I was unfortunate enough to watch a few minutes of Paris Hilton's British Best Friend on ITV2 last week.
Now I know Paris by reputation but have never really watched anything she's been in. But a few minutes into this particular tent pole in the ITV2 schedule it became clear that there's so little going on between Paris's ears that if you slapped her head hard enough it would make that "pffft!" noise that an old CRT television does when you chuck a stone at it.
If you haven't heard of it, Paris Hilton's British Best Friend is basically a programme where a vacuous American somebody invites a group of vacuous British nobodies to compete for their friendship, something that no-one in their right mind would want in the first place and which should anyway happen organically if it happens at all.
The closest equivalent I can think of would be a show called Alan Sugar's Who Wants What I've Got? where Alan Sugar has a nasty bout of gastroenteritis and a group of mercenary young entrepreneurs compete for the chance to give Sir Alan a frenchie and thus catch the condition themselves.
When I originally heard about PHBBF, I had hoped it was some kind of Darwinian honey trap where anyone who walked through the doors of the audition room immediately fell through a trap door into a huge pit which would later be filled in with concrete for the greater good of humanity.
During the small section of the programme that I managed to endure, one sobbing wreck of a girl who on the brink of eviction was putting her case to a stoic (or possibly just catatonic) Paris to remain in the competition — “I just want it so much!” she whined.
Which is good because if we look back on our own experiences that's exactly how we choose our best friends, isn't it? Not the coolest, or the most charismatic, or the most loyal, or cleverist, or funniest person that also wants to be friends with us, but simply the person who wants it the most.
This is something that seems to come up again and again in reality shows, particularly the ones like X-Factor based on some loose notion of talent, this idea that if you want something badly enough you have a fundamental human right to have it.
If that were true, I would have spent the last twenty-five years living on a desert island with Janet Ellis playing with a fleet of remote control cars and drinking Slush Puppies every day.
In job interviews, when asked why I thought I was the best candidate for the job, it's never occurred to me to just say because I really, really want it.
“Well John, if I'm honest, we saw a number of people who were far more qualified and experienced than you, but none of them seemed to want it quite as badly, so congratulations! You're our new Client Services Director for Asia Pacific.”
Clearly this won't be the last time we have to endure this barely sentient rich kid on our screens so I thought I'd at least try to influence the precise form in which she might reappear and thus have come up with the following new reality shows for our Paris:
- Paris Hilton's ASBO Party Piñata — like a goose destined for a fois-gras processing plant, Paris is force-fed small toys and sweets and a group of blindfolded teenage delinquents has to hit her and each other with sticks until all the goodies are back out in the open
- I'm A Stick Of Celery, Get Me Out Of Here — Paris Hilton eats a stick of celery. We then watch the progress of the celery through her digestive system in real time via a series of micro-cameras implanted in her body until it finally emerges at the other end to be greeted by Davina McCall and a crowd of braying celebrity parasites, half of whom love the celery and half of whom hate it
- Paris Hilton's Kitchen Nightmares — Paris is given a large dose of LSD and then locked in the kitchen of a grotty council flat and filmed for the next 24 hours as she experiences increasingly intense waves of paranoid hallucinations...
- Paris Hilton's Solo Survivor — Paris is taken to a remote, barren island and... no actually that's it. She's just left there. No-one films it and no-one checks up on her.
If I put together a petition to send to ITV2, you'll all sign it, right?
Add Comment