It was a grey afternoon on Finsbury park station. All memories of our blazing hot summer had faded with our tans. We were back to griping about the ‘disruption’ to our North London/Hertforshire train service. Signal failure or something. I went to sit in a covered waiting area on the border of platforms 7 and 8. Beside the railway a building was being demolished – a college I think. The capital can be mundane sometimes like anywhere else.
But not for long. As well as me and a young lad, staring at his phone hopefully, there was a bleach blonde woman talking very loudly on her device. I started to zone in on her side of the conversation.
‘I just thought I should tell you. She can be very difficult’.
‘We would normally travel with her but I’m doing the launch of the Russian one’.
‘ I think she was pissed off the seasons are so close together. They are just back from Australia and they have to start in the UK’.
‘To be honest that’s all the boys who are forever taking their clothes off!’
‘I’ve told her agent, I put strict conditions in the contract – if she doesn’t behave she won’t get her fee’.
‘There’s you know – dynamics have developed between them. Holly and James don’t get on but Scott’s fine, she’ll be fine with him’.
‘I wanted to be up front about it. It’d be awful if you just got landed with her with no warning’.
Now I haven’t really watched the perma-tanned, coiffed, ripped Geordie Shore since I wrote about the first episode a couple of years ago. But I twigged that I was eavesdropping on one of the production staff of the ‘reality TV’ show. The North Eastern extravaganza has indeed done a series in Australia. I can’t really imagine what it must be like for the ‘talent’ as the woman on the platform called the participants in the show. They are professionals now, as she said they have agents and contracts like any actor. But not many actors begin their careers by living in front of the TV cameras full time, and continue to do so with the same group of people for years to come. I’m not surprised Holly is becoming somewhat ‘difficult’. I think if it was me I’d have cracked up by the beginning of season 3.
My train finally arrived. I never heard the end of the peroxide production woman’s phone conversation. But one of her earlier comments kept me thinking on my journey home. She said ‘the boys’ (who must be men by now?!) find life as stars of Geordie Shore easier than ‘the girls’ (young women to you and me). She said the lads just settle in to their new pad, and get on with drinking and shagging whoever they can pull. But the ‘ladettes’ don’t necessarily adapt (or ‘perform’) so easily and immediately. I have often wondered if hetero young men tend to have a bit more of a sense of ‘camaraderie’ than women when embarking on sexual exploits, which, lets face it, are the point of Geordie Shore. The ‘homosocial’ bonding of men in groups, that is somehow, ironically bolstered by ‘homo anxiety’, just isn’t the same in groups of women. As I mentioned when reporting on another metrotastic reality TV show, The Bachelor, alone with a group of gorgeous hotties who he had the pick of, Gavin Henson just didn’t seem very happy. He would probably have had far more fun with the lads on Geordie Shore!
As for Holly, I am afraid I am not going to tune in to see if she survives the next series. And I am certainly not going to watch Lake Baikal Shore, or whatever the Russian version is going to be called. But I do note the importance of this metrosexual, morphing genre of ‘entertainment’ we know as reality TV. And even if Holly is miserable she does get to enjoy this cheering view on waking every morning:
Quiet Riot Girl 