“Age ain’t nothing but a number,” sang the grammatical illiterate Aaliyah.
And with that double negative, she agreed with the production team behind Ten Years Younger: The Challenge. See, age is more than a number, it’s a bloody great stick that can be used to beat a drab, middle-aged lady into agreeing to have her nose caved in and sanded down all in the name of entertaining you. You turd.
People have different priorities that consume their entire life, depending on which TV show they’re on. The army of bell-ends on The Apprentice are all about making money (or they were until the financial world crashed down around them) and Jeremy Kyle‘s guests want everyone to know that she’s just a slag and not good enough for their son.
The Ten Years Younger crew have one admirable priority: They want strangers to bellow estimates of their age, and then hack, slash and slice at various bits of them until that number goes down.
As it happens, people are ridiculously terrible at guessing age, clearly thinking, “she looks a bit haggard, I’ll aim a bit higher” – and they almost certainly edit out the childish guesses of “12” or “98”, which would seriously ruin the average.
Even more embarrassingly, they’re then compared to other women the same age – in this case, 44-year-old Lisa Kudrow – who astonishingly is more attractive. One of them is a millionaire who doesn’t spend eight hours a day at work and can’t leave the house without trowelling make up on in case some twat photographs her for Heat magazine. The other is a single mother who has had a tough time of it, losing her teeth at 18 and her hair in her 30s. How dare she not look as good, the selfish bitch.
So, with our brave participant suitably humiliated by the no-holds-barred commentary from the idiot public – sample comments, “she needs to sort her saggy face out” and “hahaha, she looks like she’s 70″ – it’s time for improvement.
What follows is a bizarre mixture of What Not To Wear and Cannibal Holocaust. Dowdy clothes are mocked and thrown away, replaced with jackets, dresses and shoes way outside of the victim’s usual budget.
Then it’s surgery time. Because God knows, the only way to have strangers accurately estimate your age is to have bits of face bone shaved off, stomach hacked away and skin pulled so tight that you can’t pull any expression other than vague shock. Which is helpful after seeing – and worse, hearing – those surgical procedures.
Finally, after the substantial bruising has subsided, it’s make-over time, where a team of professionals paint the unfortunate Dot-Cotton-a-like up like a clown that’s fallen into a make-up factory and then been attacked by a paint-truck.
Back out on the streets, surprise surprise, the average age estimates are much lower. Probably because people are thinking, “well, I suppose she’s made a bit of an effort…” Because almost without exception, the awkwardness, the unfamiliar clothes and crazy make-up mean the victims end up looking like men in drag. At least they look 10 years younger.
This was a guest blog by Nik Johnson from Shouting At Cows. Hooray.
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