Just another naked bungle

Zoe Williams12 April 2012

As a general rule, I've always been in favour of taking your clothes off first and thinking later, but recent developments in the world of execrable telly have caused me to re-evaluate. I'm talking mainly about Helen Swain, the would-be LibDem councillor for Mirfield, West Yorkshire, whose chances of political influence were dashed when a rival rustled up some naked pictures of her.

Swain had stripped to her rather lumpy essentials for Channel 5's The Naked Jungle, a programme with no discernible purpose other than to prolong the painful death of Keith Chegwin's career. In response, Swain has said: "Just because I've been photographed naked doesn't mean I'd make a bad councillor" - an argument which is demonstrably wrong. Anyone prepared to sacrifice their credibility for Keith Chegwin is fit for very few jobs.

Had the debacle occurred six months previously, it might have been just the lesson needed to save the future political careers of the Big Brother hopefuls. Oh yes, Big Bro Three is under way, and as a prelude, E4 is showing videotapes of some entrants. Apart from one curious female in a bunny outfit screaming, "I love chocolate!", all are naked at some point. There is naked running, naked jumping and naked sitting about.

Well, for an economical and unambiguous way of conveying just how much privacy and selfrespect you are prepared to feed to the giant beast of reality TV, what else are you going to do? Flog your first-born to Temptation Island?

It is not impossible to be publicly naked at one stage of your life, and then be an acceptable adult later on - look at Glenda Jackson. Well, from the right angle ... You can easily imagine Sophie Dahl going on to be a prominent animal rights campaigner as an old bird, Opium campaign or no Opium campaign.

And the new girlie on the Pringle ad (sporting nothing but a string of pearls, in "witty" testament to the importance of the twinset) is not going to wake up in 10 years thinking, "Oh God, the shame!"

There is a perfectly rational formula for all of this. You have to calculate three things: the objective quality of your body shape; the creative worth of what you're going naked for (on a scale of Big Brother at nought, to Women in Love at about eight); and the importance of your role in the project (part of Swain's problem was that she was one of a number of nudies; if it had just been her, that would have been a mitigating factor).

Feed these three readings into a computer, and if it gives you a clever-looking shape like in the Bond films, then go for it.

All this fawning over posh totty

And she must be relieved - only last week, Zara Phillips made it onto the 50 best-looking people in the world list, and if you're lagging behind her in minx-status, you know you're in trouble.

Let's be frank - if either of these two were the new arrival on a soap opera, everyone would say: "What's that boiler doing on telly? Bring back pretty Patsy Palmer!" They are not beautiful, at least not by any of the standards obtaining over the past 500 years.

What leads people to say they are is no more than the transparent sycophancy still accorded to the posh and/or powerful, regardless of the evidence staring us all in the face.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be unsisterly, or suggest that beauty is the only, or even the most important, yardstick with which to judge a young filly. I'm just saying meritocracy is the coolest thing about this century. And we'll never pull it off if we keep up this witless fawning over the indifferent-looking spawn of the influential.

Now it's the Mouthy Rich v the Shy Rich

This week's stories are no exception - family homes in south-west London are now pretty much guaranteed to fetch a million quid. It's an open secret in south London that every other road is brimming with rich people. In my very own hood, Camberwell, there are whole long groves without a single house worth under a million.

And yet, the north London loaded persist in being surprised that there are loaded people, just like them, over the river; and the south London lot persist in pretending that they bought their houses 30 years ago, for 2p. So, we've got a new north-south divide - rather than rich versus poor, like in the olden days. It's now the Mouthy Rich v the Shy Rich. As they are evenly matched in terms of resources, maybe they should have a pitched battle to see which ones are best, possibly centred on the Thames - like the Boat Race, but with extra violence.

The rest of us can all get drunk and watch.

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