How I See It

Beneath its slick of shiny lipstick, this make-up show looked oddly familiar…

This week, I watched two historical documentaries about make-up. One was Make-up: A Glamorous History on BBC Two, which recreated the faces of the 18th century. The other was Glow-Up: Britain’s Next Make-up Star on BBC Three, which recreated the faces of 2019. But that’s only because I pressed the wrong button on iPlayer and watched an old series by mistake.

I’m glad I did, because now if I say anything that gives the impression I thought it was derivative codswallop, we can happily assume that it just had to be derivative codswallop for its first series (to get the commission from nervous channel heads who need everything new to be like everything else they’ve seen before), and its 2021 incarnation is a radical new departure in original programme-making.

I actually quite liked it. I liked the make-up part of it, certainly. What depressed me was the “televised competition” part, in which contestants always have to be given an arbitrary amount of time to complete a challenge while the presenter shouts, “You’ve got 10 minutes! You’ve got two minutes!”, despite the judges subsequently having all the time in the world to say: “And the contestant who made up the best face/baked the best cake/sang the best song/is going home/is a loser/has humiliated themselves publicly and should crawl into a ditch and die, IS… [TENSE THUDDING MUSIC]” and then pause for a thousand years of fake jeopardy before the arbitrary name is given.

I noticed it especially in this Glow-Up show because there was so much talk within it of seeking “ambition, experiment and rebellion!” from the aspiring make-up artists who took part. The cosmetic bosses, magazine editors, product salesfolk and various other featured industry professionals kept telling the eager young contestants how much originality they wanted to see, then being disappointed because it wasn’t the sort of originality they were expecting.

They were all so trapped within the conventions of this particular TV genre, one mistrusted their ability to spot anything original anyway. One magazine editor, who had clearly watched a lot of such competitions on TV, obediently told the camera that “I’m underwhelmed, I was expecting more drama” and “There’s some amazing, amazing talent in this room”, presumably to give them a choice of cliché in the edit. But they used both.

It’s just so timid, so nervous, to copy other successful things, plodding heavily through the same old language and grammar of television. Fail on your own terms! That’s always been my motto. And God knows I have.

One of my rare successes, the BBC Two quiz Only Connect, might not be the greatest programme in the world but at least it’s a bit different, a bit idiosyncratic, a bit confident in its own quirky self – and it’s like that because, starting out on a tiny budget, in Wales, for a creatively ambitious channel (BBC Four), we were left alone to get on with it. Very luckily, everyone involved in the programme trusted it to find its way, rather than trying to force it into a familiar shape like a 12th-century Chinese woman having her feet bound.

But that’s so hard. Working in television, one regularly comes across (or struggles against) people who can’t distinguish between familiar and good. You can drown in proposals that proudly trumpet their aspiration to mimic something else – or directors and producers who want you to re-record lines of voiceover because your phrasing or intonation didn’t sufficiently remind them of EVERYTHING ELSE ON TV.

Despite all this, in the centre of Glow-Up (then and now) lurks something fresh: the spirit of the young contestants. Linguistically, they too can be gripped by the dead claw of realityspeak, yet their instincts with the make-up brush feel novel and creative.

They do to me, at any rate. I don’t know a great deal about make-up, but I do know that you should always go to sleep in it.

That way, you’re all ready to go if a hot postman rings the doorbell early. Also, I favour the French technique: always carry a small dog. Distracts wonderfully from the face.

I don’t understand make-up but I like it. Our binary culture wants to categorise all women as either vain birdbrains, constantly pampering and grooming, or intellectual frumps who have let themselves go. But I bet most feel like I do: make-up as a daily grind would be a terrible bore, yet I’m quite able to feel sporadic delight in a slick of shiny lipstick, a glimmering metallic eye shadow or a surprising, flawless nail polish. Glow-Up captures that joy – that playfulness, silliness and sense of experiment – and its ability to push through all the TV cliché was oddly moving, like a bright little daisy in a paving crack.

I’ll tell you who else wore silly make-up: the toffs of Georgian England. Lead paint, vast hair, mouse-hide eyebrows; nobody here was putting this on to blend in. If you wanted to blend in you’d have a ruddy complexion, six teeth and be grateful for them. Make-up: A Glamorous History was presented by make-up artist Lisa Eldridge who, perhaps because she isn’t a professional TV presenter, said everything in a slightly unusual way which I liked enormously. She’s also beautiful which, unfairly enough, never hurts in a visual medium.

The series could have probed a little deeper historically, but it had a freshness and quirk that’s much harder to achieve – or harder to cling onto, perhaps, during the long plod towards broadcast. It was strange and strangely appealing, like a fake mole.

Fail on your own terms! That’s always been my motto. And God knows I have

h Bake Off meets make-up: contestant Dolli on Glow-Up