I think it's fair to say that because of this site's origins, the readership of this website is comprised predominantly of those of the Network Ten demographic. But Ten have been in trouble, for the past year or so, and has partly kept the audience it has had pretty much under it's thumb (that may mean you, of course), only because the two other major commercial networks have steered clear of that distinctly Ten programming - the controversial, the gimmicky, the trashy, and, yes, perhaps a little bit nasty. But with Big Brother stumbling, Australian Idol's star falling, and The Biggest Loser, well, losing, there has been a new opportunity to grab the watercooler right out of Ten's hands. So You Think You Can Dance? has come through for Ten; but with Nine's 2008 programming schedule, so far, it has begun to steel the attention from its younger rival. And while it goes without saying that Underbelly will go down in TV publicity history, Tuesday nights on Nine have become very (dare we say) Ten-ish, and if you're yet to jump on the latest TV shocker bandwagons, you're in an increasingly small percentage of the 18 - 40 commercial demographic. I tuned in, this evening, to see what all the fuss is about, and found three back to back shows that, yes, I happily ate my Dominoes pizza right through. Let's pull up a couch, and have a look at the kind of programming that must be making the boys at Ten a tad nervous.

 

 

I'm going to work in reverse chronology (for the sake of a climax), and begin at the later point in the evening's programming: the English reality television series, Ladette to Lady. This is actually yet another commercial steal from ABC - something that, I must confess, I'm a little torn over. On the one hand, it's disturbing, in light of what we were warned about the Howard government's sly dismantling of the newtork (is that a sell-off due to underfunding, ABC? Will you be throwing away more of your best shows, after Johnny made sure you're a little tighter round the belt?); but, then again, it does mean that a more mainstream audience are going to be exposed to meatier reality programmes. I was certainly left feeling quite uneasy, when I first saw Nine's advertising for the show. Completely at odds with the real tone of the programme, Nine constructed it's own branding, bottom up, in a slick, sexed up, MTV meets cyber-emo promo that, quite frankly, led me to wonder if they've perhaps outsourced Ten's creative advertising team. I was one of the few people watching, who avidly followed the show when its first series belonged to ABC; as a die-heard, it was hard to watch the commercial station bastardise it, for the sake of pitching at its decidedly un-ABC demographic. But the beauty, of course, is that no silly promo can spoil good material, when it comes time for that good material to finally air, and Ladette To Lady is still a fascinating cultural deconstruction, from start to finish - not to mention, very funny. Within five minutes, all was forgiven.

For the uninitiated, Ladette To Lady is basically the intelligent, unromantic version of the truly atrocious Australian Princess. Thankfully, instead of taking place in the working class fantasy realm of royalty, this one keeps it to a more basic class dynamic, but ever so cleverly examines this within a cross-generational framework. The term, "Ladette", is a recently popularised slang classification in the UK, where girls we would probably (in a more familiar sense) know as the cliche English "slapper", have had their behaviour - binge-drinking, promiscuity, foul language, etc - likened to that of young English men (or "Lads"). The creators have duly noted that this phenomenon is inseparable from socioeconomics - you won't find many Ladettes who are middle to upper class. So, the show finds a handful of suitably atrocious girls ("Do you know why you're here?" asks one of the teachers in tonight's opening episode, "Because you are the very worst of your kind") from a range of cliched working class cities (Essex, Manchester, etc), and pits them against each other in a competition to see who can most successfully be transformed into a social elite - a "Lady", in other words. For those among us familiar with classic literature, it does to George Bernard Shaw what Big Brother does to Orwell - except, of course, that it does it with so much more substance.

But, it gets even more interesting than a mere study of the relationship between identity and socioeconomics. It takes this clash of two worlds (or classes) further, and conceptualises the collective social idea of the "Lady" as a figure of a past world, now decaying and betrayed by the fallen, vulgar modern generations. The competition takes place in Eggleston Hall, one of the past's most prestigious female "finishing" schools, where the ghosts of a forgotten era will be abruptly interrupted by modern Britania. Better still, they've even managed to score the school's original teachers (including a woman who made her living from teaching young rich girls how to arrange flowers), who will join a cast of other compellingly horrible women who, basically, cling to an archaic, utopian - sometimes, disturbing - ideal of the place of gender in the ways of "proper" society.

 

That's the added twist of Ladette To Lady - instead of the competitors simply being pit against each other (as they would be in the sadistic manipulations of commercial reality television), they are, on a greater level, also pitted against their polar conceptual opposites, as the old world meets the new world, the lower class fall under the hands of the upper class, and two vastly different extremes come head to head, in an intelligently designed production. It's a breath of fresh air, after drudging through Big Brother and Idol (and, yes, even So You Think You Can Dance?). I hope that enough mainstream commercial viewers were hooked by those trashy ads, and stumbled (even if unknowingly) into reality television that still has its origins very much in the world of documentary making (something the English must be credited for - it is, unsurprisingly, the American model our reality television has taken after).

This all gives the show an edge that many others in a similar vein miss. Australian Princess, and even Brat Camp (another solid ABC show), are ultimately compromised by a slant that sits uncomfortable with me: the idea that we are watching a game of submission that, by its nature, grants a sense of power and objective authority to the thing these youngsters are forced to submit to. I felt a little uncomfortable with the first series of Brat Camp, because I did not exactly agree (at all, in fact) with the programme the brats were placed under (a kind of "tough love" American approach), when the show was clearly designed to give full credit to it. I've long said (for those who have read any of my reviews of actual documentaries) that the sign of a good doco is that both sides can see it as subjectively supporting it (again, I'll use the example of Jesus Camp, where the left wing thought it was a horrifying expose, while the church it was "exposing" actually helped promote it as a fair portrait of their wonderful, divine lives). I think the heavy conceptualisation and metaphoric design in Ladette To Lady actually takes it into this territory. The brats from Brat Camp were just messed up delinquents getting set straight by a pseudo-psychology organisation, and when one failed, it was seen as just that -  the inability of a damaged child to be "saved". In Ladette To Lady, the lines are not so clear.

 

Ironically, this is mostly because Ladette To Lady, unlike Brat Camp, doesn't for a moment take itself too seriously, and despite the expected emotional spikes - and some valid, poignant moments of some very lost young women - the whole thing is kept in a tongue-in-cheek foundation. The contrived aspects of the show are partly to blame for this. The players (particularly, the teachers) often come across as caricatures; but, unlike many other reality shows, this is intentional and clever. It also takes away from any sense that the finishing school is the ultimate objective authority (because it is trapped within being a representation and metaphor), which means the viewer has more scope to mix their own subjectivities with the proceedings. You can side with either the symbols of the old world, the symbols of the new world, or, like me, you can actually spot a fascinating dichotomy that, from the two extremes, exposes the absurdity of social constructs and manifestations, on both sides of the fence. I think it's a wonderful portrait of the construct of identity - that it is just that... a construct. But you can take it any way you like. When a girl "fails" and is ejected from Eggleston Halls, you can bet your bottom dollar that there's a million English Ladettes cheering them on, and there's little effort to make sop stories out of their failure (as do most of the other shows); "I'd rather leave now, and at least know who I am," said the rejected girl from last night's episode. So, is the inevitable winner actually a winner, at all? Or has she simply had a false identity imposed upon her by the social force at the helm of her world? The old world calls her a disgrace to her gender - but hasn't she then been made into a submissive imprisonment of the patriarchal powers that be? What is better, if either one is? To use a tired reality slogan... you decide.

Ladette To Lady has only just screened its first episode (here's a sample, below) . Make sure you catch the next.