“No worst, there is none”. I thought the opening lines from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem about unimaginable pain and misery would be a fitting introduction to the subject of part two in my Irrational Hate series: ITV’s Loose Women. I know this is supposed to a list of my irrational hate for celebrities/pop culture phenomena, so please forgive me because my hatred of this show is perfectly rational.
My reasons for disliking the show are multitudinous. Firstly, I have problems with most of the panellists who appear on the show, of whom they are many but the established team consists of Andrea McLean (innocuous ex-weathergirl with a Blue Peter quality), Jane McDonald (apparently a singer but if there’s a shred of that West Yorkshire accent in her singing voice, she can’t be a good one), Sherrie Hewson (admittedly endearing former Coronation Street actress), Carol McGiffin (controversial, turkey-necked cougar who has had a fair few whacks from the ugly stick), Denise Welch (another former Coronation Street actress who sports dodgy plastic surgery and a bad bleach job), Lynda Bellingham (one of the oldest and most bearable of the group) and Coleen Nolan (uninformed, opinionated Spanx-wearer extraordinaire). The best I seem to be able to say about any of them is ‘she’s fairly inoffensive’. As Yeats wrote in The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.”
The second reason I dislike like the show is because they talk about the most inane topics imaginable. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the daytime television programme, this following is an example of the type of prattle you hear on the show. (Spoken in a blood-curdling Lancashire accent) “Did you ever go into someone’s bedroom and they have everything matching?! I went into a friend’s bedroom recently and they had the lampshade matching the bedspread, the curtains matching the carpet! I dunno ‘bout you but MY curtains don’t match my carpet! (Titters) Oh dear, that sounded like an innuendo!” *everybody falls about laughing like it’s the funniest thing that has ever been said*
Loose Women? More like Shit Hysterical Middle-Aged Bitches. Don’t get me wrong, I love older women who speak their minds and aren’t restrained in how they talk or how they act. Sharon Osbourne, Kim Katrall, Helen Mirren, Joan Rivers and Jo Brand are all brilliant, brave, witty women who stick their middle fingers up to sexism and ageism (in a world where both are still abundant). However, there is absolutely nothing racy or daring about the Loose Women.
Watching the show is like being stuck at the worst lunch table at work. In fact it is worse, because while the subject matter is as mundane and the panellists are about as interesting and informed as your typical middle-aged secretary, the former have massive egos and make a lot of noise jostling for attention, each believing that what she has to say is highly entertaining or profoundly insightful. (Really, it’s like having lunch with the shittest, most domineering member of every group of middle-aged women at work).
The only thing that separates a Loose Woman from a member in her audience is her ego... That and hair and make-up. Each day the Loose Women are trussed up to look like they are the mother of the bride; their hair is blow-dried big and they are lathered in false tan and Touche Éclat to the point that they look slippery, as if they are perspiring (although that might just be due to the hot flashes).
It becomes easier to understand the inflated egos of the Loose Women ‘stars’ when one looks at gossip magazines for mature women. The Loose Women are Girls Aloud for the menopausal; they are seen on the covers of Woman’s Way and Woman’s Own, walking down the street with no make-up on or climbing out of taxis with their mouths open, while captions read, “Coleen’s ageing fear” or “The tragedy behind Natalie’s recent shocking behaviour.” (Both are real headlines from current issues of mature women’s magazines).
Another thing I dislike about the show is the forced jolly atmosphere in the studio. Women talk about the things that affect their lives – ageing, marriage, family life – but they aren’t allowed to be serious or reflective. Every statement must end in an exclamation mark. They laugh about their big, hairy husbands, snoring or hassling them to have sex; complain about their whiny, money-grabbing children (who they love anyway, the little buggers!) and talk about themselves like their lives are just one big series of ‘hilarious’ mishaps and cock-ups. Anecdotes invariably end with statements like “me and my big mouth!” or “yet again, I end up on my fat arse!”
They send out the message that a woman’s life is a joke, because for all the talking that they do,
there is never real, frank discussion on the show. They constantly relate back to stereotypes – eg. 'I’m the nagging wife and he’s the long-suffering husband' – and thus reduce themselves and others to easy-to-manage, 2-dimensional characters. Because of this practice of lobotomising life, nothing meaningful can ever be discussed.
This flattening of individuals can be seen in the way the women refer to each other. Carol, for all her mingingness and her tendency to give too much information about her sex life, is one of the two open, honest Loose Women (the other being the rather charming Sherrie Hewson). She is an unconventional, fifty-year-old woman who enjoys having sex and has a much younger fiancé. In her bio on the Loose Women section of the ITV website, Carol writes that “Loose Women is [her] dream job. There is nowhere else on TV that old (well old for TV anyway) women can get an hour’s airtime without an even older man linking, patronising or interrupting them.” By all accounts she is an interesting person; she is a pro-age feminist but the other panellists don’t see her as that, they just see her as ‘randy old Carol, the cougar.’
Finally, the thing I hate most of all about Loose Women is Coleen Nolan. (“Mary, Mother of us, where is your relief?”)! When the 45-year-old, who rose to fame as the fat Nolan sister, isn’t forcing herself into a pair of magic knickers, she’s telling the other ‘girls’ that gay people shouldn’t be allowed to adopt children because “there’s only so much she can accept.” (Those particular comments landed her in a bit of hot water in January 2007). This coming from a woman who told her 15-year-old son that if he passed his GCSEs his step-father would take him to the Red Light District in Amsterdam and pay for him to sleep with a prostitute. But while her bigotry, hypocrisy and inability to put down the fork when she has a job on TV all irritate me, the thing that really gets my goat about Coleen is her self-congratulation. She has just released a new book entitled, Mum to Mum: Happy Memories and Honest Advice, From a Real Mum. (She is such a real mum that not only does she shop in Iceland, she also endorses it!).
In her bio on the Loose Women page, she writes “My loose lips and saucy innuendos regularly get me in trouble, but I can’t help it, I’m a big flirt”!
For me that line not only encapsulates everything that I hate about the woman, but the show in general. Urrrrrgh… Hormone Replacement Therapy has a lot to answer for.
PS. Coleen, stop shouting that you’ve lost weight when everyone can see you’re wearing a corset and you’ve just squeezed your spare tyre up into your boobs.
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