Jasmine Sahu is well suited with this new American drama exclusive to Dave.
Lois Cameron explains why this series is much more than your average cosy period drama.
The last episode of this series sees Sherlock and Moriarty attempt to solve the final problem with devastating consequences.
With major cast changes afoot, Jacob Martin ponders whether Being Human can live up to its own scarily high standard.
Paris Hilton might be almost 30... but she’s still far too cool for the methods that regular people her age use to create friendships. She doesn’t need to talk to people or get to know them - instead she’s opted for the much more reliable route of hosting a reality TV show in which twelve hapless wannabes can jump through hoops in an attempt to become her BFF (or “Best Friend Forever” for those of us that aren’t well-versed in ridiculous acronyms).
Monday night saw the return of Paris Hilton's Best Friend Forever to ITV2 for it’s second season. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking - surely the ‘forever’ part of the title suggested that there’d be just the one season. Nope. Turns out Paris’ BFF from last season was revealed to be a bit of an attention-seeker (surprise, surprise) or a “hungry tiger” in the heiress’s own words (unsurprisingly, Paris doesn’t like hungry tigers!). I doubt it occurred to Paris (or her bank account) that there are probably better ways of finding a new friend than producing another season of BFF.
I have to say right now that I’ve never been a huge fan of reality TV shows in the first place, and I’ll be the first to admit that it was mostly boredom that led me to be watching BFF on Monday evening. For whatever reason, I did watch it; I guess I was sort of intrigued to find out if the show is as completely and utterly absurd as its title indicates.
It is. It really is.
Basically, Paris has hand-picked twelve contestants from thousands of desperate applicants, and this final bunch have now got to complete challenges in order to earn the much-coveted honour of becoming her best friend. The whole process kicks off with a party in Las Vegas (anyone surprised about that?), here Paris goes “undercover” and pretends to be one of the contestants so that she can learn some more about them all. By undercover, the show does just mean that she puts on a black wig, changes her make up and (poorly) puts on an accent (this all obviously makes her totally unrecognisable!)
In the first episode, we witness a couple of the aforementioned challenges too; they vary from doing a show-and-tell to getting up on stage and pole dancing. Without doubt the oddest one, however, is how she evaluates whether the contestants are “hungry tigers” (her way of calling someone fame-hungry). She doesn’t do anything quite so logical as putting them in a fame-based situation to see how they deal with it. No, Paris has them pet a tiger (yes, an actual tiger) to spot if the contestants themselves will be revealed to be “hungry tigers” (seriously, don’t ask me how this works...). She even eliminates one of her potential BFF’s when the tiger reacts angrily...
I ended up wondering if the whole contest is a joke. Some sort of way that Paris can mock her weird and obsessive fans. All things considered though, I don’t know if I’d give the socialite’s intelligence that much credit (mostly because she comes off as stupid and vacuous as her contestants do!) Of course, it’s not really all that complex, the show has nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with publicity; I can only hope Paris finds herself a BFF and then maybe (just maybe) she’ll leave TV forever.
You must log in to submit a comment.
