TV Review - Secrets of South America - Extreme Beauty Queens BBC3

Whilst the UK is a country obsessed with the weather, celebrity sex-lives and mediocre karaoke competitions Venezuela is a country obsessed with beauty. Girls of 4 don't play in the park but go to "beauty school" and practice putting on make-up and learn how to sashay down a catwalk. Having produced more Miss Worlds than any other country the obviously are doing something right but this pursuit of perfection comes at a cost.

Reporter Billie JD Porter spent 6 months in this peculiar part of Latin America following some of the aspiring beauty queens and the circus that surrounds them. Lets put it this way; if you are slightest bit ugly or overweight Venezuela is not the place for you.

Venezuela's equivalent to the X Factor is Our Latin Beauty (Nuestra Belleza Latina) and their Simon Cowell is Osmel Sousa, a camp beauty impresario with over 40 years in the business. Sousa knows about queens because he is one. He has the power to make or break careers and during his reality TV show contestants go through the mill until they are broken, emotionally and physically, until they fit Sousa's ideal of airbrushed "perfection".

With borderline OCD the smallest of details are seized upon and criticised. Ass not perfect? Get liposuction. Teeth too big? File them down. One contestant talks about him sotto voce.

"If you need a nose, face or voice changing he will tell you"

His show culminates in a grand final held in a huge sports stadium watched by TV audience of 50 million people. Despite Sousa being the paternal figure in Venezuelan pageantry his waspish comments do not show much compassion for the contestants. When one of them passes out due to lack of food his response is

"If you feint like a beauty queen, get up like one"

He is interviewed by Porter for his response to the feminists who protested against Miss World when it was held in London in 2011.

"Those protests were staged by Ugly Bettys who have no chance to be beautiful. All were horrendous"

His solution to virtually all flaws is to recommend plastic surgery.

"Nature has not been kind to some women"

To be fair to him he does practice what he preaches and has had so much work done he looks like Elton John and Barry Manilow's lovechild. You get the feeling he thought Zoolander was a documentary.

 In the UK beauty pageants died out with in 70's along with Tiswas and the "friendly" pat on the bottom so its curious to see why Venezuelan women still aspire to this Charlie's Angels image of plastic-breasted beauty. The answer may be that this beauty ideal is the one that wins competitions and doing well in Miss Venezuela opens doors in a country with very few opportunities.

Despite the poverty that affects large parts of the country families see expensive plastic surgery as an investment in the future the same way a public school education may be a short cut to a well paid job in the UK.
 

Porter interviews Maya an 18 year old aspiring beauty queen living in the run down Caracas slum of Santa Cruz. Her family saved up and forked out £7000 on new boobs, nose and dental work despite her looking stunning to begin with. The family make sacrifices not just because she is their daughter but because she is their meal ticket out of the barrio. Caracas is one of the most dangerous cities in the world with on average of a murder every 40 minutes and you can understand its citizens desire to move up the property ladder.

Hugo Chavez may have died but his legacy of his radical Bolivarianism lives on. Food shortages are commonplace since the state nationalised all the farms and Porter films an angry queue of women hanging about on street corners for basics like eggs, milk and toilet roll. Its no wonder aspiring beauty queens will literally do anything to win competitions. Careers, boyfriends and health are all sacrificed.

Perhaps the most shocking evidence of their desperation is that in an effort to loose weight Maya had a plastic patch sewn onto her tongue that makes solid food too painful to eat. All her meals are taken liquefied. You thought the Atkins diet was bad?

Its is a relief to hear the mother of another contestant reject this surgical madness 

"She doesn't need surgery. Who is competing? Is it the most beautiful girl or the best surgeon?"

With the BBC3 docu-bar being kept artificially low by the lightweight Stacey Dooley, Extreme Beauty Queens was a fascinating glimpse into this anachronistic way of life. Despite being a self-confessed newby to Latin America, Porter comes across as Alan Whicker in comparison to Dooley.

Of course it helps having someone as unhinged as Osmel Sousa as the centrepiece for a documentary but the whole hour had the air of an episode of Louis Theroux Weird Weekends about it. I can pay it no higher compliment.

