Steph's so posh she's never been on a bus. And now she's venturing into Geordieland!
I reviewed a Channel 4 show the other day about four ignorant spoilt Brits who were sent to live in poverty in Gambia for a week. This one, Geordie Finishing School for Girls (BBC3), seems to be the same idea. Except that, as the title suggests, the four are all girls ? posh ones, from London and the south. And instead of Gambia, they're off to Newcastle upon Tyne. It's not so different ? once you get beyond tourist Newcastle, the regenerated quayside and the vibrant city centre, to places such as Byker or Walker; you might as well be in Africa. It's cheaper to get to, and you don't need jabs. Reality television has just discovered Tyneside, it seems, with Geordie Shore and now this. The north-east, it's the new Essex.
Why do people such as Fi, Lucy, Steph and Fiona ? our well-groomed fillies ? agree to go on shows like this? Do they not realise how they're going to come across? Fi gets �700 a month pocket money from Daddy. Lucy ? whose surname deserves a mention because it's Haythornthwaite-Shock ? was bought a flat by her daddy and has never been on a budget. Steph has never been on a bus! How can that be? Even if she's never needed to, you'd think she might have got on one once, just out of curiosity. And Fiona is engaged to a banker ? a banker with a capital W by the looks of him and from the way he says "I love you too, babe" on their doorstep when Fiona leaves.
So off they totter, in their tweed and their rabbitskin, with their rocks and their Louis Vuitton bags, to further north than any of them knew existed. And there to greet them and show them a slice of the real world are four Geordie lasses ? Shauna, Makylea, Lyndsey and Kimberley ? who look as though they've stepped straight from the pages of Viz. And keeping an eye on everything, a kind of referee, is Hufty, who's described by the narrator as "something of a local legend when it comes to youth work in the city".
No mention of the fact that she's also something of a national legend when it comes to youth television. That is her, isn't it, Hufty who used to present The Word in the early 1990s ? one of the unlikeliest, shortest, and some might say, ill-judged television careers ever? But she was also much more likable than any of the others. What happened to them? Terry Christian went back to Manchester to be a professional Manc, Mark Lamarr and Dani Behr seem to have disappeared, and who cares about Amanda de Cadenet? The Word was hardly a springboard to bigger and better things, more like the kiss of death. At least Hufty is doing something useful now.
Anyway, right now she has to keep the Sloanes and the Geordies from tearing each other's throats out. They're like cats, eyeing each up, wailing and clawing at the air.
To be honest when the poshos have put on the clothes their hosts have got for them, to help them blend in, you can hardly tell them apart. Until they open their mouths of course. But that's being taken care of too ? with Geordie elocution lessons. It's fun, like Pygmalion by Dr Spooner. "Hoo noo broon coo," they repeat after Simon (Donald, co founder of Viz), the teacher. And my favourite: "fur'er copya". I always thought that Kawasaki was the best word to say in Geordie, now I'm not so sure. Find out for yourself; if you don't know any Geordies just dial 0191 followed by seven digits until you get one on the line, then simply ask them a) Honda, Suzuki, Yamaha and . . .? And b) At the office Christmas party you take your knickers off and sit on the . . .?
The posh girls are pretty awful to begin with. OMG, you poor people, you have no money, but you're still really cheerful, and your accents are so adorable ? it's like that. But they're not bad underneath, and they get better as their stay goes on. That's the way these shows go, there needs to be some kind of journey of discovery. And tears ? there has to be tears. They come when Steph and co meet a drug user who used to be a prostitute to finance her habit. "It's just so sad," whimpers Fiona.
It's not the end of the journey though, there are still two more episodes to go. At the rate they're going, the posh girls will be necking Newcy Brown by the end of it, dumping their banker fiances, going on benefits and getting pregnant ? by Sid the Sexist.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/jul/26/geordie-finishing-school-for-girls
Russia Social networking Kanye West Higher education England cricket team Soap opera
No comments:
Post a Comment