A Critique of Daytime Television: 1.) Real Housewives

I just shouted “Yes!” when the announcer on ITV2 announced a double bill of Real Housewives of Beverley Hills.

I am officially a very sad person.

The thing is, when you are on maternity leave, there isn’t a lot to do.  Or there is, but most of it involves spending money I do not have.  Got a credit card bill in the post today and almost cried as I completely forgot I had a credit card that needs to be paid.  I thought the credit card was for buying designer shoes and pretending they were free, as the impact on the bank account isn’t felt immediately and therefore doesn’t count.  Real Housewives doesn’t exactly help in this respect as the women on it appear to have all the money in the world despite appearing never to do a single day’s work.  After googling some of the Real Housewives, I am reliably informed that at least some of them do in fact work, but how they manage to fit this in amongst all the partying, wine drinking and bitching, and asking stupid questions that no one ever asks in real life, such as “So now we’re alone…I wanted to ask you, why do you have such a problem with me?” and “Did you just give me the Evil Eye?  You just gave me the Evil Eye!” (the latter, btw, led to a full-on six person argument that I thought was going to descend into actual fisticuffs).  One of the cast of Big Rich Texas, which is even worse than Real Housewives, is actually a successful doctor and author, and yet seems to spend the entire series wafting around a clothes shop with elaborately styled hair, drinking and schmoozing.  This raises two questions: 1.) when does she do the doctoring and authoring? and b) why am I not this person?

Argh an entire section of the cast of Real Housewives of Beverley Hills have just swanned off to France (which is a LONG way from Beverley Hills, so we’re not talking driving down to Dover and hopping on Le Shuttle here) for no apparent reason, just because they can.  I hate them all.  That said, suspiciously all the scenes that were supposedly filmed in France seem to look exactly like Beverley Hills, so there is a strong possibility the whole trip has been faked (a bit like the Real Housewives’ friendships and arguments, one suspects).

Oh I love it, the French scenes now involve a French flag flapping about and, bizarrely, something that looks like a tank driving down the Champs Elysee.  Is France being invaded again?  Or is this just how Americans imagine the rest of the world rolls?  Maybe they just found some very old footage of Paris in 1945 and re-used it to save money on air fares.

Today, in a bid to get away from all this daytime television, I signed Piglet and I up for a parent and baby group at the local children’s centre.  This may be worse than staying in watching Real Housewives.  I doubt it will involve champagne, but it may well involve bitching.  Watch this space.

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