Loading ...- Category:
- Soap Box
- Author:
- Phil Scott
- Posted:
- Wednesday, 4 March 2009
That compelling cultural collision Ladettes to Ladies has reappeared on the box, with an antipodean twist.
In the original series, a slew of East End slags were transported to a stately home that doubled as a Finishing School for Girls.
The school must have fallen on hard times to participate in this fiasco, probably due to the fact that girls no longer need to be finished. What’s the use of knowing how to behave in a stately home if you don’t have one?
The courses were run by the most grotesque dragons you could imagine -” terrible snobs with no fashion sense and a highly developed sense of outrage. The show had everything: cat fights between foulmouthed scrubbers, with haughty bitches throwing in the odd caustic put-down on the side. Russ Meyer (director of Pussycat, Kill! Kill!) would have adored it.
Certainly Australia did. We love to snigger at the English with their gutter manners and fascination with bodily functions on the one hand, and their anachronistic social divisions on the other. It makes us feel egalitarian -” precisely the reason they ridicule us right back.
But our joy is muted with the new series, because the current crop of ladettes is from Oz. God knows why. It’s even sillier to teach low-rent local girls how to eat fish roe with three different knives and glide downstairs in a satin train. They might as well learn to speak Phoenician.
What are they being equipped for? Sorry, but Crown Princess Mary of Denmark was the ultimate one-off.
My friend Mike Williams and I were laughing about the preliminary heats that must have been held to find the Australian contestants. Did we miss the first elimination series, Bushpigs to Bogans?
To bring the whole thing into the 21st century (and out of the 18th), it basically needs a new set of aspirations. A Queer Eye slant, perhaps: Ladettes to Lesbians.
Or would the show work better if they substituted gay men? I guess drugged-up dance party boys could be the equivalent of the ladettes. The teachers could be prissy, drawling old queens who subscribe to wine clubs and the opera. The stately home might be a long-established sex-on-premises venue. One always approaches the sling from the left side-¦
And what lifestyle changes would occur? When the surviving party boys graduate, what kind of society would they be equipped for?
I see them in three-piece suits, picking the kids up from the crèche on their way home from work. Later, maybe a Parents & Citizens Committee meeting or local Liberal Party fundraiser.
In other words, masquerading in an alien world that treats them with deep suspicion, never fully accepts them, and requires them to eliminate every trace of who they really are. The gay version of respectability.
Hm. It doesn’t sound nearly as funny as the original.
Tags: Finishing School, Ladette to Lady, Ladettes to Lesbians