Whilst a little green around the edges Porter did not shy way from asking probing questions but did so with an easy charm that got her subjects to open up to her. Let’s hope the remaining couple of episodes on South America are equally as entertaining.

Catch it on iPlayer for the foreesable future.

TV Review - Stacey Dooley Investigates - Cocaine Capital of The World BBC3

The war on drugs is one of the longest and most futile wars the West has waged and one which ruins lives on both sides of the divide. Fuelled by loudmouth tosspots in US/Europe this multi-billion pound business touches all of us directly or indirectly and the world's most powerful governments have been incapable of getting to grips with it.

Fresh from a her expose of the horrors of Magaluf, Stacey Dooley presents a three-parter on BBC3 exposing the murky world of the drug trade.  Think of her as a budget version of Louis Theroux, where serious subjects are tackled with the same knowledge and wide-eyed naivete you might find in your local 6th form media studies class.

Peru is now the largest producer of cocaine in the world.  This fact amazes Stacey and her first subject Danny, a cockney moron who tried to smuggle 1.3 kilos of Peruvian marching powder (the clue is in the title Stacey) out the country and is currently residing at El Presidente's pleasure, inside a overcrowded Lima jail.

‘I always thought Columbia was the world’s biggest cocaine producer,’ he tells Stacey, in his England cap . ‘So did I" she grins.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge on the subject would be aware the two countries share a border, a massive jungle and more importantly the kind of grinding poverty which makes growing coca one of the only viable ways to make a living.

With her credentials fully established what we get is Tracey pissing about in various locations; from the coca growers in the hills of San Jose where Tracey has to overcome the not-at-all staged road block by riding to the location on some passing donkeys.

"If it is this hard for us to get here think of the Peruvian authorities."

to the infamous cocaine laboratories of Santa Rosa where her attempts at creating some TV jeopardy by whispering sotto voce how they all need to keep a low profile are somewhat undermined by her delivering said piece to camera in broad daylight.

 

For those of you who are interested the process itself is a fairly amateur affair.  It involves picking coca leaf, sun-drying it and mixing it with salt, bleach, ammonia and gasoline in makeshift vats and treading all over it like a gap-student making wine in Provence. Whack the paste into microwave for 40mins and bingo!

Then she is off on a raid with a crack team of Peruvian commandos who are responding to a tip off. It might be revelatory to Stracey but they actually have helicopters that can reach those out of the way locations. As she tip-toes up a  muddy jungle path her excitement gets the better of her and she starts to resemble a fake tanned Blind Date contestant who drew the short straw and instead of being sent on a spa treatment got sent on a go-karting holiday instead.

"This is the most insane thing I've ever done"

The commandos get there but all the bad guys have scarpered leaving them to burn the makeshift factory to the ground in what feels like a futile gesture.  The outlook doesn't great for them as new varieties of coca leaf have been created that don't require the cooler hillside temperatures and can be hidden in the muggy Amazon basin well away from the prying eyes of law enforcement.

Despite the misery that cocaine inflicts upon the world you find it difficult to criticise the subsistence farmers who grow the crop in Cuchillo Cocha, an Amazonian backwater, when one says he is finally able to drink cold water for the first time in 50yrs as he can now afford a fridge.  Dooley tries her best to emphasise the apparent wealth of this town

"There's tin roofs everywhere"

but these guys certainly aren't living like they're in an episode of MTV Cribs.  Give them something else they can grow and make living and they will move on to that. Growing coca doesn't make them rich it helps them escape poverty.

With the best will in the world Dooley is not a serious documentarian and would do well tackling subjects more suited to her style (although I did enjoy her Blood Sweat and T Shirts expose in 2008). Perhaps she will develope with experience but here she just looks a bit lost and out of her depth.

The documentary may not be particularly eye opening but it is timely following the news that
two 19yr olds, Michaella McCollum and Melissa Reid, were arrested in Lima on Tuesday trying to smuggle 11 kilos of cocaine worth £1.5m out of the country.  Not to worry girls. I'm sure Danny will show you the ropes.

