Isn't memory a wicked little tinker? About ten days ago I saw a snippet for a reality TV show on E4 called "Beauty and the Geek". It looked awful, and I quickly moved on after seeing only two people walking into a room. Then my aunt, at the weekend, started speaking about having seen the castle I hired for the weekend of my marriage on the television. I immediately remembered the clip, and knew which program it was. How odd.
In a spirit of "oh look, there's our room", I watched it last night. The premise, so far as it goes, is not really that bad if sniggering at others is your thing: half a dozen pretty but vacuous girls and half a dozen geeks are placed in a castle, paired up, and compete against the other resulting couples in competitions where the geeks must demonstrate social skills and the "beauties" must demonstrate learning (be it e'er so rote).
One drawback is that the beauties are not universally beautiful. One has a genuinely stunning face but is a touch bulky for someone being presented as a "10". All are pretty much standard Essex nightclub fare. Only one seems truly dim (one has a maths A-Level - unattainable if stupid). Similarly, only one of the men is actually what I would call a socially unskilled geek (and he was chosen as partner by the dim girl in question). The others comprise two dorks, a wimp, and a geek with a good haircut who is just a bit awkward around girls.
At least they look more true-to-type than the original US series, developed by Ashton Kutcher, where the girls are mainly meh and the blokes just a bit preppy. I think, in both series, the producers bottled it when presented by true, Babylon 5 T-shirt-wearing, milk-snorting geekery. And they fail to play it cruelly enough for hit-dom, either. The girls are not exposed as sufficiently shallow and vacuous nor the men as sufficently gawky and awkward for truely toe-curling horror. And where is the other side of each coin: the tanned adonis paired with the white-trainers-and-metallica-loving female chemical engineer?
The programme is presented as a social experiment. Uh-huh? What I can't help but see is the future. A decade from now, when these 23-year-old beauties are suddenly feeling the pressure of time and biology, the fact that they never had to try - that they truly thought that their conversation was interesting (all the men seemed intrigued) and all their jokes funny (all the men laughed) - will not have prepared them for a time when their looks would no longer do, and when our Kev has run off with Shaz from the local. One of these girls says "I was popular at school and everyone knew who I was. I don’t have any nerdy or ugly friends. Why would I have? Ugly people get you down." How popular you were at school, honey, will be colder and colder comfort with time.
In the meantime, the geeks will be a bit older, too, but time is kinder to men. They will wear good suits, earn a lot of money, and be on their way to wielding power and influence in their respective spheres. And while they'll be delighted to find those same girls suddenly see them, not as figures of fun, but as desirable providers of security, they're probably happily married to the chemical engineer in the white trainers and the metallica t-shirt, who shares their taste for Babylon 5.
That said, Blairqhuan (pronounced "blare-whahn", FYI) Castle looks gorgeous. Shame about the lunatic, comedy butler they've shipped in for the series.