Watch TV with Paul Flynn
SOMETIMES, WITH TELEVISION , it’s the littlest details that are the most telling. When the 10 applicants on the latest season of the BBC’S fabulous make-up challenge, Glow Up, are introduced on screen, without any ceremony their gender pronouns are included after their names. Saying Samah (she/her), Craig (he/him) or Jack (they/ them) instantly targets the Glow Up
demographic. Suddenly, the show doesn’t look like Bake-off or Strictly. In that tiny moment of production thoughtfulness, the TV talent show speaks of 2021.
This show is made for the generation who grew up on a screen diet of Lady Gaga, Drag Race and Pose. In the first episode, early favourite Dolly references Afrofuturism as one of her abiding grooming influences. It doesn’t need explaining, because everyone’s seen Black Panther.
Gen Z has been incubated in conversations about gender, mental health, #Metoo and BLM, which their parents still argue senselessly over. So, on the one hand, Glow Up is just a competition where folk get to flex their creative muscle, like Interior Design Masters (interior design), All That Glitters (jewellery) or The Great Pottery Throwdown (sculpture). On the other, it matters. In the space of the first episode we’ve had two contestants expressing their autism in their work. Another, born with a port wine birthmark, explains, ‘I used make-up to disguise who I am. I have learned to love myself.’
As effortless ringmaster, Maya Jama’s empathy for the contestants is naturally gorgeous. Lauded make-up gurus Val Garland and Dominic Skinner are the judges, bristling on a finely judged line between sincerity and camp. For the first knockout round they’re joined by the great beauty journalist Ateh Jewel. There is the genuine sense that they care about the talent.
While the judges aren’t there to sugarcoat anything and give it both barrels when someone isn’t hitting a target, this is categorically not a mean show. In many ways, it is about the indestructibility of youth. As it turns out, there is no better medium than make-up by which to gauge it. Who knew? Glow Up does everything it says in the title, and more. Buried beneath the false eyelashes and blusher brushes is a competition with proper heart and soul. BBC Three from Tuesday 20 April