You know how you can eat a takeaway pizza or curly fries and – if the manufacturer/concocter has done its job properly – the combination of chemicals and preservatives that have been moulded together into the food-approximation you are pushing down your gullet seems to sate and feed your appetite for it, regardless of the self-loathing that fills you at the same time? Yes? OK, great – Send Nudes (E4) is the televisual equivalent.
Anyone with an ounce of sense and a grasp on humanity’s and TV commissioners’ basic urges will have seen this coming since Your Body Uncovered, presented by Kate Garraway, graced our screens in March. It used new technology to create a holographic avatar of participants with various medical disorders, who could then see themselves inside and out, walk around their own representations and view what doctors were planning to do to alleviate their health problems.
It has taken five months for the powers that be to put that technology to far lesser use. Yes, here is a show in which people with body hang-ups confront them holographically head-on (almost literally in the case of the pornographic actor Steven, because guess what he is worried about?) and are then presented with a modified digital body that shows what they would look like after surgery.
Send Nudes takes all the latent prurience and voyeurism promised by the new software, strips it of the medical gloss Your Body Uncovered valiantly imposed and – the final flourish, the extra spray-cheese topping on your nacho cheddar – adds public opinion to the mix.
Steven is up first. Vogue Williams, the presenter, asks if he is ready to see his naked avatar, the product of umpty-squillion cameras snapshotting him from all angles and rebuilding the picture in front of us. He is. It appears. He looks at it. We look at it. He tells us he wants a bigger penis – ideally one that is the same girth all the way down and ends in a nice “fat helmet”. A lot of people in the industry sport nine or 10 inches, he explains – and he feels he should try to step up.
Two options – longer, or longer and girthier – are shown and explained by Dr Sherif Wakil, who appears in a pastel suit against a multicoloured pastel background that makes him look like the host of a very, very wrong CBeebies show. You get an extra few centimetres by cutting the suspensory ligament that connects the penis to the pubic bone and injecting the shaft with abdominal fat. Steven looks thrilled. It would mean, says Wakil, he could still get hard, but the penis wouldn’t stand up. What? Dr Wakil, that is what we in the journalistic business call “burying the lede”. Steven looks unthrilled.
Fifty members of the public are invited to give their thoughts. “It looks like a deformed hotdog,” says one. “Oh no,” says another. Dr Wakil outlines some non‑surgical procedures – such as fattening the glans with some hyaluronic filler – instead.
Steph, a 31-year-old mother of three, has big breasts. Their natural sag has come to dominate her entire image of her gorgeous (as noted by the phalanx of 50) self. She wants them reduced and uplifted and can hardly look at her avatar. Her eyes fill with tears when she does – and delight when it morphs into a pert set of 34Es and a perter set of 34Cs. The 50 reckon on the 34Es, mainly because they are more proportionate to her tall frame, and bombard her with compliments and wishes that she could embrace herself as she is, while clearly understanding that for her, right now, this is not an option.
I marvel, as I often do during body-image programmes, at the disparity on display between the sexes. The man wants an aesthetic tweak to give him an edge over people in an extremely niche profession. The woman wants hers because a perceived imperfection has put her so far outside of what she has been told is the only way to be attractive that she can no longer live her life with ease. Are there men out there in the equivalent situation? Do we just not hear from them? Or is endemic self-loathing the overwhelmingly female experience it seems to be?
All these questions and more go unanswered by Send Nudes. You can gorge for ever without it doing you the slightest bit of good. Delicious, in its own soul‑rotting way.
