"It will really change my life," a tearful young woman says of her forthcoming rhinoplasty. "I'll be happier." That Orla has already had her breasts augmented and used fillers for her mouth, with no vast improvement to her happiness, gives her little pause for thought. But such is the general scepticism of Body Shopping (RTÉ 2, Thursday, 9.30pm), a new documentary series on plastic surgery, that Orla is presented as someone in more urgent need of a confidence transfusion.
Presenter Ciara Kelly approaches these transformation operations with the same gentle scolding she deploys on Operation Transformation. "As a doctor," she says, "I'm half fascinated, half worried that more and more of us are choosing to change our appearances surgically." As a viewer, I'm half amused by, half suspicious of the estimate "more and more", as though Kelly is using her credentials to bolster an anecdote. How seriously should we take it?
Perhaps later episodes will consider plastic surgery's role in treating burns and disfigurements, but Body Shopping's title suggests interests closer to tabloid. The first episode is engaged mainly with procedures, price tags and a dollop of prurience. Kelly interviews the prematurely balding Ger about his immensely costly hair transplant ("It hasn't ruined your good looks," she assures him), later offering similar encouragement to a glamorous Greek woman who wishes to transfer fat from her thighs to her breasts. Her name is Panoraia, as though she had already undergone anagrammatic reconstruction for a condition that surgery won't alter.
Not that the industry will tell you that. An honest Lithuanian surgeon tries to manage expectations, but won’t argue against his services. (“No, actually,” Orla answers a subtly probing friend, “they don’t do any psychological evaluation.”) Elsewhere, a lipo-sculptor credits the pressures of Instagram with the demand for “procedures seeking near perfection”.
The squeamish comedy here is to show you how primitive such perfection procedures actually seem: the chisel and hammer used to break up a nose; the seamstress-like concentration of replanting hair follicles (“A lot of the girls here have experience with needlework,” offers the surgeon); the slicing, sucking and shoving it takes to move someone’s ass closer to their chest.
By the end of the show, we are told, with sad predictability, that Orla is "no longer happy" with her new nose; that Handsome Ger thinks it was worth it; while Panoraia merely gets Kelly's assessment: "Did she need it? I didn't think so." That saggy editorialising might have been reduced, some concluding footage moved towards the top of the show, and the context for our cosmetic culture lifted and made much firmer. Actually, maybe Body Shopping could have some work done?
