Despite myself, I am irrepressibly thrilled at the return of ITV live meat-market, Take Me Out to our Saturday TV viewing schedule. As much as the program is undeniably a shallow, materialistic, cliched cataclysm of tackiness, there is something so outwardly tongue-in-cheek about it that makes me watch without cringing uncomfortably at every cheap innuendo and lustfully inappropriate wink. And that’s just Paddy McGuinness.
Credit where credit’s due, at its rudiments the Take Me Out framework is pretty much TV genius. During one particularly dull evening back at uni, my housemates and I conducted an Apprentice-style idea session as to how the TMO format could be altered to accommodate all sorts of modern social problems – ‘Take Me Over’ where weary business-owners offer their companies to potential buyers, ‘Take Me Back’ for scorned lovers, ‘Take Me There’ for travellers bargaining for flights, ‘Take Me In’ for waifs and strays, ‘Take Me Under’ for funeral directors to tout for business, ‘Take Me Home’ for taxi drivers to help out the inebriated, ‘Take Me On’ for dyslexic A-Ha fans, and ‘Take Me With You’ for asylum seekers to hitchhike into the country.
SHOCKINGLY, it does not seem that ITV have been particularly enamored with any of our ingenious, ready-made TV hits, and have plowed on with yet another series of the original. As much as TMO is best enjoyed with a glass of chardonnay and a mind completely empty of self-respect and female unity, I cannot help but dutifully analyse it using my hard-earned critical feminism, rigorously drummed into me by an English Lit degree.
One must assume (nay hope) that when TMO’s pioneer first pitched his/her idea to the ITV bods it was met with the following response:
“You’re proposing that we build a prime-time, Saturday night television program around the premise of a man, standing in front of what can only be described as a harem of women, assessing each one almost solely according to visual appeal, before having to eliminate them as sexual partners one by one, using a cruel system of light bulbs?? Are you insane?? Have you any idea what they’ll say in the Guardian!? Or Huffington Post?? Or Jezabel?? Although The Sun would go for it I suppose…”
Clearly however, this was not the case. So, how did a TV show so evidently saturated with controversial gender politics ever make it onto our screens? Well, firstly I guess one must address the gender issues that are most prominent in TMO’s format. Although the show can legitimately be reduced down to the account given above in my imaginary board-meeting, it isn’t quite the whole story. For a start, the men are not the only ones doing the visual judging. Female contestants are actually the first to be allowed a go at playing are-you-attractive-enough-in-a-conventional-sense-to-be-my-next-sexual-conquest, as the man in question enters through the ‘Love Lift,’ before parading his wares up and down so that the baying women get a good look at what he’s packing and can choose a wattage accordingly.
This considered, I suppose its only fair to acknowledge the element of consent involved in the show – women have to be interested in the man (conveyed through keeping their lights on) in order for him to be able to date them. Paddy McGuinness helpfully reduces this down to an easy-to-remember catchphrase “No Likey, No Lighty’, just in case the concept was unclear for those less intellectually gifted. However, I have, on more than one occasion, witnessed a doomed date to the hideous British colony known as The Isle of Fernando occur simply because the woman ‘forgot to turn her light off’. It would seem that as a female contestant on TMO you have to be vigilantly on the ball at all times – let your concentration slip for but a second, and you could find yourself forced aboard an early morning Ryanair flight to a geographically undisclosed location with a balding chauvinist in red corduroys named Ricky.
So, I guess on a fundamental and technical level, TMO offers both genders the opportunity to exercise their most superficial, judgmental impulses by gifting them buttons of rejection. Is this gender equality? Both genders are equally able to judge the other’s attractiveness through myriad superficial categories, but somehow it just doesn’t feel right.
The problem for me is this: why, in all of the many series, do TMO episodes always consist of 20+ women, and only one man? Why is it always the man who is the dater, and the women the datees? However well-intended the producers of the show may be, and however much glitter and red lightbulbs they throw at the set-design, the curved line of dolled-up female contestants does somewhat resemble a cattle market, and the suited, booted and dubiously recruited male contestant the selective farmer…
Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing for women’s rights by lampooning ITV trash TV as the genesis of everyday sexism. I feel that TMO, when analysed even slightly (which I would recommend avoiding if possible, but I am in too deep now) is troublesome for both men and women when it comes to gender stereotyping. The apparent refusal of the show’s producers to experiment with switching the roles of the male and female contestants is telling, and somewhat fixes both in rigid molds. If, heaven forbid, a woman were to ride down in the ‘Love Lift’ to a banally generic chart hit of the past 18 months, strut around in front of a line up of particularly laddish lads before finishing with a flurry and pose next to Paddy, only for about 25% of the bulbs of judgment to remain white, we would squirm and feel dully uncomfortable, imagining the men lecherously sizing up her body parts.
This is because, in the world of TMO anyway, we are taught that a man’s sexuality is more sinister, powerful and dangerous than a woman’s, and subsequently a woman’s sexuality harmless, silly and not to be taken seriously. This is offensive to both genders and both should feel a sense of sadness at its indictment of modern sexual politics. Perhaps we have made great strides towards true gender equality in the past decade, but TMO, which in this blog functions as synecdoche for mainstream pop-culture, displays that we still have a way to go.
My advice to ITV? Mix it up a bit. Make the next series an all-male line up. Better still, make LGBT versions of the show – explore modern sexuality in a way that represents us all!
Failing that, I am more than happy to sell you, for a princely sum, the rights to Take Me Over, Take Me In, Take Me Under, Take Me There, Take Me With You, Take Me Back, Take Me Home and Take Me On. After all, think about how many prime-time saturday night slots could be filled with that little lot…