How to Feel 10 Years Older Watching 30 Minutes of Television
How to Look 10 Years Younger in 10 Days (Tuesdays 9.30pm, Channel Seven), is a makeover show that tries to do what its title implies. Each episode, a couple is stuck in a glass booth and people on the street are asked to guess their age, then each person is given a makeover, stuck in a glass booth again, with me wishing it would fill up Harry-Houdini style, and the public guesses their age. The makeover team that gets the youngest average age wins. What do they win? Not our hearts, that’s for sure, in a show that’s as much fun as an Andrew McCarthy movie marathon.
Hosted by Sonia Kruger in cheesy ‘I’m helping poor people who don’t look as good as me’ mode, How to Look 10 Years Younger in 10 Days is a show that values style over substance in every possible way. The makeover teams consist of hair stylists and groomers, not the horse variety, which take a real looking person and make them almost good looking enough to be on television. The end results always seem that the makeover teams make people look like their perfect vision of a younger, more beautiful person, who is, not inconsequentially, exactly like themselves.
The makeover teams only have ten days to achieve their results, so there is no time for exercise (a 21st-century mantra, if ever I heard one), so they often use surgery to remove the equivalent of a baby seal from a fat person’s midriff, or inject their faces with bovine toxins to take away those nasty ‘I’ve been alive twice as long as Miley Cyrus’ lines. The before-and-after shots have the Jenny Craig feel, with the older-looking contestant unshaven, without makeup and scowling, while the younger version of themselves is well dressed and happy, once hours have been spent dressing them and making their hair look stylishly messy. The show is also obsessed with giving contestants shiny, toothy smiles that look like those of Mr Ed or Sonia and only remind me of Jimmy Hannan. Just once, I’d like a contestant to say, ‘I like the older version of me better than the store window mannequin you’ve turned me into’. What’s next, How to Tie Your Shoes in 10 Days? Only, following this surgically obsessed format they’d end up giving the contestants a pair of sneakers with Velcro.
The show reminded me of the time I let my teenage younger brother housesit for me, while my housemates and I were away. As we prepared a meal on return, he informed me that he’d had a party and one of his mates had thrown up in our frying pan (he didn’t want to dirty our kitchen floor). After watching How to Look 10 Years Younger in 10 Days, I’m letting you know someone has thrown up in your frying pan; it’s up to you whether you cook a meal or throw it out.
This piece originally appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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