In 3e's Nadia - Chasing the Dream (3e, Friday), top Irish model, I'm a Celebrity Get me Out of Here contestant and wannabe pop-star Nadia Forde chases down a defenceless dream.
The poor dream. It doesn’t make you a screaming environmentalist to find dream-hunting cruel. If the dream isn’t ripped apart by Forde and her hounds (four often-topless male dancers), it will die of a fear-induced heart attack while cowering in a ditch or end up living as a feral city dream, scuttling between parked cars and eating out of your bins.
In the most recent episode Nadia, flanked by her sculpted and gyrating honour guard, chases the dream to Ibiza where its thin emaciated form is perceived at a distance in a cheesy dance club. Nadia and her hunky friends perform there to a skipping backing track. The dream makes a break for it.
Nadia follows it back to London, presumably in some sort of flying machine like Richard Milhous Dastardly. She goes to the studio to record a song written by Thereza Bazar, formerly of the band and reserve currency Dollar.
“Sometimes it’s easier to think of yourself as an instrument,” says Thereza. “Pretend you’re a flute.”
Nadia pretends she’s a flute.
The dream ducks out a fire escape.
Then it’s revealed that Nadia has a big opportunity – a gig in Miami opening for Marc Anthony. Yes, the Marc Anthony, presumably fresh from avenging the murder of his friend Julius Caesar and just before his untimely suicide pact with Cleopatra.
“That’ll help me nab the dream for sure,” thinks Nadia opening a big box with Acme written on it. “Meep meep!” says the dream.
Pineapple crunch time
It’s decided that Nadia needs some help catching the dream in Miami and so she goes to Pineapple Dance Studios, the setting of another reality TV programme. There she is coached by a woman called Lemon, or possibly a lemon called Person (I can’t read my notes – the ink is smudged with tears).
Lemon observes Nadia and her dancers doing their dance. Their moves land somewhere between “freestyle conga” and “a kind of fit”. Lemon looks alarmed and sad and smiles widely at the same time, because reality television has destroyed the emotional responses of a whole generation.
Lemon re-choreographs the whole show.
“Uh oh,” says the dream, lacing up its running shoes.
“If Nadia has the sickest dancers and the sickest look she’s going to look sick,” promises Lemon, helping me imagine a magnificent, vomit-themed dancestravaganza.
“Ulp,” gulps the dream.
Lemon demonstrates to Nadia the correct manner in which to rotate her arse and then starts giving advice on the exact scientific amount of sexy Nadia needs to be. It’s possible to be too sexy, Lemon informs Nadia, and it’s also possible to be not sexy enough. The gist of it is that there’s a goldilocks zone of sexy. Both Nadia and Lemon are confident that these citrus- infused sexiness lessons will have the dream stuffed and in a glass case in no time.
“Oh dear,” says the dream.
It needn't be worried. In the next episode (I've watched ahead. It's like The Jinx. I really want to see what happens to the dream), Nadia, who's quite likeable really, reveals that she has existential doubts about all the "bum-shaking" so garners the services of Jelone, "a face around London".
Sadly this does not mean he's a ginormous floating head like in Zardoz, but an attitude-filled hipster with a whole body, who tells her to think: "I'm Nadia Forde, make way, back up, because I'm coming through."
“Isn’t that a bit rude?” says the dream, who’s just out of shot.
“I’ll get you yet dream,” shouts Nadia, shaking her fist. She’s going to catch that dream and when she does it’s f***ed.
Factory farming
If Chasing the Dream is an amiable blood-sport, then Britain's got Talent (TV3, Saturday) is an inhumane industrialised factory farm producing dream-flavoured husks. Founder Simon Cowell has been dormant for decades now, but his holographic image is still active and has dozens of recorded phrases in its databanks. "Wow. I was not expecting that," he says tonight. And: "This is why we love making this show, for people like you."
The other members of the judging panel, at least those who can move their foreheads, demonstrate their knowledge of human emotions with exaggerated displays of wonder, as they milk human individuality and transform it into processed saleable mush.
This episode includes: a sword-wielding little Irish girl that Alesha Dixon calls a “dinky little thing” (she is no doubt already trapped in Dixon’s handbag); a magician whose witchcraft frightens Holo-Simon (for he is a being of technology and science); a man who fires a puppet from a cannon; a man in lederhosen playing cowbells; and a dance act called Boyband or possibly a boyband called Dance Act (again – my notes are smudged with tears).
“I’ve sat in this chair for a long, long time [aeons] and I think in you we see the future,” says Holo-Simon to Boyband, as though they’re the next logical step in human development after mirrors, electrification and the welfare state. I think what he actually means is that the future involves the tired remnants of humanity dancing for the pleasure of a crazed hologram. We can only dream.
