WHAT A TRANSFORMATION! THE TV MAKEOVER IS BACK

The TV makeover has been given a new look. While the first wave of programmes was often brutal in the name of entertainment, now the shows chime with our more touchy-feely times, says Stuart Husband

Earlier this year, a new series debuted on Netflix. Well, it wasn’t new, exactly; Queer Eye is a rebooted version of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy, a makeover show that ran in the early noughties in which a Swat-style quintet of gay men swooped into a hapless heterosexual’s life and transformed him, if not into a new man then at least one who might think twice before donning shapeless cargo shorts and persisting with a straggly mullet. As was traditional with makeover shows of that era, the love that was dispensed tended to err on the tough side, and was accompanied by generous side orders of snark. ‘It looks like you’ve used each disposable razor about 1,500 times’, or ‘these pants smell like 10,000 locker rooms’ were not untypical comments before the subject, freshly tweezed and reupholstered, was left to stammer his grateful thanks.

Fast forward a decade or so, and those sitting down to Queer Eye hoping for more of the supercilious same soon discovered that the show had undergone its own metamorphosis. While wardrobes were still riffled and man-caves brightened, the focus was as much on interior lives as exterior trappings. Tom, the self- confessed ‘ugly redneck’ of episode one, wanted help in trying to win back his ex-wife, while AJ, the semi-closeted assistant manager of a sofa store in episode four, was advised not only to stop wearing nerdy button-downs, but was also told, by the show’s culture maven/chief therapist Karamo, that he was ‘the epitome of what it is to be a strong, beautiful, black gay man’. There was a lot of hugging, plenty of learning and a not inconsiderable amount of blubbing. In short, the new Queer Eye is woke. ‘It wants to wrap Black Lives Matter, toxic masculinity, self- care, prejudice and how to choose a good patterned shirt, all inside the safe, affirming cover of a reality-TV makeover series,’ according to an editorial in New York magazine.

It’s safe to say that this wasn’t the criterion for the raft of original makeover shows – from Changing Rooms and Ground Force to 10 Years Younger and What Not To Wear – that cut a swathe through the TV schedules in the late 1990s and early noughties and gripped whole families, who were desperate to see the final transformations of the shows’ subjects, whether a poky semi, scrappy garden or a menopausal