Are Glamour Girls Always Dealt the Losing Hand on Reality TV?

Archive article : first appeared in Telewatcher in early 2009

One of my guilty pleasures in life whenever Big Brother is running on TV is to read the acres of often unintentionally hilarious comment the series generates on the online forums. On the launch-night of Celebrity Big Brother 2009, the response to Page 3 girl Lucy Pinder’s entry into the house was especially intriguing. Historically, models – and especially glamour models – have done particularly badly on both Big Brother and the celebrity version. But in this case, the initial feedback was startlingly favourable, with many women making approving comparisons with Melinda Messenger (a previous glamour model contestant on the show), principally on the grounds that Pinder was following Messenger’s example in keeping her body ‘well covered up’. This is seemingly the main criteria for a topless model to be accepted by a female audience, and such acceptance is all-important – because the vast majority of those who take part in the show’s eviction votes are thought to be women.

So far, so good for Lucy Pinder, then. But within a matter of a few days, the mood on the forums had turned on its head, in a seemingly inexplicable way. Suddenly, Pinder was being charged with hypocrisy for precisely the same reason she had been so lauded at the outset. By stubbornly keeping her body so firmly under wraps, the argument went, she was treating the very thing she did for a living with disdain, and by extension was treating the loyal fans who had created such demand for her steamy pictures with equal disdain. This perception, as Pinder would herself acknowledge, played a large part in her early departure from the show. But the viewers’ change of heart seemed on the face of it to be fairly typical of the fickle attitudes of those who inhabit the forums. Now that Pinder has been evicted, however, it’s become clear with hindsight that rather more was going on than met the eye – and the show’s producers played a large part in engineering the chain of events that unfolded.

The turning-point in Pinder’s fortunes started with the all-too-predictable revelation that there would be a ‘twist’ on the normal method of nominating housemates for eviction. Only ‘Head of House’ Terry Christian would be permitted to nominate, and one of those nominations would be based on his assessment of which of his fellow housemates had exhibited the least talent during a session in which they were each required to give a demonstration of whatever had made them famous. So the two actors were required to do a spot of acting, the five singers (including, among others, La Toya Jackson) were required to sing, the politician Tommy Sheridan was required to address the housemates in public meeting style, and the one-time TV weathergirl Ulrika Jonsson was required to deliver a weather forecast. But there was a discernible frisson in the air when the penny started to drop about what this unmistakable logic might mean for Pinder – could she really be required to demonstrate her ‘talent’ for posing topless? Unsurprisingly, the answer was no – or, at least, so it appeared at the time. Instead, she was invited to do something seemingly unrelated to her line of work – a presentation on, among other things, her reason for disliking the Labour Party. The only nod to her career outside the house was that the item was dubbed ‘Lucy’s News in Briefs’ and she was provided with a special pair of ‘briefs’ to wear, leaving her legs on display for the duration of the presentation. But even this wheeze seemed somewhat illogical for a topless model, given that it left her top-half covered up.

Unsurprisingly then, Pinder’s performance was by some distance the least captivating of all the celebrities, and the Head of House was left with little choice but to nominate her on that basis. It was at this point that the murmurs on the forums began – it was her own fault, some suggested, for not engaging with the true ‘spirit’ of the task by disrobing a little more during her presentation. After all, how else could she be said to be demonstrating what had made her a celebrity? At face value, this appeared to be a totally unfair criticism. The producers had set her an apparently very specific task which she had fulfilled to the best of her ability. Indeed, a fairer charge seemed to be that the producers had stitched her up, and made it inevitable due to her unequal role in the task that she would be nominated for eviction.

But a somewhat different picture emerged during Pinder’s post-eviction interview. The host Davina McCall spent much of the exchange persistently – albeit semi-jokingly – demanding to know why Pinder had so stubbornly failed to take her clothes off during her stay in the house, and specifically challenged her to explain why she hadn’t at least stripped to her bra during the ‘talent’ task. And suddenly the strange realisation dawned about the true nature of the task the producers had set Pinder – it had in fact been devised as a huge tease. The only costume requirement that had actually been specified was that she wear the ‘briefs’ provided, but contrary to initial on-screen impressions, how much else she wore was entirely left to her own discretion. She could in fact have worn nothing else if she had wished, and it appears that the producers thought there was at least a chance that she might actually take that option. Essentially they provided her with a huge dilemma, and by leaving enough ambiguity in the stated rules left her enough rope to either hang or save herself. By stripping off, she could have dodged the first eviction by avoiding being branded the ‘least talented’ – but in doing so she would have risked the familiar wrath of the predominantly female viewing audience. So while this dilemma was entirely artificial and contrived, it nevertheless neatly encapsulated the problem virtually every pin-up girl will face in any ‘celebrity’ reality TV show – because they essentially just have famous bodies, while all their fellow contestants are famous as people. The fact that so few people even knew what Lucy Pinder’s voice sounded like before she entered the show is testament enough to that.

Perhaps the only solution is for the producers to stop playing games and to be much more up-front about the blindingly obvious reality of why women like Pinder are always signed up for the show. Maybe it should even have been written into her highly lucrative contract that she was fully expected to ‘sex up’ the programme, something that was clearly the unspoken expectation in any case. And, while a certain section of the viewing public would doubtless still disapprove, a more direct approach might lead them to focus their ire more on the producers, and show a little more tolerance to the model herself.