Why won't the beauty contest die? I thought it would go out with all the other driftwood of the 70s - George Best, Dusty Bin, big pubic hair. The others have fled, but every time you think the beauty pageant might wither, every time you think we have moved on just an eyebrow, just a toenail, just a blemish from kiss-me-quick-and-crush-me-slowly, it re-animates itself, like Dracula with a misogynist wishlist.
I have barely recovered from Miss University 2008 - an inter-British higher education slagfest where girls answered questions such as, "What Sex and the City character do you most relate to?" At that point I wanted to strip them of their degrees - and their over-moisturised heads - and use them as battering rams. Or tampons. (I hereby patent the idea of using beauty queens with degrees as tampons. I will be rich, like the man who invented Toilet Duck.) Is this why they went to university? To compete with other women where it matters least?
And now - now - we get the latest round of Miss Great Britain, one of Britain's oldest and creakiest beauty pageants, due to splay herself in May. Its promotional website is splashed with union flags. It's retro, says the marketing, and ironic. But isn't misogyny with irony still misogyny? Or am I being blond?
Miss Great Britain is an accident-prone beauty pageant: if she were a woman, she would always be puking up on herself. In 2006, Danielle Lloyd was dethroned after tabloid accusations that she had copped off with Teddy Sheringham (because he was one of the judges, not because he was Teddy Sheringham) - only for Lloyd to sue and force the claims to be withdrawn. In 2007, the winner withdrew in mysterious circumstances, and had to be replaced. Last year the contest didn't appear at all, presumably because it was lying on its back in a darkened room.
A few years ago, out of a grim and morbid curiosity, I went to see Miss Great Britain. It proved to me that every apology offered for this fleshfest is a silicone implant. The ballroom looked like an underground car park with a carpet thrown down. On the stage was Noel Edmonds. A girl whispered to me: "He's nothing without Mr Blobby."
Backstage, the geography was faulty. Miss St Albans wasn't from St Albans, she was from Watford. Miss Newport wasn't from Newport, she was from Swansea. "The Swansea title had gone so I did Newport," said Miss Newport. And they all went to pageants all the time - some had multiple titles, like a disease. Miss Bournemouth was also Miss Photogenic. Miss Torquay was the Face of the English Riviera (I didn't know the Riviera had a face). "Last year I was Miss Personality," said one girl with no personality at all. I wondered if she would have to surrender her title that year to a breadboard.
They told me stories. Miss Dorset once dated a football player whose ex-girlfriend ripped out her hair extensions in a nightclub toilet. She was also surprised because they had all been spray-tanned the previous night. "They sprayed so many of us," she simpered, "that the hotel air-conditioning system crashed due to overload." Miss St Helens stood in front of a mirror listing her perceived physical defects to me: "Makeup, hair, posture, bum, boobs, legs, walking." The only degrees here were degrees of self-loathing. The fear was real.
They squeezed makeup on to their faces until no more could fit. They taped their breasts up so it looked like there were breasts standing on their breasts. They wore Kermit the Frog-coloured wedding dresses and sprayed perfume in clouds, "because they can smell you from the front row".
I longed for a 1970 Miss World-style stage invasion. That was the year that feminists attacked the compere Bob Hope, and he accused them of being on drugs. But it didn't happen. Instead they got as their judge John McCririck, the hideously ugly racing correspondent from Channel 4. He looks like a boil in a suit - Prince Charming inverted. "I will judge them breast by breast," he said. And he did. "Number three had blotchy thighs," he said, as the girls stood nearly naked in bikinis before him. "Number 15 should sack her hairdresser. Number 27 should lose 10lbs."
Even one of the guys who ran it despised them. "I asked the girls to write out why they entered Miss Great Britain," he told me. "One wrote, 'I want people to understand that models aren't stupid. I've got four A-levellers.' Another wrote, 'I want to prove I have a brian ...'"
In the end, Lloyd won Miss Great Britain. They dragged out a throne that looked like a toilet and crowned her, and she said, "I want to cry but I can't because of my makeup." She was in danger of stumbling into metaphor. Miss Ilford, a veteran, said, "There are a lot of deflated girls up here. They take it to heart, you see." I imagined the girls deflating like beachballs. They looked unplugged, like curling tongs going cold.
The first modern beauty pageant was inspired by a dog beauty pageant. The impresario thought: we do it with dogs, why not with women? And now we are supposed to cheer, not jeer, on the grounds that it is all ironic. I have been there. There was no irony, and the food was terrible. As the stand-up comedian Natalie Haynes put it: "The only difference between sexism and ironic sexism is the height of your eyebrows."
• Charlie Brooker is away.
• This week Tanya watched Horror at 37,000 Feet, the 1973 William Shatner masterpiece about a defrocked priest trapped on a haunted aeroplane, pursued by a malevolent demon (no, it wasn't his agent). Sample of dialogue: "Aren't you afraid?" "Of dying? I gave that up along with the rest of my illusions. Don't look at me. I have nothing."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
photo: www.daylife.com
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