It's a Dad's Life Adam BrophyOn Monday mornings I preview the week's TV on Orla Barry's radio show on Newstalk 106. Back in 1989 when I was going through all that pre-Leaving Cert career choice nonsense in school, watching TV would have been number one in my Top 10 of dream jobs. Now that dream is realised, I don't know what to do with my life.
But seriously, this is something I've been training for since my eyes and ears worked. Deep down there was always some small voice telling me that knowing how Tucker Jenkins became Mark Fowler and then died to rise again as a policeman would pay dividends. Now, watching TV has provided me with a warning, it has shone a light on the coming of the unholy one, the Antichrist who walks among us. Her name is Janice Dickinson.
The Janice Dickinson Modelling Agency airs on Tuesday nights on TV3. The JDMA tells us the story of the self-proclaimed first supermodel's attempts to set up her own modelling agency, holding open auditions and whittling the hopeful clothes-horses down to a handful of chiselled Kens and Barbies, before sending them forth to continue her evil work.
Aged fifty-something, Janice looks as if she has had half her skin stripped away, stretching the remainder over the original skeleton. Her surgeon seems to be working on her face with a cartoon Beelzebub as a guideline. The maniacal eyes, arched brows, jutting jaw and Joker-mouth would be funny in themselves were she not inflicting these as benchmarks of physical normality on all those around her. You see, the Kens and Barbies I mentioned earlier aren't chiselled enough. In the episode I previewed, JD employed a personal trainer to mark up her protegees with happy-face stickers where buff, and sad ones where saggy.
It was a sorry sight. All these gorgeous kids flouncing around having been told they were no fitter than an over-60s, nude chapter of Weight Watchers.
This type of TV would have been ideal Tuesday night fodder 10 years ago. It has everything - a comic villain, hysterical storylines and acres of golden flesh. But now I have daughters and I live in fear, in dread of eating disorders and poor self-image. My eldest is only five.
We can scoff at a show where a homeless girl is offered the chance to get off the streets and hit the big time, provided she has a nose job, but to do that is to deserve the TV we're getting from TV3. When my daughter frames her stomach with her hands and asks me is it big, I worry. Today she was crouched on the floor playing, when she said, "Dad, look how fat my legs are when they're bent like this". She said it with no concern, but the fact is she has stretched in recent months and is becoming tall and slender. She is nowhere near having a problem, but she is more bodily aware than I would like.
As right-on parents, we try not to place any emphasis on how a person looks, and yet from the moment the elder could express a preference she became besotted with beauty. She gravitated particularly to late-teen and early-twenties girls, attaching herself to them with a savage intensity as if she could, by proximity, absorb their appeal. Somehow she grasped that to be pretty was to be great. Some of this must have seeped through from us, her family, and our hardwired social attitudes, but it was purely unintentional and possibly unavoidable. The other factor: Barbie movies.
That's why Janice must go. We watch, we laugh, we normalise and we wonder why the shows have to be increasingly extreme to catch our attention. I don't ever want to find my child purging after a meal or becoming depressed at 12 because she feels her butt's too big. They can watch Kill Bill or Trainspotting any day, but they're staying away from TV3. And Janice, I'm actively seeking an exorcist for you.
abrophy@irish-times.ie
