TV Review/Shane Hegarty: In The Craig Doyle Show, the host called in on Hugh Hefner. The Playboy founder is an ageing icon, but seems quite content to struggle through life on a regimen of fine centrefolds and finer dressing gowns. His best chat-up line remains "My name is Hugh Hefner."
Oddly, on his tour of the Playboy mansion, Doyle didn't get a peak inside the master bedroom. Such a wagon train of film crews passes through the house these days that more television presenters than naked women have been in Hefner's boudoir.
Hefner currently has three girlfriends and an on-call "party posse" who fulfil both his various needs and the outside world's expectations of him. Doyle met number one girlfriend, 24-year old Holly. Having Holly as your number one girlfriend would be like having all your Christmases come at once. So, asked Doyle, what crazy things do you get up to around the Playboy mansion? "Every day we've something to do, whether it's play Monopoly . . ." Say no more. It's like the 1960s all over again.
Doyle wasn't altogether enamoured by the set-up. It was, he decided, "just a little bit tragic". Holly seemed happy enough. While feeding the monkeys in Hefner's private zoo she was dressed in her best bunny costume, her cleavage proud and utterly unyielding. But what do her parents make of her lifestyle? "They're just happy that I'm happy," she said abruptly. Yes, they probably bring a picture of her to dinner parties. Here's our daughter, they say, as they unpick the staples to give everyone a better look.
After Hefner, Doyle went for a drive through Los Angeles with Amanda Byram. The Dubliner has become quite a television star in the US. She presented Paradise Hotel, in which young, libidinous Americans were put in a compound and urged to succumb to their deepest urges for cash and fame. Byram now presents a show called The Swan, in which people are given full-body plastic surgery. They leave home for four months and return looking like they've been thrust into a giant pencil sharpener. At the end of the series there is a beauty pageant to crown the least ugly duckling of them all. "The Swan has been accused of being cruel and exploitative," said Doyle, "or, to put it bluntly: trashy TV". There are people who think that to refer to something as "trashy" is far more insulting than to call it "cruel and exploitative".
Byram believes that she's stayed grounded despite her success. "There's no point in going changing, 'cos people will hate you for it." Tell that to the people on The Swan. She is unflustered by the ethics of the show. People complain, she argued, but they still watch it. You've got a point, said Doyle. And they drove on up the California Coast. Two television presenters, the wind rustling through their egos, revelling in their self-validating logic. They watch, therefore I am. Still, I'm sure Byram's family are just happy that she's happy.
YOU CAN FIND such plastic surgery television shows at the end of the schedules thanks to MTV's I Want A Famous Face. "Shockingly, many teenagers are going under the knife," the narrator told us while doing her best to sound concerned. "The scalpels are sharpened and ready," she added, just unable to disguise the glee. Late on Tuesday night it featured a 19-year-old called Shá who wanted to look like Pamela Anderson. "Shá had decided on her own to get cosmetic surgery," it told us. "MTV then asked to document her journey." She worships Anderson, a poster girl for cosmetic surgery who is as famous for her oscillating breast size as for her acting career. Shá dreams of becoming a Playboy centrefold as much as most adolescent boys dream of bedding one. Playboy, of course, has been airbrushing women into shape long before the scalpel could do the job in advance. But the cheap blow-up doll look, apparently, is no longer in. Mikki, a Playboy talent scout, warned her that "what's in now is all real stuff. The fake stuff is all yesterday". On that score, it must be said, Mikki is very much yesterday's girl.
Shá was determined to go through with the surgery anyway. The plastic surgeon asked her what breasts she wanted, so she showed him a picture of Anderson. "Do you think that's enough?" he wondered. "This must have been at some point when she was downsizing." So Shá supersized and when it was all over she had bee-stung lips and breasts that would survive nuclear war. She was delighted.
Playboy hesitated about whether it should use her, but finally put her in an edition of "Voluptuous Vixens". Would she have got the shoot if she hadn't had plastic surgery? Who knows. Would she have got the shoot if she hadn't appeared on MTV? Will her success have been noted by the teenage girls watching MTV? Will people have outrageous plastic surgery in the hope of attracting the interest of global television network MTV? Hey, don't ask MTV; it was only documenting her journey.
POOR BARBIE'S NOT looking her best either, as we learnt in Barbie's Mid-Life Crisis. She's been growing a little old-fashioned next to her funkier rivals, Bratz. They're the kind of dolls more likely to listen to Pink than wear pink. In the market, they appeal to the "tweenage fashionistas" and KGOYs ("Kids Growing Old Younger"). Or "eight-year-old girls" as they were known before re-branding.
Meanwhile, the Sindy doll is being re-launched in the UK. She was always marketed as more like the girl next door than the physically unrealistic Barbie. "She doesn't have her manicurist on 24-hour speed dial," mused former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis. "There's something a little scruffier about Sindy." She does look scruffier, all right. Frankly, it strikes you that Sindy might be secretly hitting the gin before lunch.
Barbie is 45 years old this year, having been born in 1959 when her creator based her on a slutty character in a German comic book. Her owners, Mattel, are trying to keep up with the changing tastes of young girls. Last year they came up with a range of hip-hop dolls called Flavas. But they looked more likely to burgle your doll's house than play in it, and were dropped after six months. Then, Barbie dumped her long-time partner Ken; only adding fuel to the rumours that Ken was always the type of guy more likely to play with dolls than date one.
Since then, Barbie's been dating a buff Australian surfer called Blaine, hanging out with a gang of younger dolls and wearing clothes that are wholly inappropriate for a woman of her age. She's coming across as a little desperate and still struggles to impress today's sophisticated, picky little girl. Perhaps all is not lost, however. Has Barbie ever considered plastic surgery?
RUGBY PUNDITS BRENT Pope and George Hook wielded the knives in The Restaurant this week. Hook arrived with his cupboard well stocked with juicy quips. Example: "You thought manual labour was a Mexican bandit." You had to hope his cooking would be a little sharper. "Someone's going to vomit," predicted Hook, whose voice sounds like a food blender jammed on a pineapple. "It's either going to be me or the fella at the table, but somebody's going to throw up."
The reason for Hook's pessimism was that he was talking tripe. Or rather, talking about tripe. His menu gave a hint as to why the world is not weighed down with restaurants dedicated to the culinary delights of Cork. His main course was tripe and onions. (A diner: "Oh good lord!") Tripe comes from the wall of an animal's stomach. One of the assisting chefs had never seen it before. Guess what, it looks like off-cuts of cheap carpet. Keeping with the theme, his starter was drisheen, which is a pudding made from sheep's blood and intestines. Chopped up and put on a plate it looks like sheep's droppings. All in all, it caused much comment among those waiting to be fed by their anonymous chefs. "You feel like you're heading for torture," chirped one guest.
Tom Doorley, Irish Times restaurant critic, who was among the panel of three expert judges, refused to taste either dish; his nose wrinkled in disgust like a kid facing a plate of steamed greens. Fellow critic Paolo Tullio delivered a verdict that had piquancy in its faint praise. "It's not offensive," he declared. Both the tripe and drisheen went down well, stomach meeting stomachs in relative harmony. Nobody threw up, but one Cork diner was struck down with severe homesickness.
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