Times come when the intellectual snob in me pops out for a whinge and gripe about what’s on the telly. Big Brother, Australia’s Got Talent, newstainment shows like A Current Affair and so-called viewer oriented programs like Funniest Home Videos (why hasn’t YouTube killed that show yet?) make the little guy pop his head out and say “What’s wrong with us that we want to make more famous than us people who are more stupid than us?”

I normally give that guy a flick in the ear and send him on his way, but last night I couldn’t help but listen to him. Not being able to sleep I turned on the box to watch a five minute preview of a new show on Channel Seven called Look 10 Years Younger in 10 Days. It made me think: there’s stupid TV, and then there’s evil TV. And from what I saw this program promises to be evil in its purest form.

It’s quite a standard formula:

1. Take a woman in her early thirties. She must have a face that’s “not made for television” in contrast to the supermodel who is hosting the show. And make sure she has an equally ordinary looking husband or boyfriend (no lessers!).
2. Put her in a glass box in the middle of the city, where she can be looked at by passers-by.
3. Make videos of people’s reactions to the sight of the woman. Make sure the passers-by who are taped are women in their early twenties. Ask the passers-by to guess how old the woman in the box looks. Keep the most outrageous and ill-informed comments for later use.
4. Remove the woman from the box, place her in the studio. Let her watch the video tapes. Tape her while she cries.
5. Give her a make over. Try to make her look more “made for TV”.
6. Show her to her husband.
7. Tape them both while they cry.

Pure and unadulterated exploitation of the poor and ugly in our society. Take some women who don’t spend enough money on beauty products. Tell them how this lack of spending has made them pariahs. Give them products for ten days to make them less like pariahs. Treat them like they’re famous for a day. Then wait for the free products to run out so they have to spend more of their smaller incomes on products they weren’t using beforehand.

Tell the public it’s like a fairytale, ugly ducklings transformed. Yet it was not the public who saw them as ugly ducklings in the first place.

I’m so enraged.