Let’s Get Naked?

Last year seemed to see an explosion of shows on TV which aped nakedness as a cure for most of life’s insecurities. Of course setting the ball rolling we had the camp crusader Gok Wan, with his self-confidence boosting charade which was How to look good naked, and it looks like a few TV execs had a free night that night as they saw this and immediately started to approve naked themed shows. Naturally all these shows have only shown tasteful nudity (well as tasteful as getting naked on TV can be to be fair), and start bragging about how being naked in public can be a life-changing event.

Anyway to cut a long story short, these kinds of shows kept coming as we saw the crusade of tele-journo Dawn Porter, trying to take on the fashion industry and single-handedly save femininity in one fell swoop in Dawn gets naked where funnily enough Dawn actually doesn’t get naked (not in her final crusade anyway). We were also treated Then came the final nail in the coffin for this trend as Trinny and Suzanna, the well known fashion it-girls who are well known for their disparaging comments about people wearing different clothes to them, suddenly took on an agenda (namely to try and save their flagging careers) to celebrate the British body. This culminated in a quite frankly pathetic publicity stunt where a load of naked people made a big naked model of a person. No one was that impressed…

I have to say I feel sorry for all the nudists, streakers and flashers of the world, as they’ve been banging on about getting naked for years, and more often than not have got a criminal record for their trouble, or generally have just been shunned by society. They must feel pretty stupid now that it’s cool to get naked in public, or elated depending on the person. I still think that perhaps the whole fad is a little bit short-sighted as getting naked in public is a big step into the unknown, but we all know the chances are that isn’t as positive an experience as people make out, but then sex, or nudity in this case, sells doesn’t it. We haven’t seen a flourish of public nudity yet either thankfully, as the message is so diluted in pulling in the punters to see a bit of flesh that none of the rather superficial ‘crusade’ aspects are taken much into account. It seems more like another form of the TV freak-show, probably followed on the same channel by a show about where a man now has a rubber head, from an unfortunate tyre factory accident.

In reality I am not going to suddenly take a walk around town throw off all my clothes for the purposes of self-esteem, as I expect the police may have other ideas about my rebellion against the fascism of clothing. Will the Gok Wan’s, Trinny and Suzanna’s of this world run to my rescue in an altruistic frenzy of saving my self-esteem and not stamping on my expression? I doubt it as not much in TV is ever altruistic.

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