After escaping the hypnotic clutches of the strangely addictive Dickinson’s Real Deal this afternoon, I stumbled upon the apparently broadcast worthy ITV2 media abomination commonly known as ‘The ‘real’ housewives of Orange County’.
Set in some sort of hauntingly tasteless, shiny Californian neighbourhood, the programme is in essence an hour long insight into a world littered with characterless, artificial mansions, and the characterless, artificial women they contain. The lives of five or so Barbie Doll shells are followed, and the viewers treated with a portrayal of their endless social dramas and wealth based problems. Sound like a detestable 60 minutes? Well it was.
The first woman to feature on the programme looked worryingly like if Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler finally lost it and started cross dressing, but was apparently called Lyne Curtin. The storyline surrounding her life this week was based around the struggle of her and her husband to sort out all of the expensive possessions contained in their garage. Much drama was somehow drawn out of the banal task of organising numerous symbols of western capitalism into alphabetical order, and the segment ended with Lyne crying on the shoulder of her husband, stating that it was “all just too much”.
This level of indulgence and materialism is of course vile, and the fact that these people’s so called problems (paradise based inconveniences) are humoured by television companies, and presumably the public, is embarrassing. Not only does it make it seem like these waxworks actually provide some true entertainment value, but only reinforces their own belief that their lives are filled with genuine problems (WHICH THEY AREN’T).
Anyway, the next segment followed a half melted Calippo lolly called Vicki Gunvalson, who discussed how she was now having to spend less than $100 on foundation each week and how she’s really having to ‘think’ about finances. It was at this point I realised that my face was permanently holding a pained/disgusted/offended expression. You know the face: the kind of look a teacher would give a student if they didn’t do their homework and then decided to blame it on the Jews. My disgust was then further aggravated by the show’s attempts to reach a moral conclusion at the end of each segment. Vicki’s telling of her son to act like a deeper, more emotional human being produced the kind of irony that could only otherwise stem from Simon Cowell writing an article condemning the commercial nature of modern music.
40 minutes in, and the programme depicted a party inside one of the soulless mansions where the various wives and husbands drank champagne and laughed unnecessarily loudly at jokes that probably really weren’t that funny. In fact, it sort of felt like I was watching a short film at the beginning of ‘The money programme’ parodying the kind of excessive, loan based consumerism that occurred prior and partially lead to the global recession. I half expected the music to stop and a grim faced Evan Davis to come strolling in and begin a “that was then, but now the world’s economic makeup isn’t quite so rosy” style speech.
Despite labelling each woman as a ‘housewife’, the show did attempt to make it seem as though its participants were the kind of strong, independent and not at all shallow women that young girls should look up to. Phrases such as ‘self-made’ and ‘hard working’ for example were thrown around almost as though they had meaning. However, this attempt to conceal the empty nature of the participants was undermined by their spoken taglines used to introduce them to the programme. This included Vicki Gunvalson’s line “I want the power and the money, and I want them both”. Oh Vicki, you and your prose.
So there you go, it turns out that the injurylawyers4you adverts are not the most weird and repulsive items on daytime TV. No, I can safely say that award lies with the awful ‘Real housewives of Orange County’.
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