MY NEW TV SHOW IS LIKE THE ANTI-KARDASHIAN...
Michelle Visage tells why fans will be getting the real deal on her new lockdown show
SOCIAL media may be flooded with pictures of banana bread and homebaked sourdough loaves, but don’t expect to see them feature in Michelle Visage’s new TV series.
“Doesn’t it take like eight hours to make a loaf of sourdough bread?” she asks down the phone, speaking from her home across the pond ahead of new show
If you’ve watched her as a judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race, you’ll know the 51-yearold American star is never anything but flawlessly turned out.
But the coronavirus, quarantine and lockdown means even celebrities are having to turn their hand to all types of new things – like becoming your own
ROPER
make-up artist or filming your own TV series entirely from home.
And that’s exactly what viewers will see Michelle and her family – husband David and her youngest daughter Lola – doing. “I would describe it, I think, it’s like the anti-Kardashian, and it’s not that I’m anti (them), it’s just that we are a regular family in regular situations, in a regular house, doing regular things but we do it with heart, we do it with love, we do it with energy and we do it with determination,” she says.
“My husband is a one man crew, he is doing the camera, the lighting, he’s doing the sound, he is literally doing all of it.”
During the course of the series, viewers will see Michelle interviewing a few other famous faces, among them Little Mix’s Jade Thirlwall and This Morning’s Dr Ranj Singh.
Also in the mix is Michelle’s former Strictly Come Dancing alumni, fashion presenter Susannah Constantine.
The pair both showed off their prowess on the dance floor during last year’s series of the BBC1 show, with Michelle and partner Giovanni Pernice making it as far as the ninth week of the competition. Will viewers be seeing Michelle all glammed-up? “My make-up artist is going to hang her head in shame but you’ll be seeing the real deal, the real me, me at home when I’m not put together by a team.
“I have a good sense of style but I cannot do my hair, my nails have all fallen off, like you’re going to see the whole progress of me basically deconstructing right before your eyes.
“You know when we started this we were all like ‘I’m going to work out twice a day, I’m going to eat nothing but vegetables, I’m going to clean my whole house... and by week three we were all like ‘Alright, can I get some ice-cream and crisps please?’.”
The use of the word crisps seems a particularly British reference given that in her home country they’d be referred to as ‘chips’.
But Michelle has a genuine love of Blighty.
She explains: I actually properly fell in love with your country when I was 13 and came over for the first time.
“I don’t know if you believe in past lives, I do for our souls and I really believe there’s a part of me that was British in my past life.”
But back to the series and that question about the baking.
“You will see absolutely no sourdough, you will see no banana bread,” she says.
“But you will see me cooking and doing things that I do and my ways of doing things you know...”.
■ BBC Three’s How’s Your Head, Hun? is on BBC iPlayer now.