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Pam Bell is a former maths teacher who now works for top Auckland academic school Senior College. She's a fan. Anna-Marie White is a curator at the public art museum in Nelson. She's a fan. Dame Helen Mirren is, well, Dame Helen Mirren. And she's a fan too.
The television programme these accomplished women won't miss? Not the latest Jane Austen adaptation or big-budget BBC documentary but America's Next Top Model (or ANTM among its aficionados), the tabloid American reality show returning to TV3 this week. In the show, stroppy supermodel Tyra Banks mentors girls wanting to pursue a career on the catwalk. And the wacky thing is, classy broads with double degrees are not ashamed to admit they're addicted to a programme which features trailer-trash slappers bitching and backbiting over hair-weaves and lipgloss.
"No, I'm not embarrassed to say I like it. I don't watch much TV and it's not exploitative like those reality programmes where people give up their babies," says Pam Bell. Oscar-winner Dame Helen Mirren attracted international attention when she confessed: "I love it. I love Tyra. It's wonderful to watch the appalling nature of females. We are so awful."
The long-running series - launching its ninth season in New Zealand this Friday and now shooting its 11th cycle (or intake) of wannabe models in the US - is an unlikely hit with intelligent women who count it as appointment viewing and even have a ritual to get together in groups to watch it. Anna-Marie White set up the Facebook group Women Of Integrity who watch America's Next Top Model with museum colleagues after discovering a shared passion for the show. "I have sat in on ANTM Friday wine and cheese evenings in Auckland and Wellington with professional women in television, banking and environmental science," White says.
Why do so many well-educated professional women congregate with religious fervour, in cosy living rooms everywhere, with wine and fatty foods, to watch ANTM? a discussion thread on the group asks. One group member, Louise Rae, based in London, explains: "It's interactive. They've entered a competition that is all about looks so we're allowed to be as bitchy as we want without an ounce of guilt at being superficial or judgmental. Plus Tyra's so bad she's good.
Sandra Ward said simply: "It's good telly." If you haven't seen the programme it sounds like a standard B-grade television format. About a dozen wannabe models are installed in an apartment. Each week they are given two modelling assignments. At the end of the episode they appear before a panel of judges who assess their two best photos and potential to be America's Next Top Model and one of the girls is sent home. The final girl is crowned the winner and gets to shoot a magazine spread, although there is scepticism about how much help winning the show is to developing a serious career.
Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld has said ANTM is "trash that is funny for five minutes if you're with other people. If you're alone, it's not funny. Those girls will never be the next Gemma Ward (the latest supermodel). There is no justice in the fashion business." They may not become A-list models but the show will make them celebrities of a sort; it is the highest-rating programme on its American television network.
There are the usual manufactured psychodramas between borderline retarded binties from America's midwest shrieking profanities about who ate their corn chips, but something seems to set the show apart and make it acceptable to name-check among women who would be comfortable to call themselves feminists. That is partly due to the show's howling so-bad-its-good sense of camp: a winking acknowledgement that this is all a bit of fun, helped by the fag-hag contributions of outrageous cross-dressing runway coach J. Alexander, who calls himself "Miss", and photo shoot director Jay Manuel.
The competition provides dramatic tension with at least one neurotic nymphet set up as the villain of the piece, with viewers encouraged to root for the underdog. But possibly the main reason for the show's crossover appeal is Banks' bolshie personality. She is not simply a frontperson but as producer is the driving force behind the series and presents herself as both a tough-but-fair matriarch and a kind of a cat's-eyed Oprah peddling inspirational "you go, girl!" messages.
Banks won even more female fans when she famously went on her TV chat show in her swimsuit to give the tabloid media a serve after they published photos of her saying she was fat. The Tyra Banks mantra - it's not what you've got but what you do with it - seems to epitomise the liberation theology of post Spice Girls-type feminism. ANTM fits into the "I'm so liberated I can be a pole-dancer if I want" school of women's lib. "I see it as pro-women, giving these girls an opportunity to make something of themselves," Pam Bell says.
Bell also enjoys the behind-the-scenes glimpse into the fashion business. "It's fascinating to watch how they can take someone who is quite a pretty face and make them look like a model through the artistry of the hairdressers and the other people who work on the show."
Banks frequently pushes the message that it is the mental resilience of the candidates which will help them succeed rather than their innate physical gifts, although, unsurprisingly, the odd plus-sized candidate has been pretty swiftly dispatched in favour of stick insects.
- HERALD ON SUNDAY