Last night's TV: Nasty Nicky's knife is too much to bear

Published on Tuesday 27 May 2008 20:48

Ten Years Younger, Channel 4 Imagine, BBC1

IT'S THE sheer unapologetic affront of Ten Years Younger which gets my blood boiling. "We're the original and best show that says 'YES' to the knife!" it boasted on returning last night, giving no quarter to the complaints against the first three series. While Trinny & Susannah and Gok Wan may be shallow feelgood merchants for a dumbed-down age, at least they pay a certain lip service to the idea that looks aren't everything and that all the insecure may need is a little confidence boost.

But Younger, ruthlessly, has no such qualms: "This is the show that nips, tucks and tightens to get those years off!" And I find Nicky Hambleton-Jones one of the scariest, most unlikeable presenters on TV. Perhaps in real life she's a lovely warm woman, a great laugh on a girls' night out, in which case I commend her acting skills at playing such a bitch on TV.

This time the target was a poor soul called Amanda, who having had five children and a recent divorce could be forgiven, one would have thought, for looking a bit tired. But no: this is not the show that does forgiveness. Amanda was, as usual, put on display like a zoo animal for people to guess her age, which came out at slightly over her actual age. Ridiculously, the programme compared her to "other 38-year-olds" such as Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani and Catherine Zeta Jones, declaring that it was simply lack of effort which made her any different. How dare she not look like a multimillionaire!

Even the unfortunate woman's past was not safe from abuse. "Let's face it, Amanda's never really looked great, has she?" sneered the narration over some fairly average old photos. And while many people are rediscovering recycled or home-made clothes as an alternative to sweatshop fashion, she was also mocked for buying cheap charity shop clothes instead of expensive items. After all, with five kids she obviously didn't have anything more important to spend the money on.

Poor Amanda then had her skin peeled, her face hacked off, leaving her looking like someone who had been in a terrible burns accident (lovely for the kids to see), her eyes lasered, her teeth replaced, her wardrobe trashed. I suppose at least they had the honesty to leave in her comment, after the painful facelift, that she initially thought: "What the hell have you done? You stupid cow, how vain can anybody be?" But, of course, the format of these shows is that no one is allowed to regret anything and so Amanda dutifully proclaimed herself delighted with her new self.

As usual, she did look nice at the end but I suspect just the new haircut, make-up and a little attention would have had more or less the same effect. After all that, her new "age" was just three years younger than reality – hardly worth it.

Clearly people choose to take part, but this vile little show surely only adds to the insecurities people feel – well, let's be honest, that women feel. How so many women have allowed themselves, after years of access to education and the workplace, to feel their worth rests only on what they look like is one of the most infuriating stupidities of the day.

You wouldn't get that kind of nonsense from Doris Lessing, the Nobel-winning and no-fools-gladly-handled writer who was the subject of Alan Yentob's Imagine. This was an interesting discussion of her inner life, her "myth country" where she writes and dreams. Yentob seemed a little intimidated but asked intelligent questions and this was a thought-provoking profile.