TV Revisited...Daria

I remember growing up in the 90’s and never really appreciating Daria, which aired every Saturday on channel 5. I was drawn to the pleasing aesthetic of the show but I could never relate to this ugly, gawky outcast and besides, I didn’t find it funny and the characters voices irritated me. Perhaps I was just too young to fully appreciate her.

Recently there has been somewhat of a Daria revival on freeview channel VIVA, with Daria episodes airing left, right and centre, and this time round, I’ve developed a bit of an obsession with the show which has definitely seen Daria dragged off the mortuary slab, resuscitated and thrust back into her high school uniform to relieve those painfully awkward days.

For those that don’t know, Daria is a series following the lives of the Morgendorffer family, but particularly titular character Daria as they ride the peaks and weather the troughs of life in a new town.



Daria herself is best known for her cutting cynicism, wicked wit and sinister sarcasm. She’s not depressed and she doesn’t have low self esteem, just ‘low esteem for everyone else’. She dresses in drab fashion, clashing colours that would never work on the runway and she seems genuinely bemused and wearied by American teen life.



Little sister Quinn embodies everything that Daria despises about the teenage experience. She’s pretty, popular and perky, a real life Jessica Rabbit, and an odd mixture of doe-eyed Lolita like sexuality and padlocked celibacy with a love of everything bright, shiny and fashionable and a dislike of anything hot, sweaty and dirty. Quinn does indeed have all the depth of a puddle but she still manages to be quite a mesmerizing character. She personifies young newly awakened sexuality that parades but doesn’t really understand itself yet, immaturely beautiful, understanding the effects of her looks but not the responsibilities they entail.

Dad Jake is the little boy who never grew up, and constantly berates himself for selling out and following the conventional norms of society and wife Helen is the businesswoman-cum-mother who tries to excel at it all whilst wearing her perfectly preened suit.



Outside of the intriguing family dynamic and clash of characters are the students of Lawndale high who encapsulate the little world that Daria and Quinn are propelled into. For Daria, this world consists of equally outcast artist Jane (famous for her red jacket, short black hair and witty quips), her brother Trent (a guy who may or may not have finished high school who now spends his time playing in a band called Mystic Spiral – name liable to change, on whom Daria develops the crush to end all crushes and okay, I was won over by Trent myself...), students Brittany and Kevin who exemplify the cheerleader/jock archetypes and Upchuck, the resident deluded lothario with about as much charm and sex appeal as a cockroach mated with a rodent.



Quinn’s world consists of a very different set of acquaintances. Within seconds of her arrival at her new school, Quinn is snapped up by the fashion club and becomes their vice president. Sandi, Stacey and Tiffany form her image conscious gang, symbolic of everything shallow, self-conscious, materialistic and insecure about teenage girls. Indeed, this gang are a kind of pre-Mean Girls or alternate ‘Ashleys’ gang from Recess. They talk boys, eye liner and beauty products and little else. Daria and Quinn’s high school experiences are polar extremes; Daria exists on the periphery and Quinn excels in the spotlight under the glare on the precipice of popularity and obscurity.



Beyond the student body, the teachers are an equally dysfunctional bunch. Mr DeMartino can barely repress his rage at the apathy and stupidity of his students and constantly wishes he was doing something else, whilst Mr O’Neill is still in the Pollyanna mode of teaching, believing that he is making a difference with his blood curdling sensitivity and focus on esteem and emotions.

So what is it that hooked me about Daria this time around? Daria is a show that is a skilful slice of everything that the 90’s was.  Each character represents and relates to a very definite aspect of many peoples lives.

For anyone that’s ever felt isolated by their morals or intelligence, there’s Daria.

For all the ‘what if’s’ and ‘if only’s’ of our romantic life’s, there’s the aching, embarrassing, hormone riddled infatuation that Daria has on Trent, a crush that probably would have little basis for a long lasting relationship but is definitely relatable to every teenage girl on earth.



