography (which I can only assume is self-penned) “her charming manner and effortless style make her a delight to watch.” Well.

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While Blonde Nige and Indian Nige go in for all the vacant smiling that Real Nige pioneered, they seem to have forgotten the personality bit. They have none of Real Nige’s cheekiness that keeps those silly old men glued to the TV.

 

STOP EATING SHIT AND DO SOME EXERCISE.

Come January, year-round shows like ‘Diet Doctors’ are joined by ads aimed at the slightly podgy and even much loved magazines such as the Times Style push ‘New Health Tips for the New Year’.

First channel five’s Diet Doctors: For anyone who’s not a halfwit it’s fairly obvious that bad food and no exercise means bad health and (for those of us without super-quick metabolisms) excess fat. Why then do otherwise sensible people strip down to their white M&S bra and pants and reveal their flabby, stretch-marked bodies to a nationwide audience in order to be diagnosed? What does it matter which part of your inactive, junk-food-guzzling lifestyle is resulting in fungal infections and broken veins? As qualified as I’m sure the two oh-so-concerned presenters are, their expertise is really quite superfluous. They lay out a week’s worth of the terrible ‘food’ and say “this is what you’re putting in your body EVERY WEEK,” at which their subject gasps/cries/wonders aloud just how it could have happened and I find myself screaming “it’s just the contents of your shopping trolley unwrapped,” at the television. Without fail everyone is told to eat fruit and vegetables and do some exercise. Duh.

Next, the magazines: It’s one thing when 60p rags like Take a Break, Closer and Pick Me Up scream that you can ‘Lose a Stone in Three Weeks Eating Only Doughnuts’ but QUITE another when the beloved Times Style magazine hops down from its pedestal and joins in. This week clever, witty (but sadly right-wing) India Knight says you can ‘Eat Yourself Slim’, she suggests cutting down on carbs and sugar but all the time stresses that you can still eat AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE. If she’s not careful she’ll end up on Diet Doctors with a load of side-effects of iron and protein deficiency. Some better ideas off the top of my head: run yourself thin, cycle yourself thin, or swim yourself thin.

Worst though are the adverts. Particularly the one telling us we can lose weight by replacing two meals a day with a bowl of Special K. Of course we can, because losing weight is all about consuming less energy than we use, and if we dramatically cut our calorie intake then we’ll probably do that. Eating nothing is another way that weight loss can be achieved. Unfortunately our poor old bodies need nutrients n that to survive. Annoying, eh?

Kirsty, Kirsty, Kirsty.

Oh no. Oh no oh no oh no. Kirsty – Betty-Page-alike, fabulous-wearer-of-coats – Allsopp, how you’ve betrayed me.

Up ’til today I really liked her. Particularly her tendency to suggest smashing walls down with a sledgehammer. She knows her stuff about the property market, and I saw her helping first-time-buyers find their perfect property as altruistic. But I suppose it’s not really, it’s just a load of rich people moving their money around. Rubbish.

I’m not a fan of politics. It’s boring. Party politics anyway. I really like social politics because, you know, it actually matters. But one thing I really, really don’t like is rich people complaining about being taxed. Kirsty Allsopp thinks it’s just AWFUL that she has to pay all this tax to Gordon Brown. What’s he doing with it anyway, she wonders? Probably giving some of it to POOR people. Yuck.

As housing advisor to David Cameron I imagine Kirsty is mainly concerned with finding nice houses for nice, middle class people. And while, yes, my generation doesn’t have it as good as my parents when it comes to our ability to buy houses (I can’t see it happening unless a large whack of inheritance comes my way… not something I want to happen any time soon) there’s no shortage of rental accommodation and it isn’t crippling in price. There are bigger problems in Britain than whether the children of middle class parents can afford to buy houses or not.

One is the loneliest number…

Like many people I don’t like being left alone with my own thoughts. Unlike everyone else with this trait my thoughts are usually quite fleeting and rarely serious. It’s not that I wish to avoid dark, reflective moments, I can’t remember the last time I had one of those. No, the issue is that I am a social creature desperate to share moments of excitement and exasperation (usually brought on by some brush with popular culture) with a fellow human being.

Due to a distinct lack of funding tonight was one of those frustrating times when my need for interaction threatened to make me burst at the seams. Here is for why:

Pro-life mentalist Anne Widdicombe presented Have I Got News For You ruining it for everyone. Because I was by myself I turned it off, knowing that in the company of that dreadful woman with no suitable bitching outlet I was likely to explode

Secondly James-rhyming-slang-Blunt was on Jules Holland. I like to tell people about how I worked with someone who was at Harrow and Sandhurst with him. There’s no real point to the story: it’s not interesting, it doesn’t show me in a good light, or Blunt in a bad one. But it pops into my head whenever his name comes up and I want to get it out.

Thirdly Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion was shown on E4. My two best school friends and I probably watched this film about 30 times between the ages of 13 and 15. We taught ourselves the routine to Staying Alive and danced like synchronised fools any time the N Trance version came on at a school disco. One of my friends pretended to be in love with Clarence the cowboy to cover up the lesbian crush she had on Heather Mooney (probably not something she’ll thank me for recalling in a public forum… well, a forum available to the public).

And finally I found the Black Cab Sessions on the interweb. They are brilliant and deserve a post all to themselves (note to self), but I discovered them tonight, all by myself with no-one to tell about them. It was torture. In the end I sent my poor, long suffering friend Helen a Facebook message pleading with her to get onto Gmail chat so I could show her my new find. She liked it. I was sated.

*UPDATE – 24/11/07 02:16*
Twenty minutes after publishing this post, after having a wee read through the blogs I subscribe to, I find myself doing EXACTLY what I’ve been talking about AGAIN. What’s worse is that I didn’t realise it until afterwards. I even sent Helen (aforementioned long suffering friend) an email to tell her I wish she hadn’t gone to bed so I could show her the exciting thing. The ‘thing’ this time was Caitlin Moran’s blog Alpha Mummy on The Times website. I know I’m not a mummy, alpha or otherwise, but I do LOVE Caitlin Moran so I read it (she rarely mentions her children, anyway). She has just put up a jolly funny post about female defuzzing. Sample quote:

“Here’s where I’m coming from, viz hair: I thread my eyebrows whilst waving a picture of Elizabeth Taylor at my threader. I thread my upper lip whilst waving a picture of Hitler, with “NO” written across it, at my threader.” – Caitlin Moran