There’s something discomforting about the term ‘re-education’. To my mind it conjures up images of subversive religious cults and Orwellian mind control; even Microsoft Word’s timid thesaurus levels the term with ‘brainwashing’. But with Ladette to Lady, a programme in which binge-drinking ladettes are ‘reeducated’ into morally-upright ladies, ITV have given the term far more horrifying connotations.
The idea for the programme is something you’d expect from a drunken Daily Telegraph reader. Begin with a montage of the ladettes fighting and training, send the girls to Finishing School and force them into a series of ‘character building’ exercises (watch out for one disgusting scene in which the girls are forced to pluck and disembowel birds) and then the ladies-in-training will attend an aristocratic dinner party, we’ll give them a few drinks and maybe they’ll make that jolly old faux-pas when one, you know, mentions one’s clitoral piercing at the dinner table. Not content with this recipe of snobbish humour and self-righteousness, ITV add a sprinkling of the more sinister. In one of the more ghastly scenes, the ladies-in-training are told of their role at the dinner party.
They must be ‘tantalising’ but not ‘tacky’; they must be ‘sport’ for the ‘hunters’.
And that’s the most disturbing thing about the programme. Strip away the humour and the women are merely being manipulated from prey for leering hair-gelled apes into prey for tweed-clad bourgeois hypocrites. They’re being groomed the way the boys sitting smugly at the top of our class system (well, the scum always floats to the top, doesn’t it boys?) would like them.
Like with Wife Swap, the most entertaining feature is the seismic culture clash between the ladettes and the aristocrats. I’d use the term ‘clash of civilisations’, but it’s absurd to describe either side as anything like ‘civilised’. You see I find the idea of ‘lay back and think of England’ equally offensive as the excesses of ladette culture, so for me this programme feels like that playground game where you imagine up two distressing situations and make your friend pick one. And what a dilemma it is - it’s either pole dancing and drinking your weight in WKD, or it’s foot binding and chastity belts – you HAVE to choose one.
So is this merely harmless entertainment? No, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a stark reminder of the need to place ethical shackles on reality television. It’s a sadistic display of the infallibility of reality television. If such brainwashing and degrading treatment was being practiced in a Middle Eastern state then everyone would be quick to label it an appalling abuse of ‘human rights’, but since it’s all in the name of reality television, it’s just good primetime entertainment.
Robert Jackman