Quinn is the shiny, super cute queen bee who has everything, and shows moments of maturation and growth beyond her desperate desire to fit in, acknowledging that everyone has something that they are good at, and for her, it’s being popular.

The fashion club represent herd mentality to hilarious effect, Jane represents alternate living, and Trent personifies the lazy but contradictorily ambitious attitude of a slacker with dreams.



Helen and Jake represent the power house matriarch and the coddled, ineffectual father becoming increasingly prevalent and I’ve never seen a better example of a teacher who just doesn’t give a rat’s ass (that would be Mr D.)

Daria is a brilliantly clever take on 90’s life seen through the eyes of a disillusioned teenage girl who can see through the fluff and pretence of cute clothes and bouncy hair, but what’s most important about this show is its heart. If it were made today, Daria would be portrayed as vivid and beautiful, and wholly unrelatable as an outcast loser ‘brain’. Instead, we can relate to Daria’s reluctance to fit in, her ability to soar above the average teenage issues (like getting a nose job or updating your wardrobe) and her awareness of the fact that there is more to life than high school. In this way, Daria is a role model for any outcast girl, or indeed, all outcasts, to escape from their petty problems and realise that Daria has been there and done that already. Daria doesn’t get the guy (Trent is always just a ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ crush, she  is never popular and she never manages to achieve bouncy hair) , but she does survive high school, and she does so by never sacrificing who she is, and that is all any of us can really ask for.

Beauty and the Beast: The Ugly Face of Prejudice

Series 2, Episode 3

Channel 4

9 o’clock





Channel 4 is renowned for its provocative, distasteful titles but does tend to scrape the surface of some rather poignant matters.

This time, the focus is on our obsessive relationship with a very narrow definition of beauty that an increasing number of women and men are cutting, injecting and butchering themselves to fit.

A handful of highly desired features are sought after by the individuals who pursue the never-ending search for idealised beauty: full lips, long luscious locks, large glimmering eyes, pearly white teeth, a smooth, wrinkle free forehead, a slim figure complete with large breasts and an ample bottom (buxom and gravity defying of course) and skin the colour of untrodden golden sands.

Few, if any of us, are naturally endowed with the majority or all of these attributes but yet this has become the pinnacle of perceived human attractiveness. The achieving of such beauty has generated a market of make-up, plastic surgery, hair extensions, false tan and various other products designed to strip the bank balance of girls and boys with disposable incomes (or their harassed, harangued parents) and the far reaching grip of the marketing machine is targeting younger and younger age demographics, forcing girls and boys to become preoccupied with their appearances earlier and earlier.

There has always been a pressure to look good and it’s not difficult to envision that there always will be. Beauty has always been valued, but over the years the definition of beauty has shrunk to fit a narrower, more defined margin, to the exclusion of an assortment of various other looks.

Magazines, movies and newspapers tend to portray a certain kind of look, to the exclusion and alienation of all others.

So what happens when the cataclysmic combination of a self-confessed beauty worshipping narcissist shares life’s with a person with a facial disability/disfigurement?

What can the two exchange and learn from one another?

Is there merit to the fanatical pursuit of beauty? Do we need to shift our priorities? Is our quest for beauty draining us emotionally, mentally and spiritually? (As well as financially).

You might come to this show with preconceptions about the ‘beauty’ and the ‘beast’. You might assume the beauty is vacuous, insecure, self-oriented, lacks will power and has all the sustenance of cotton candy. You might also assume the ‘beast’ is warm hearted, has triumphed over adversity, and has a greater grounding and understanding of what ‘really’ matters. This show attempts to unravel these preconceived notions, or solidify them. The interesting thing is that many of the beauties are adamant that they are self-confident and completely at ease with their dedication to a strict beauty regimen, perceiving it as both achievable and necessary. Some light probing though, suggests that the majority of the women are caught in a cycle of both short sightedness and deep rooted insecurities. By fixing the outside excessively, they feel they are soothing some great internal monster that threatens to engulf them with a yawn. What the show tends to reveal, as a trend, is that the beauties, despite being aesthetically appealing are often dealing with a ‘beast’ of their own in the form of a mental disfigurement, rather than a physical one, be it depression, an eating disorder or devastating insecurity.

