My dirty little guilty pleasure (aside from watching Christina Aguilera music videos with a cider and a bar of galaxy) is Secret Eaters.
I used to be somewhat of a TV connoisseur, eschewing the likes of Big Brother and the X Factor for more ‘underground’ TV shows with high ratings and a deep, moral message.
That was before I came to University. When I had a hangover at home, I’d unsuccessfully pretend I’d had nothing to drink, walking the dog at 9am with my mum, painfully dragging myself to the Farmer’s Market and valiantly choking down Sunday roast into my poor gurgling stomach. Nowadays, a hangover is spent as a day in bed watching Secret Eaters.
This sort of voyeuristic, exploitative TV show, made for viewers to laugh at the people on it and their obesity & stupidity used to turn my stomach; but when alcohol has already done that for me, it’s strangely addictive. You see everyday people- not these size 6 airbrushed glossy twenty-something actors and actresses on the likes of 90210.
People who use food as a crutch, who break and order a Domino’s even though their wallet and waistline means they shouldn’t. People who want to change but society simultaneously tells them to buy all of these foods with glossy adverts and discounts and then admonishes them- in the form of the hideously patronising host, and indeed the sniggering viewers- for doing so.
It’s also so obviously fake and mindless. The swiveling wall that everyone knows is there, and the food spies who the people on the show must know are following them- who wouldn’t research a show before going on it? But there’s something real about it.
It shows a side of us, and of society that is normally hidden from TV, and as someone who got dumped then weepingly ate an entire stick of garlic bread and a large pizza and then watched Gossip Girl– which made me feel like a disgusting, doughy mess, I get why this show is so addictive.