By BRIAN VINER FOR THE BE INFORMED
PUBLISHED: 23:14 GMT, 26 July 2016 | UPDATED: 06:28 GMT, 27
July 2016
From Big Brother to Sex Box, the world of TV is always
looking for new lows. And this week Channel 4 succeeded.
Thousands of viewers complained on Twitter and media
guardians branded Naked Attraction — an uncensored nude dating show — the
‘worst programme ever shown on TV’. Broadcasting watchdog Ofcom has already
received 24 complaints about nudity.
A spokesman for MediaWatch UK said: ‘This has to be the
worst programme ever shown on television, there is nothing to recommend it.’
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Thousands of viewers complained on Twitter and media
guardians branded Naked Attraction — an uncensored nude dating show, pictured —
the ‘worst programme ever shown on TV’
|
Norman Wells, of the Family Education Trust, accused Channel
4 of ‘grossly irresponsible broadcasting’ and viewers labelled it ‘creepy’ and
a ‘new low for British TV’.
A spokesman for Channel 4 said last night: ‘This is a
light-hearted and appropriately scheduled series which aims to demystify the
rules of sexual attraction for the [dating app] Tinder generation.
Here, the Mail’s film critic Brian Viner gives his queasy
assessment.
Sadly, we will never know what Cilla Black would have made
of it. But there’s really no avoiding the dispiriting conclusion that Channel
4’s latest reality show Naked Attraction, a nude and heavily sexualised version
of Blind Date, the Saturday tea-time institution that dear old Cilla hosted for
nearly 18 years, marks a spectacular new low for British television.
Of course, the bar could hardly be lower than it already is.
Already this year we have been subjected to ITV2’s Love Island, in which one
couple copulated in broad daylight while other contestants commented on their
love-making technique.
But this is worse. From every angle, but especially the one
that allows participants to assess the sexual organs of their six would-be
dates, Naked Attraction is utterly ghastly, and depressingly degrading
![Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner calls the show 'a nude and heavily sexualised version of Blind Date... [which] marks a spectacular new low for British television'](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vF2No82Tbml_pQXxWb0joNBCtcPmseUYaXZHVuy3gtiF2aIX5aJmuyBjUZYBxPtbkE3xfhagCC2-xv3Q0B_AdqTF9uL-CBzyWa9v7JKLp7AyND3l17K9aBuV-mi-oLHeVtvuwSV9N9YHvmLGYFvHlR0eiGCcvsMzeYdo_u7Q=s0-d) |
Daily Mail film critic Brian Viner calls the show 'a nude
and heavily sexualised version of Blind Date... [which] marks a spectacular new
low for British television'
|
In each two-part programme, a pair of contestants get to
appraise the six people vying ‘in their birthday suits’ for approval.
Each date stands stark naked in a box, while a screen is
gradually raised to reveal them front and back ‘bit by wobbly bit’, as
presenter Anna Richardson puts it.
The contestants then reject the dates one by one for purely
physical reasons mainly attached to their genitalia. I use the word ‘attached’
advisedly; there is an awful lot of body-piercing on show. As well as,
inevitably in this day and age, disfigurement by tattoo.
When only two potential dates are left, they parade naked
while the contestant runs the rule over them, and while this doesn’t quite
happen literally, in Monday’s opening programme one aspiring suitor was
rejected because his penis was too big.
That was the moment when I had to remind myself of Channel
4’s original remit, to which it still makes a vague pretence of adhering.
Its founding fathers, who included the great actor and
director Richard Attenborough, set up Channel 4 in 1982 to be ‘innovative,
experimental and distinctive’.
But it is safe to say that the concept behind Naked
Attraction isn’t even remotely what was meant by those high-minded words; Lord
Attenborough will be another wincing from beyond the grave.
So why is Naked Attraction worse than even Love Island?
There are so many reasons. To start with, because it is such a horrible
mutation of a much-loved family show.
And second, because it so disingenuously affects
to be truthful and honest
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The premise allows contestants to appraise the six people
vying for a date ‘in their birthday suits’
|
The real truth is this is nothing more than an exercise in
old-fashioned voyeurism, pure and simple, yet it pretends to be broad-minded
and progressive.
On Monday, the first contestant, a 32-year-old woman called
Aina, selected as her date a man with a prosthetic leg. Fair enough.
The second contestant, a 24-year-old female bisexual called
Mal, then admired a significantly overweight woman for her ‘gorgeous, beautiful
shape . . . very Botticelli’. Again, fair enough, except that the woman was
duly rejected for being — no euphemism could possibly disguise it — fat.
The show’s message, loudly amplified by Richardson (the only
person who doesn’t get naked, since the contestants eventually have to strip
off, before striding off hand in hand with their dates), is that as two people
weigh each other up as candidates for a possible relationship, clothes are a
distraction, an irrelevance. Apparently, we’re all only interested in what’s
underneath.
