Whilst idly channel hopping today I came across 10 Years Younger: The Bus Pass Challenge, the television equivalent of falling down a sheer vertical drop with enough brain-bashing rocks and thick branches on the way down to ensure that you come out of the other side with a suitably reduced IQ.
As the name suggests, it’s another one of those morally objectionable shows that convince an average looking member of the public (in this case specifically old folk) that they have a face that only a mother with severe retinal detatchment could love, before subjecting them to all kinds of vanity-enhancing surgeries in a disgusting attempt to make them appear (in the eyes of the hosts) less disgusting.
I often wonder how the audition process for these shows unfold. Do you, for example, volunteer someone you know – perhaps a dear relative or unfashionable friend unaware that their very existence is offensive to society? Or do these people show enough self-awareness to know that they are “ugly” and need help, but lacking of enough self-motivation to do anything about it themselves?
Or – and this is my personal favourite scenario – do the producers of 10 Years Younger storm old people estates, dragging all the residents out kicking and screaming by their packets of Werthers Originals and haul them into the backs of cattle trucks? Either way, it’s a type of make-over show that exists in one form or another in pretty much every country that broadcasts television – What Not To Wear, Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, Extreme Makeover – and serves only to prove that humanity is circling the drain in ever decreasing circles.
What I’d like to see is a show called ‘10,000,000,000 Years Younger’ where all the producers, executives and presenters of these programmes are hauled out in public, ridiculed for their spiritual bankruptcy and then subjected to a harrowing make-under where they are systematically reverted through the evolutionary stages of life itself until they are little more than a pile of primordial soup, before being poured into nice TikiBar mugs and made to proclaim how meaningful their lives are now they have attained some form of unnatural beauty, before being tipped down a sewer and forgotten about forever.
Now that would be a ratings winner.