This week we meet Holly Kent and Nelly Shaheen. Holly is a model and pole dancer, who initiated her career at the tender age of seventeen. Self-assured and assertive, Holly appears entirely in control of her destiny with the same cold tenacity worn by successful glamour models such as Jordan. She finds pole dancing liberating and claims she never feels happier or more at ease anywhere else than in a gentleman’s club. Although she doesn’t claim so directly, it appears that her career enthuses her with a sense of identity and womanhood.

Nelly by contrast, suffers with harlequin ichthyosis, a skin condition that forces her to partake in a gruelling skincare regime every morning to sooth her blistering skin.

The two instantly click. Both are confident, direct women who are cardinal in their approach. But Nelly exposes Holly’s less than glamorous past, revealing her battles with bulimia and crippling insecurity. Holly then turned to plastic surgery, parting with her cash for fillers and Botox at the tender age of twenty-two to combat the looming signs of aging long before their onslaught.

Holly is stubborn in her declarations that her chosen path makes her happy, but Nelly whisks her away to LA where hardened ex industry girls reveal their disillusionment and dissatisfaction with a world that centred itself solely on their looks and had no use for them when they were no longer novel and fresh out of the box shiny.

The girls become firm friends, cementing a new ideology that the external may be shallowly and superficially important, but the inside is the generator of all potential and power that can inspire a life. Nelly shines as a happy, warm and powerful young woman with the perspective to guide and inspire legions of others who struggle with disabilities or insecurities, and hopefully Holly will put her powerful ambition to a more worthwhile cause that will benefit her both in the short and long term.

'The Undateables'

Aired: Tuesday 3rd April 2012

Channel 4



When adverts for ‘The Undateables’ began to air, viewers automatically fell into one of two camps. There were those who, suffering from a reality TV malaise, assumed the show would be exploitative and shameless, and there were those who were generally (and perhaps shamelessly) interested in what rendered someone ‘undatable’. These kinds of shows evoke a bizarre voyeuristic urge in me. Any show that gives me a glimpse into another person’s life always intrigues me. This is how I’ve been unwillingly sucked into shows such as ‘The World According to Paris’ and ‘Audrina’, because despite how scripted and false they are, I enjoy peeking over the white picket fence.



Despite the provocative and controversial title, ‘The Undatables’ is a very human look at the difficulties several individuals living with different disabilities have to endure in the dating world, which is hard at the best of times for the best of us, in an increasingly shallow and superficial society. First we meet Richard, an aspergers sufferer, who douses himself in cologne prior to his date and eats her food. Richard has an endearing innocence to his character but finds it difficult to navigate the dating world when his aspergers means that he only likes to date women within a certain radius and he can’t always pick up on social cues in conversation. We then meet Luke, a tourettes sufferer who is matched with the very accepting Lucy, who reacts only with mischievous laughter when Luke refers to her as a ‘slag’. Finally, we are introduced to trainee teacher Penny who suffers with extremely brittle bones that leave her wheelchair bound. Despite this, Penny dreams of the typical, TALL, dark and handsome boyfriend who will accept her for who she is.



Dating is always a minefield at best, but this show exposes what most of us know anyway, that anyone that doesn’t fit a preconceived mould will find dating harder than others, but also that there is someone for everyone (whether that someone wants them back is another story). I found this a very compelling watch and I truly felt for the characters. Even with their quirks and eccentricities, they were still very choosy (and so they should be).