But in a series about full exposure the fundamental weakness
of this notion was well and truly exposed when Mal and her eventual choice,
Rebecca, reported back after two weeks of dating.
Clearly, there was no romantic spark at all. If their body
language screeched anything as they sat alongside each other on a sofa, fully
clothed, it was that they could hardly stand each other.
Everything Mal had so admired about the naked Rebecca — her
height, her curves, her gorgeous brown eyes, her (heaven help us) fascinating
pale areolae — had plainly counted for nothing over conversation in a wine bar.
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When only two potential dates are left, they parade naked
while the contestant runs the rule over them
|
So the idea of ‘dating in reverse’ — ie starting with
nakedness, and moving on to dinner — doesn’t even work.
Yet there are many other reasons to be appalled by Naked
Attraction. At least Love Island was shunted to ITV2. But Channel 4 is still
one of our main terrestrial channels.
What kind of nation have we become when our principal summer
sport, Test cricket, cannot be seen live on so-called public-service TV
(Channel 4 is publicly owned but commercially funded), yet a shameless, semi-jokey
examination of genitalia is a mainstream alternative to the News At Ten?
What is most dispiriting about all this is that the show
degrades not just those taking part, not just Richardson — who keeps dropping
sexual and physiological facts in a blatant attempt to give this voyeuristic
nonsense some kind of scientific credibility — and not just Channel 4.
No, it degrades all of us. For if we are what we eat, so, to
an extent, we also are what we watch.
We get the TV that the production companies in their trendy
steel-and-chrome offices, and the executives who commission their supposedly
brilliant ideas, think we want.
I grew up at a time when Mary Whitehouse, the head of the
National Viewers’ And Listeners’ Association and the nation’s best-known moral
crusader, was frequently and loudly ridiculed.
But in a way we could do with such a spirited campaigner
again, if only to remind us that shows such as Naked Attraction aren’t nearly
as modern and liberating as those who make and broadcast them think they are.
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The real truth is this is nothing more than an exercise in
old-fashioned voyeurism, pure and simple, yet it pretends to be broad-minded
and progressive, notes Viner
|
Miss World was an indefensible festival of condescension not
only towards women but also towards developing nations and racial minorities
(Miss South Africa was white; Miss Africa South was black). I don’t mind
admitting that we all loved it. ‘Oh yes, now she’s not bad, not bad at all,’ my
dad would say from his Parker Knoll armchair, of Miss Denmark. ‘No, she’s
knock-kneed,’ my mother would counter. ‘Wait until you see her in a swimsuit.’
The three of us would then wait excitedly for the swimwear
stage of the proceedings and usually my mother, who for some reason had an
uncanny eye for knock-kneed women, would be proved correct. From the waist
down, the bare-legged Miss Denmark resembled the letter X.
Now, of course, we all know better. We know that
old-fashioned beauty pageants, in which the contestants were actually required
to turn round and show their behinds to the overwhelmingly male judges,
demeaned women. The 1970 Miss World contest was disrupted by ‘Women’s Lib’
protesters who suddenly emerged from the audience and threw flour bombs at the
host, Bob Hope.
At the time, many of us were rather cross with them. But
almost half a century later, we’ve all taken their message on board.
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'It degrades all of us,' writes Viner. 'For if we are what
we eat, so, to an extent, we also are what we watch'
|
That’s another reason why Naked Attraction diminishes
television, and our culture in general. It fully deserves that old slur about
beauty pageants: it really is nothing but a meat market.
True, it can’t so easily be accused of rampant sexism, since
it’s men and women alike who parade for the delectation of the judges (by which
I mean the one judge on the show and all the others at home, assuming there
will be any audience left by the end of the series).
But aren’t we all supposed to know these days that it is
offensively superficial to judge anyone purely on the basis of what they look
like, let alone to make them turn around so they can have their bottoms
assessed? And speaking of bottoms, how much further down the barrel can Channel
4 scrape?
Will they next conceive a show in which contestants are
actually allowed to cop a feel of these naked patsies? If so, that won’t propel
us backwards in time merely to 1970, but all the way to 1770, when slaves were
bought according to the firmness of their flesh.
In the increasingly desperate grab for ratings, can we rule
out a grab for a male appendage? I suspect not.
In the meantime, we should remind ourselves that
full-frontal nudity is commonplace on television these days.
The name Versailles, which once evoked a palace or maybe a
treaty, now summons images of Louis XIV and his entire court having energetic
sex in the altogether, thanks to the controversial BBC2 serial.
So it’s not as though Naked Attraction is showing us
anything that isn’t already flaunted, pretty much every night of the TV week.
However, context is all. Some of us might lament the way in
which sex and nudity is used to sell TV drama, but it’s still drama, still
make-believe. Naked Attraction is a different matter. Hard though it is to
remember when reality TV seemed fun and novel rather than exploitative and
stale, there was a time when it was.
There’s nothing clever about this show. In fact, it is
pathetically, irredeemably, intolerably stupid.
