Rock hard

Now that the Bush years are (finally) over, I can proudly announce that I love America.

OK, so perhaps I’m a tad late to join the pro-America bandwagon, but the world has been a hostile place for the past decade. I’ve barely uttered any approval for supersized meals or surgically enhanced it-girls for fear that some liberal will blame me for supporting the Iraq war. Now that Barack ‘The Second Coming’ Obama is in power, I can finally declare my LOVE for everything American. After all, where would we be without Britney Spears, a Starbucks on every corner, and those adorable housewives from the Bible Belt with their disapproving smiles? Such salacious shame! Above all else, where would we be without trashy, scummy American reality TV?

I don’t know how many of you will have heard of Rock of Love: The Love Bus. After all, Warwick is supposed to be a highly intellectual establishment, one founded on academia and not one which should encourage, well, sluttish behaviour. But that is exactly what Rock of Love: The Love Bus does. The basic premise of the show is that various women vie for the title of being Brett Michaels’ new beau. These women are renamed and branded like cattle for the sake of the program. Rock of Love is unarguably, and shamelessly, a misogynistic program. I should think that it is absolutely abhorrent, but a large part of me actually likes Rock of Love, and I can’t be the only one. It is currently on its third season, it has various spin-offs planned (I Love Money, Daisy of Love, Charm School to name but a few) and is itself a spin-off of the original …of Love, Flavor of Love.

So why, I hear you ask, is this program so vile? Well, I’ll tell you, but it isn’t pretty. The very first episode of this season contains a scene where one of the contestants consumes a shot from a bodily orifice of another contestant that should never contain a shot, if you know what I mean. Another contestant steals all of the other girls’ dirty socks, her reason being that they pad out to make her pillow more comfortable. Various contestants have been outed as, or continued on to become, porn stars. Need I go on?

Still, I love the fact that this program actually exists. British broadcasters are too afraid of taking risks nowadays, particularly after ‘Sachs-gate’ and the Celebrity Big Brother Racism Row, and so it is actually refreshing to see a program that is so unrestrained. This may not be ‘reality’ as we know it, but I think that everyone wants to see extremes on television. No-one really wants to watch a middle-aged lady making dinner for her used-to-be-interesting husband. If we all face facts, we want to be entertained by extremes, and we want to see those walking STDs make a fool out of themselves. Why? Because that is entertainment.