Skin deep: Why it's time TV faced the truth about beauty

From Grand Designs and Property Ladder to The F Word and Celebrity MasterChef, a cursory scan of the schedules reveals that our national obsessions are well represented on television. Food is omnipresent. Fashion and interiors get a fair chunk of airtime. But where are the witty, entertaining programmes that explore beauty, a £3bn-a-year industry in Britain, and a daily preoccupation for most of the fe-male population?

That's not to say that beauty is ignored. Far from it. There are make-me-a-model contests, sensationalist documentaries about plastic-surgery-gone-wrong and seemingly endless makeover shows. Typical of the fare we've become used to is Britain's Next Top Model, which reaches its tear-stained final tonight on Living TV. It is the modelling and beauty equivalent of The X-Factor, replete with body fascism (how about judges telling size 6 women that they're too fat?) and out-and-out bitching.

But as a former beauty editor with a decade's experience in the job, I've never seen anything on television that accurately reflected the business or the way women buy into it. In my opinion, beauty should be given the same sort of billing that food gets, and food, as we know, is everywhere in the schedules. Furthermore, I'd argue that it's a subject that deserves to be treated with intelligence and sensitivity, touching, as it does, women's deepest fears and insecurities.

Most of what we get are makeover shows. The prototypes for this format are American TV hits such as Extreme Makeover and The Swan, in which "ugly duckling" female contestants undergo cosmetic surgery and follow a three-month intensive "boot camp" of exercise, diet and therapy, culminating in a "final reveal" in which, for the first time since entering the programme, they are allowed to see themselves in a mirror before they weep on cue for the camera.

The best-known British versions are 10 Years Younger and How to Look Good Naked. Offering the same reductive narrative, what they boil down to are "the before" and "the after", plus the obligatory fairytale denouement, in which a downtrodden, plump and saggy, or raddled and prematurely aged "subject" is magically transformed into a glowing, blow-dried princess, streamlined and vibrant in a new wardrobe of clothes.

10 Years Younger might be deemed an exercise in tough love. But all too often it takes its subjects on a very rocky journey, resembling a theatre of cruelty that subjects the woman in her "before" stage to the vile ministrations of charmless presenter Nicky Hambleton-Jones, who takes her out in the street and invites public comment about her often aged appearance. The hapless guinea pig is virtually bullied into having extensive and expensive plastic surgery (funded by the show) and dental work, where it is arguable that good professional hair and make up might have been enough to transform her.

Cruelty aside, the main problem with the makeover format is just how bland, homogenous and underwhelming the "butterfly" or "after" results can be. Tasteful blonde highlights and a bit of judiciously applied bronzer do not a style icon make; there is no attempt to tease out any individuality or creativity from the madeover subjects. In America's The Swan, the women ended up looking like Stepford Wives prom queens, plastic Barbie dolls with peachy golden skin, boring "nude" make-up and white-white smiles.

Defenders of the makeover format will cite Gok Wan's How to Look Good Naked, a show that refuses to berate or belittle his average size-16 subjects and instead encourages them to be proud of their faces and bodies without going under the knife. But there remains a real gap in the schedules for some serious exploration of the beauty industry in Britain today.

This month, BBC3's Beauty Season is attempting to redress the balance by scheduling real documentaries about the industry, not to mention programmes that present alternative views of physical attractiveness, including a reality show about disabled models. No makeover shows here, just programmes devoted to exploring the construction and consumption of beauty.

Fashion or beauty and disability might seem like uneasy bedfellows – but this is exactly the premise of the season's headlining show, Britain's Missing Top Model. It is a reality-show-meets-talent-contest in which eight disabled models battle it out to win a modelling contract and a shoot in Marie Claire. The format is unashamedly populist. The contestants live in a house together, so there's a touch of Big Brother in their fly-on-the wall interactions with each other. They're forced to compete in different photo-shoot and catwalk "tasks".

But we also get to see how the judges look at them in the light of their disabilities, and also, importantly, their personalities and talent for modelling. "Yes, it is populist, but I thought, what's the point of preaching to the converted?" says Richard McKerrow, the show's executive producer, in defence of the reality-meets talent show format. "I wanted to strike a balance between reaching a broad number of people and keeping some integrity. Ultimately, I want lots of viewers to watch. If you're too serious and too worthy you become like a bad teacher and the whole class will fall asleep."

One of the best aspects of the show is that the judges (who include designer Wayne Hemingway and Marie Claire's éditrice Marie O'Riordan) find themselves debating issues surrounding disability. They wonder aloud if they are pussyfooting around the contestants because of the struggles they confront. They are forced to ask themselves if they are picking a model for her innate ability in front of the camera, or because she'd be a good role model. They argue about picking someone who has a visible disability – an amputee or paraplegic, over someone who is deaf or partially blind or suffering from an invisible but debilitating genetic condition.

Watch a clip from Britain's Missing Top Model


This all has the surprising result that, as a viewer, you progressively become less aware of the individuals' disabilities and more aware of their personalities and their adeptness at the modelling game. When Marie O'Riordan sees a brilliant image of one of the girls wearing haute couture, her stump protruding from a short-sleeved top, she's not moved to comment on the stump but instead declares what a brilliant photograph it is and how she would like to have it in her magazine. And you find yourself in complete agreement with her. "Beauty isn't diverse enough," says McKerrow, "we should be better at celebrating difference in all aspects of society. The fashion modelling world is an incredibly rarefied world. It's not just inaccessible if you're disabled. It's inaccessible if you're not 5ft 9in, very slim and incredibly beautiful."

