TV Review: Extreme Makeover - Home Edition

Mum-of-14 Felicia Jackson gets a helping hand from Ty Pennington and his poncey pals. Photo / Supplied

One of the challenging things about being a TV reviewer is that your editor sometimes sends you a preview disc of something you would usually hold gingerly between thumb and forefinger with one hand while pinching your nose with the other. Such as the returning Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Ugh.

It probably does not reflect well on me that this do-gooder American TV reality programme makes me turn up my nose. The concept for the programme is that a middle-American - that means mostly fat and smug - community rallies around and gives a deserving family - that means mostly black and sad - a home renovation. But that basic description doesn't go anywhere near describing the whooping, pseudo-religious fervour, the embarrassing, barely articulate recipients, the gratuitous sentimentality, patronising smarminess and discomforting sense that one is being emotionally manipulated.

The show opens with a shot of an American flag waving in the breeze: 'nuff said. In tomorrow's first episode of the new season, the recipients of the television largesse are a struggling black family - a solo mother called Felicia with 14 children, 10 of whom she took on when her sister died. They live in three rooms of a cheap hotel, eat only microwaved food and spend hours at a community centre while Felicia works as a security guard.

Needless to say, there are no black faces among the smug white team who swoop down to "help" them. Host Ty Pennington arrives in working-class Maryland on a bus with a team of poncey designers. The designers wear trendy glasses and are called Paige, Preston and Constance. The family they are helping have cornrows and are called Tiana, Ta'nia, De Andre and Keyon. The programme might be more palatable if this huge class and racial gap was acknowledged. Or if some glaring questions were answered, like where are the fathers, and how did Felicia's own four children feel about being invaded by 10 cousins? Instead, there is a pervasive fakery that we're all just ordinary "folks together". Oh get real!

Why I should be surprised at the contrived premise I don't know: the show is a spin-off from the execrable original Extreme Makeover, which took unfortunate-looking losers and subjected them to the best appearance medicine has to offer: most notably permatans, botox and Persil-white sabre-sized gnashers. The idea behind the original show was the transformational power of facial DIY, whereas Extreme Makeover: Home Edition worships the redemptive power of home DIY, and it has outlasted the original.

But you know the truly amazing thing? Despite my Gina Hardface-Bitch cynicism at the treacly American family values promoted on this show, when I heard poor sad, overweight Felicia describe her day looking after 14 kids, I did start to soften. Because all the craven American network television hoopla - free clothes from Sears, vacation at the network-owned Disneyland, endless product-placement promos - couldn't totally overshadow the fact that a woman who promised her dying sister she would take on her 10 children and keep them together as a family is a bit of a bloody legend.

In the end, I had to unblock my snobby nose and mop up my tears. Ghastly as it is, no wonder it has rated so highly and lasted for seven seasons.

-Herald On Sunday / View