So does the show exploit its characters? In my opinion, no. Sure, I can picture some 14 year old drones drinking beer and laughing at the TV, but that laughter might be more of a reflection on the ignorance of the viewers. I think the majority of watchers would enjoy this sensitive and honest portrayal of what dating is like for a disabled person. The search for love and acceptance is what makes us human, and it was a very sweet journey to watch these guys and girls bravely take that voyage.

The World According to Paris...Einstein it ain't

Paris Hilton is Barbie incarnate. From her Repunzle-esque butter-blonde hair to her bottomless blue eyes to the general pristine, fresh out of the box perfection and cleanliness she radiates, there’s no doubt about it – she is Hollywood’s Z-list blonde. She’s pampered, preened and perfect. Notorious heiress and scandalised socialite, she rocketed to fame off the back of a homemade porn tape released by an ill-fated ex boyfriend. Plus she's got that Disney star grin.

She became a household name and poster child of spoilt, shallow and stupid (and sexy) whilst being silly and skedaddling about and getting up to various sensationalised scandals and shenanigans with former friend Nicole Richie. Paris was the clown-footed beanpole and Nicole was the cheeky cherubic one. The two cavorted around caravans and harassed their new households for money in the send-up of their selfishness ‘The Simple Life’ and since then, I don’t really know what Paris has been up to, aside from collecting a menagerie of exotic animals and brushing her hair in front of the mirror whilst attempting and pretty much succeeding (for a time) at breaking into the world of film (she took a pole through the head in ‘House of Wax’ and hooked up with a black actor to quash those racism rumours).



It seemed that the reality TV star crown had passed from Paris to the Kardashian sisters (one of which, Kim, also leapfrogged her way to fame thanks to a porn tape). It was now the turn of the doe-eyed, deep-tanned brunettes to saunter about acting moronic and moany, ‘entertaining’ us with their day-to-day stints in ‘Keeping up with the Kardashians’. But Paris seems to have awakened from her dead-pan, fish-eyed slumber in latest reality offering ‘The World According to Paris’. It’s not exactly Stephen Hawking’s answer to how the universe was formed, but there you have it.

So what do we learn about Paris? In her syrupy, sugary, sickening voice over’s, Paris informs us that she’s having to crash at sister Nicky’s pad after her residence is broken into. We also learn that Paris is somewhat intolerant of new assistant Lexie’s side job as a writer of porn scenarios forcing her to choose between penning naughty sex scenes and working for Queen Parie. But there must be more right? Yes...there is. Paris can’t stomach her 8 am community service stint, nor can she stand close friend Brooke's, (ex of Charlie ‘Winning’ Sheen) new assistant, whom she refers to with ironic short-sightedness as a ‘hungry tiger’. Paris has also bagged herself a boyfriend, Las Vegas club owner Cy, but the fabric of their wafer thin relationship is stretched to breaking point when a married with children ex begins to bombard her with texts.



For me, reality TV is a guilty pleasure. You don’t admit to watching it in the cold, harsh light of day. You watch it by candlelight, half hidden behind the sofa, with the curtains drawn and the subtitles on with cheetos in your hair. Then you go to work and talk about that awesome documentary you watched about the dangers of climate change. The truth is there is something inherently watchable about trash TV, and that includes the slew of ‘em from Jersey Shore to Teen Mom, and there is something fascinating (yes I said it) about trying to decipher whether Paris is a carefully constructed image, a sort of blur between Marilyn Monroe and a Cindy doll, or just a genuinely vacuous little girl lost in Hollyweird. In the world of silver screen blondes, she’s the curdled cream that rises to the top of the milk jar – the antithesis, the send-up, the satire of the beautiful, breathy blonde.

