What next? Televised executions, probably (Make My Body Younger)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Make My Body Younger
Date:	20/07/09 (25 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Airs on Freeview BBC3-ish so very easy to avoid

Disadvantages: Factual information content best presumed dubious throughout

'Make My Body Younger' is the latest in a series of reality-themed health and lifestyle shows airing mostly on the Freeview channels, the main point of which as I see it appears to be to scaremongering, by means of 'laughing at the freakish folk'.

Given the ubiquity of these shows these days, together with the number of times each episode is repeated, most TV viewers by now will be fairly familiar with the general format: each episode features some young person with non-standard and / or ill-advised eating / lifestyle habits. This type of show might focus, say, on a young man who has survived on nothing but cheese sandwiches and salt and vinegar crisps since his childhood, or alternatively we might see a woman so insecure about her appearance that she is many tens of thousands of pounds in debt due to her excessive spending on cosmetic products - it doesn't matter because the exact nature of the problem is largely immaterial, since in every case in this type of show the outcome is always exactly the same: the freak of the week is made to face up to the extreme foolishness of their situation, then given 'help' by a team of professional dieticians, psychologists, money managers, beauticians, dating coaches, or whichever type of 'expert' is deemed most appropriate to help them with their particular brand of problem or problems.

It has to be said that this type of thing is usually a pretty unpleasant format for a television programme per se. There is little for a viewer to gain or learn by watching someone has, for example, become morbidly obese due to their insistence upon eating a full three-course roast dinner for every meal seven days a week for the past 15 years, being advised that perhaps he or she should cut down on his food intake just a little bit. The advice given on these shows is generally, to paraphrase the words of Basil Fawlty, a case of statin' the bleedin' obvious. In the case of 'Make My Body Younger' however, the above tried and tested health show format is taken to something of a new level of hideousness. Where this show stands head and shoulders above its contemporaries in terms of cruelty and gratuitousness, is in the extreme lengths the programme makers go towards frankly, scaring and upsetting its weekly participants.

The young people with bad diets and / or smoking and excessive alcohol consumption habits unlucky enough to be featured on the show find themselves dressed in flesh-coloured body-suits, quite literally strapped hand and foot to a mock-up of a surgical table and then subjected to a fake 'X-ray' - in full, all-singing, all dancing colour - of their internal organs, skeleton and digestive system. For some reason this is all carried out in a studio mock-up made to look something like a small combined autopsy / lecture theatre from a Victorian-age teaching hospital. A couple of fully-clothed, business- suited (male) 'doctors' stand by to give a running commentary on the 'X-ray' "results" while projected onto the wall in large numerals behind them is a counting-up timescale measured in years for each piece of tissue or organ as it is considered; this is designed to indicate the amount of damage the featured participant has inflicted upon each part of themselves by virtue of their particular chosen bad lifestyle or habits.

According to the 'experts' on this programme, eating no vegetables whatsoever, ever, might perhaps age a 25 year old person's e.g. spleen to the extent that it operates like the spleen of a 43 year old; go out in the sun too much and when you're 40 your skin will behave as if its twice as old as that. Drink like a fish and your 25 year old liver might have a 'functional age' of 108, and so on. All right, so I made all those particular figures and 'effects' up myself, but it's that exactly this sort of pseudo, unverifiable so-called statistic that this silly, silly, scaremongering, iniquitous, irresponsible programme seeks to peddle as some kind of useful or meaningful 'truth' each week.

Needless to say - given the title of this programme - following the 'X-ray' 'analysis' segment, the alleged goal during each hour-long episode is then to 'make the participant's body younger' - ie to reverse the presumed damage they've done to themself - and this is done by providing them with the usual diet advice, with added incentives in the form of footage of the participant's doting parent weeping over their child's awful 'body clock' results ("but it says his spleen's come out older than I am!" - it really is in very poor taste), shots of the participant weeping over their own young progeny, etc.

I can accept that somewhere buried in the ghastliness of this show's format there may be some useful outcomes for the featured people involved. But without exception, on all the episodes I've seen, the protagonists already KNOW they're a bit daft to be drinking quite that much vodka every night, or that the breadcrumb coating on chicken nuggets doesn't really count as one of your 'five fruit and veg a day'. Perhaps the intended idea behind the odious format is indeed to 'shock' these guys into some semblance of responsibility and / or self-awareness - but it still all comes across as so horribly exploitative, preaching and unnecessary.

No. I can't accept any apologies for it. 'Make My Body Younger' has to be the one of the worst things on television I have ever, ever seen.

Summary: More preaching about health and lifestyles from the BB-bleedin'-C