Fet Milner

Crude Reality

Feel free to watch reality television, if it entertains you and you're not using my television. Feel free to sit in the back of lecture theatres whispering to each other about how absolutely shocked you were that the hot boy with the pseudo-mullet got dropped from NZ Idol, or that INXS look like they're going to end up with a socially-retarded ex-stoner 'spiritualist' for their new lead singer. In fact, feel free to get T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of Celebrity Treasure Island contestants. Then, when you feel ready, feel free to apply to be on one of these cheap excuses for not putting ads on twenty-four hours a day. Please do, it'll be a gift to the human gene pool.

When Deleese Williams was accepted to have the face and body that some whimsical deity gave her rearranged on Extreme Makeover, she thought she would become some kind of Cinderella. Or, at the very least, an ugly duckling transformed into a rather presentable duck. When the show's dentist informed the producers that her recovery would take six months, though, she was dumped like an old block of cheese, mouldy and dried to a brick in the back of the fridge. It turned out later that part of the show's angle involves coercing family and friends into saying cruel things about the image-obsessed surgical victim. Deleese's mother-in-law took up the challenge with a flurry of abuse, concluding, "I never believed my son would marry such an ugly woman." And, of course, Deleese got to watch all of the footage: every abuse, every admission of repulsion.

This was predictably difficult for Deleese to take, but it was her sister who was most tortured by the experience. Four months after she had spoken to the cameras about how repulsive she thought her sister was, how awful it was having to grow up alongside someone so obviously deformed, Kellie McGee overdosed on pills, alcohol and cocaine. She was not lucky enough to die immediately, though; this overdose merely put her in a coma in which she suffered four strokes and a number of brain hemorrhages as the drugs only slowly destroyed her brain. Imagine, then, how Deleese must feel; imagine the show's producers, grinning smugly to themselves for having dodged a very expensive bullet -- before discovering that they are on the receiving end of a very large lawsuit.

In 1995, the Jenny Jones Show (which seems to be an even more white trash version of Jerry Springer) had one of those "secret crush" episodes beloved of Rikki Lake. Sadly, one homosexual man declared his love for the wrong redneck and declared that he often fantasised about a "whipped cream and champagne" adventure. Three days later, the belligerent redneck, Jon Schmitz, obliterated his admirer's chest with two blasts from a shotgun at close range. Had the neighbours not alerted the police, Schmitz was ready to drag the body behind his truck with the aim of tying it to a fence to be eaten by carrion beasts.

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