For the most part, Paris shows herself to be cold, narcissistic, judgemental, hypocritical, delusional and insufferable and her ‘world’ is equally so. Paris doesn’t realise that she herself is a ‘hungry tiger’ – desperate for a crumb of fame and to bask in the limelight of reflected success. If I can admire Paris for one thing, it’s her inability to bow down to the boob job brigade, but as Paris confides that the baby girl voice has gotten her everything she’s wanted and jostles her way through adult relationships like an emotionally immature, attention-whoring 13 year old, you realise that Nicole Richie might have settled down and levelled out, but Paris is still projecting...well, Paris, a facade with all the depth of a Disneyland ride. She hasn’t really changed and she’s not quite ready to show us the ‘real’ her.

New Girl (Pilot Episode) - We wont be saying 'go to hell' to Ms Deschanel

Aired: 6th January 2012

Channel: 4



Zooey Deschanel can act awkward, desperate and gawky to a T. It’s her ‘thing’. Jennifer Anniston’s booked the ‘eternally Rachel riding out a series of emotional relationship-related rollercoaster’s’ gig and Meg Ryan was the Queen of the blonde, ditzy rom-com girls. We seem to like actors that play a type and then deliver that type in a succession of identical roles with only alternating names, fellow characters and scenarios to differentiate them from the last.  Perhaps we don’t like to be surprised. Zooey’s ‘thing’ is to act the goofy cross of E.T and Katy Perry's backwater cousin on demand, but she’s a pretty cute and endearing girl with lamp-light blue eyes, so it seems to work for her. As such, it was only really a matter of time before she became the titular character in her own sitcom.

Zooey is Jessica ‘Jess’ Day, whose well-meaning world falls apart when she discovers that her boyfriend Spencer has been cheating on her. After cavorting around the room nude trying to play erotic with a potted plant and a cushion, Jess realises she needs to call time on the relationship and find some new lodgings. This is the concept of New Girl, Foxes latest American offering which is sure to succeed once it washes up on UK waters, all bug-eyed and irritating.

The premise of the pilot episode was that with great immediacy, Jess had located the perfect apartment on Craigslist where she finds herself berated with questions from the three settled housemates. Jess is a goldfish in a piranha tank, a kitten in a petshop of pit bulls...a...well you get the drift. There’s Nick (Jake Johnson) whose suffered a breakup of his own six months ago (but he’s over it...*sarcasm off*), Schmidt (Max Greenfield), the douche of the group who is a high flying lawyer and womaniser extraordinaire (his name also allows for endless word play such as 'Hey Schmidt stain!'), and Coach, (Damon Wayans Jr.) a shouty, angry, angry young man who can’t talk to women but can shout your body into shape in sessions.  Sadly, Coach is out after the pilot so don’t get too used to him.



Jess’s awkward, bumbling interview technique finally strikes a chord with her unimpressed hosts when she reveals that she has a hot model bestie CeCe (Hannah Simone) so the boys naturally accept her as their fourth and final flatmate. They soon begin to regret their choice when Jess degenerates into floods of tears at any given opportunity, watches Dirty Dancing on repeat and bursts into spontaneous song.  The boys decide that the only way to cheer Jess up and escape the insanity of her effervescently cheery personality is to get her a rebound.

With the boy’s expert coaching, Jess manages to secure herself a rebound date, by saying little, laughing at all of his jokes and demanding rebound sex. Unfortunately, the date doesn’t pan out due to Jess’s childlike neediness and text onslaughts. The boys, booked up with a party, decide to come to her aid and serenade her with ‘Time of My Life’.

This show has been heralded as something of a ‘new Friends’. I don’t think it’s quite that, even if there is something of the OCD Monica and the cloud cuckoo land Phoebe in Jess’s character and a vague remnant of Joey hovering around Schmidt. Nonetheless, it’s a sweet and funny, slightly indie look at 3 guys and 1 girl in a flat share looking to live life and find love. I don't know if Jess will becoming slightly unpalatable as the series wears on but for now her fish out of water kookiness seems to be going down well. I’m also looking forward to finding out whether Jess finds long-term love with one of her three flatmates...watch this space...