You can watch it for the next week in iPlayer but to be honest go check out Bruce Parry's Amazon  or Channel 4's Cocaine series for more substance.

TV Review - The Call Centre - BBC3 9pm

The much maligned call centre: a 20th century institution that everyone despises, especially the people that work there. Even though it isn't the most glamorous of careers over a million people work in call centres in the UK, that despite their bad reputation, provide the public with all manner of essential services from sorting out your gas supply, providing legal advice to organising a tow truck when your stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Useful they may be but their very impersonal and sometimes labyrinthine set-up can make contacting them a f*cking nightmare.

However, there are call centres and then there is the lowest of the low: the cold-calling telesales call centre. These are the type of organisations who will interrupt in the middle of your dinner and try and sell you PPI insurance or persuade you to put in a personal accident claim for an accident you’ve never had. They are the human equivalent of pubic lice and are about as welcome.

One such parasitic battery farm, going by the name of Save Britain Money, is the setting for new docusoap The Call Centre BBC3 9PM. It is managed by Neville "Uncle Nev" Wilshire a self styled "Napoleon" who is the real life embodiment of everything that was excruciatingly wrong with David Brent. Such are the similarities, after watching Ricky Gervais tweeted:

“I honestly don’t remember writing it but I must have surely. I think it’s my best work but I can hardly watch it”

Nev is a balding blowhard of a boss full of motivational baloney like "Smile When You Dial", "Glide In Your Stride" and " PPPPPP -Proper planning prevents piss-poor performance!". He seems hell-bent on creating an office environment that is a cross between a school playground, a night down the pub and 2AM fumble behind a nightclub.

"I'm like Napoleon. His troops loved him"

Do be fair he has a tough job on his hands trying to motivate the predominately young, dumb and lairy staff from remaining in their jobs when they are routinely abused by disgruntled punters who don't appreciate having an episode of Eastenders interrupted by their requests to buy cavity wall insulation.

"I've been told to f*ck off a lot of times."

Says perma-tanned Jenni.

"An old woman once told me she hoped I get killed. I thought that was a bit much."

Says another staff member who goes by the name of Chickenhead.

Whilst you may be able to excuse the mass sing-along’s during induction meetings "I've sacked two people for not singing", the jokey "banter" and informal ambience as an unconventional means of ensuring his staff stay positive and motivated (SBM motto "Happy People Sell"), his incursions into their private lives are harder to justify.

After seeing that admin assist Kayleigh was recently dumped by her cheating boyfriend, Nev steps in to turn her frown upside down in his own unique way. First of all he parades her up and down the office asking if any of lads fancy her.

"Any single blokes? I've got a desperate female here"

He then organises a speed dating event subtitled GKL (Get Kayleigh Laid) where staff members are invited to get drunk and cop off with each other. Showing that she isn't the best judge of character she selects South African sleazeball Dwayne but before he is allowed to break her heart again Nev wades and threatens to "throw him down the stairs" if he messes her about. Dwayne sensibly cuts his loses and bails.

Nev is easy to caricature and a documentarians dream, just turn on the camera and let it roll. Despite being a colossal d*ck is heart seems to be in the right place and he engenders a remarkable amount of affection from his staff despite his short-comings. There was a brief glimpse into his soul when his laugh-a-minute persona dropped for a moment as he described his bankruptcy and subsequent divorce as a "hurtful" period in his life.

Don't worry though he was quickly back into a swing with some gentle sexual harassment and mild ABH with new staff members shortly after. One of these newcomers is asked how she feels about her new boss after he parades her through the office with shouts of:

"Make way, good looking Welsh girl coming through!!"

"He seems really cool...a great guy...unless it carries on"

Personally, I think Nev’s enforced hilarity would make working at SBM my idea of purgatory but amazingly it was ranked 2nd in the Sunday Times list of "Best Companies To Work For 2013". For now, the bland politically correct tentacles of human resources haven't penetrated as far as Swansea thus guaranteeing Nev's place a micro celeb for the foreseeable future. Tune in next week to see how much "fun" you are missing out on.