One of the biggest problems in our celebrity-dominated world is its increasingly homogenous definition of "beauty". Blonde, ultra-skinny fake-tanned celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie represent a kind of anodyne norm that desperately needs to be challenged. TV programmes like to blame fashion magazines and exotic catwalks in foreign countries. But television itself is a large part of the problem.

Just look at the legion of perky, peppy, girls-next-door who present primetime TV shows: Fearne Cotton, Holly Willoughby, Kate Thornton and Cat Deeley are easy on the eye, "vanilla" blondes who do little to challenge stereotypes of accepted beauty. And we are bombarded by their images on a daily basis. When even high fashion – in this case, Vogue Italia – decides there isn't enough diversity in its realm and puts out a magazine issue populated solely with black models, what hope for TV, where "pretty" and "normal"-looking (read bland) girls such as Katie Price, Colleen Rooney and Kerry Katona (all of whom have their own shows) reign supreme? We're not at the stage of America, where every news anchor is a Botoxed, blow-dried, desperate housewife – but if we're not careful we'll be heading that way.

Television is back to blaming magazines for the homogeneity of beauty in our society in another of the Beauty Season shows, Alesha: Look But Don't Touch, in which the Strictly Come Dancing contestant and Mis-Teeq singer Alesha Dixon investigates the prevalence of "airbrushing" and retouching of celebrity images in photographs. Here, at least, is an attempt to deconstruct the images of beauty we swallow every day. "It was very difficult to penetrate the magazine world," claims executive producer Mark Soldinger.

Alesha then challenges a magazine to put her on the cover without using any airbrushing. Eventually, the Mirror's Celebs on Sunday takes up the challenge – also running a picture inside the magazine of how she would have looked had they retouched her.

But the most revealing part comes when Dixon explores the effect that images of perfect (doctored) celebrities are having on girls; at one primary school there are girls of seven who worry their teeth aren't white enough. A 16-year-old says she'd had a breast enlargement because she feels she has to compete with Victoria Beckham. "I guess in the programme we're trying to get away from these unattainable images and the level that they are doctored," says Soldinger. However, he does concede that it is not only magazines to blame. "All visual media is responsible for our unrealistic expectations. Even in pop videos there's a lot of artistic licence."

The flipside of perfection, on television at least, is horrible imperfection, at its worst in the shows that sensationalise freaks of nature and plastic surgery gone wrong. Channel 4's BodyShock and its ilk are a Victorian cabinet of curiosities, a circus sideshow of bad surgery and babies with eight limbs. Sadly, BBC3 has joined in with this tabloid fetishising of imperfection with Konnie Huq's When Beauty Goes Wrong (all about disastrous beauty treatments and the harm they can inflict) and Addicted to Changing My Body, where journalist Louise Roe goes in search of various women who've had up to six breast operations, and tries to unearth their reasoning. "It's not just sensationalist, the programme does have a heart to it," argues Roe. "Some of the women I met were normal mums, they weren't glamour models or Pamela Anderson."

And yet the very premise of featuring women who've gone to extreme lengths with surgery and suffered horrific side-effects, such as leaking implants and reconstructive surgery, does feel like something of a freak show.

As Roe herself notes, cosmetic surgery is so omnipresent in our society now that it really is just normal mums and the woman down the road having "work" done – not only porn stars and celebrities. So it is a shame there is not more on our televisions that really reflects that, or indeed tackles the prevalence of Botox and injectables. To focus solely on the freakish extremes of surgery and women who have quite obviously got some sort of psychological problem, ignores the quiet epidemic of women, probably fairly rationally, having the odd Botox jab or the once-in-a-lifetime eyelift.

Ultimately, the BBC3 season, while raising some interesting issues, is patchy and in places too sensationalist. It's also tokenistic and doesn't go far enough to redress the balance and put some decent beauty coverage on TV. Personally, I would like to see some more serious beauty programming on BBC4, in the vein of the brilliant House of Chanel. Or a fly-on-the wall documentary that followed the world's top make-up artist, Pat McGrath, around on shoots and backstage at the catwalk shows? Or, indeed, a similar look at the life and work of a top conceptual hairstylist such as Guido or Eugene Souleiman? These are creatives of just as much genius and verve as designers such as John Galliano and Karl Lagerfeld.

The lives of beauty editors could make good reality television in themselves – flying around the world to glamorous launches, testing out spas, having blow dries and trying to investigate and assess products. The history of beauty is worth exploring; how about a travelogue looking at bathing cultures around the world, from the Finnish sauna to the Japanese onsen and the Turkish hamman?

TV commissioners often argue its impossible to put perfume on television, because you can't smell it, but just think back to the final task of The Apprentice this year, when the prohibitive cost of Alex Wotherspoon's double fragrance bottle for "Dual" cost him dearly; there are some fantastic characters in the perfume industry, like Roja Dove and Luca Turin and "noses" such as Francis Kurkdjian, who would make for quite wonderful TV. And finally, what about a proper consumer testing programme, a kind of Top Gear for girls, that deconstructs all the hype surrounding expensive beauty products and hairdressers?

And that's not all. British television badly needs programming to reflect the boom in plastic surgery and non-invasive procedures such as Botox. Despite intelligent and interesting highlights (for once, none of the vanilla-blonde variety), BBC3's Beauty Season doesn't go quite far enough.

'Alesha: Look But Don't Touch', tonight, BBC3, 9pm. 'Britain's Missing Top Model', tomorrow, BBC3, 9pm. 'Britain's Next Top Model', tonight, LivingTV, 9pm