I don’t know what it was like when Ugly Betty first made it onto US TV screens. But anticipation levels for her New Year debut here in the UK were extremely high, with television pundits falling over themselves to tip the show as the new hottie for Friday nights, and Betty herself (actress America Ferrera, above) as the coolest anti-heroine since Roseanne.
I wondered if the programme (shown here on Channel 4 and E4) would provide any legitimate fetish angles for this column. Fortunately the very first episode did just that when Betty, the newly-appointed, less-than-fashionable assistant to a New York fashion magazine publisher, was humiliated in fetish attire while performing model stand-in duties on a magazine photo shoot.
Betty makes her entrance as magazine photo-shoot stand-in for absent model
Now, allegedly, Ugly Betty is full of irony, or at least what passes for irony in American television. ‘Not especially beautiful girl gets job on fashion magazine and is good at it’ may be just about as ironic as things can get in a country often considered an irony-free zone. This being the case, it was hard for me to decide whether the tacky, plasticky dominatrix gear that Betty and the ‘real’ models were forced to wear for the photo shoot was part of the show’s conscious irony or not.
I wondered where they’d got this stuff from, and the end credits suggested an answer. The programme’s costume designer is none other than Patricia Field, who earned her television wings providing outfits for that earlier New York ‘fashion television’ confection, Sex And The City, and more recently had designs featured in movie The Devil Wears Prada. I suppose Field’s style (which, as a result of encounters with her downtown Manhattan store in the early 1980s, I always think of as having its roots in TV of a rather different kind) is not entirely inappropriate to this sort of lightweight fairy story fodder. I can’t help wondering, though, what kind of a look the show might have, overall, if its producers involved a designer with less of a ‘Hollywood glamour’ take on fashion.
Betty, dwarfed by ‘real’ models, is obliged to pose in tacky fetish gear
But will Betty be a big hit over here, and does it deserve to be? Well, given its stylistic similarities to Sex And The City and Desperate Housewives, it could easily enjoy the same kind of popularity as they have. We’ll probably all watch the first series because there’ll probably be enough originality in it to keep things fresh, but as the novelty wears off, and the fund of simple morality tales dries up, our interest might not be sustained.
But I could be wrong. I actually do like the Betty character, so I want to see what they do with her. And unlike esteemed British TV critic AA Gill, I don’t find the ‘real’ irony in this programme to be the fact that Americans think that placing an ‘ordinary’ person in a ‘glamorous’ setting is in itself so inventive as to be revolutionary. AA may have forgotten that Ugly Betty is not an American creation at all; she started out as Colombian TV soap character Betty La Fea, and from there the concept has been appropriated and adapted for television in about a dozen other countries including America — everywhere, in fact, from Germany to India. So the Ugly Betty we’re seeing here in the UK is not a Hollywood original but an example of US studios doing what they do all the time — remaking someone else’s ideas.
Humiliated, Betty flees the photo studio pursued by her boss
But I do find it interesting that in all of these remakes, the actress chosen to play Betty is in reality (just as America Ferrera is in the US version) somewhere between very attractive and stunningly beautiful, and has to be ‘made ugly’ to play the part. Why? Why couldn’t any of these programme makers have had the guts to cast a genuinely plain Jane in the lead role? Why has it become the rule with this show, wherever it is remade, that the only way to create an ‘ordinary’ woman suitable for the rôle is to de-beautify a beautiful one? That, I think, is a far more telling indictment of the mindset behind the whole conceit.
Ironically the best chance of a plain Jane playing Betty would be if we made our own version of the show right here in the UK. British television is renowned for featuring, in starring roles and especially in soaps, plenty of ordinary-looking people, not to mention a fair smattering of genuine baby-frighteners. But that is also why a British remake of this show was probably never on the cards. Precisely because British television has been embracing ‘ordinariness’ (or what we like to call ‘realism’) with enthusiasm since the 1960s, today’s UK audiences would just not see anything remarkable in a short, slightly chubby girl with braces on her teeth getting a job on a British magazine.
Fortunately for Betty, though, we are still willing to suspend disbelief if she appears on our screens in a more appropriate cultural context — to wit, one where (we are led to believe) perfect teeth really can get you further than a perfect mind.
I hear that the producers of Ugly Betty are having Syren Latex (www.syren.com) - masters of genuine latex fetish couture - create a masterpiece dress for an upcoming episode. Finally there will be some true fetish fashion on the show!
Posted by: juliachrista | 02 February 2007 at 01:09 AM