Snog, Marry, Re-evaluate Life

Following hot on the heels of recent successes such as the ever ground-breaking My Big Decision, a top quality and not-at-all-cheap-to-make-in-these-difficult-times programme in which two sets of teenagers are sent off in VW campers to be bleated at by non-experts about their potential decision on an obvious subject, comes Snog Marry Avoid?.

The basis of Snog Marry Avoid? is so simple that even a dunderheaded fool with only the strength to remember to breathe can grasp it, and it’s aimed squrely not so much at a specific audience as at a specific timeslot that BBC3 didn’t have anything else to do with.  Basically put, they ran out of money for more Family Guy.

The format is straightforward though, having stuck with the adage of ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ Three have applied this ideal from the basic concept, right through to the production values, and even presenter and audience.  Jenny Frost is a face you may remember but you won’t know where from, and even with IMDB only 10 seconds typing away, you won’t care enough to find out.  Even typing this review, I haven’t bothered to find out.

Essentially you take the most over tarted, well, tart you can find and clean off their make up, give them a little lip gloss and a hair cut mum would approve of, and you’re sorted.  Invariably they react in a way that is a bit more “I miss my extensions, but maybe I’ll learn to like this shoulder length bob…” and before and after you show them to idiots in the street who instead of telling you to fuck off, actually have the time to grin inanely and say that they would “avoid” the Before look, and “Snog” or “Marry” the after look.

I forgot to mention probably the best of all of this, which is POD, the Personal Overhaul Digerdoo or Primally Obscene Design or something.  POD is apparently the computer who does the assessment of the subject before magically transforming them; a process we don’t see because location recording is expensive and we don’t want everyone to know that these fools are ‘made up’ by a regular BBC make up crew.

POD is entirely graphics based, and poorly made by a work experience kid who had once used photoshop to make Mellinder Messinger’s tits bigger, and was therefore consider an expert by the overstretched producer.  No doubt he handed in the final graphics just before asking “Could you sign my work log for this week too, Mr Alnbury says I have to get it signed”.

Of course, it isn’t difficult to find people to react as you want them to in the Vox Pops because firstly, you’re asking people with time to spare on a weekday in Covent Garden (i.e. no job, daddy pays for everything) and secondly, you selected the most hideously over painted doll that people originally mistake your subject for a Geisha who had a terrible accident.

No set, no talent and no particular premise make Snog Marry Avoid an exercise in either switching off your brain after a terrible experience in order to avoid PTSD, or an exercise in brain chewing-gum for insomniacs.  If you have a camcorder from 1987, maybe you could donate time to the Beeb and make this show for them, saving money to allow them to make something better in future.

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