I Wanna Marry Harry

 This review refers specifically to episode 1, series 1, of I Wanna Marry Harry.

Imagine being a princess – it must be a dream come true. Well, it turns out it’s hardly the Cinderella story that this royal-em-up delivers, but the twelve American girls don’t care. We begin with this screaming, hollering vacuous bunch of aspiration breasts-on-legs being taken to a castle, spouting either blatant observations or statements so exaggerated I prayed for the hyperbole police to come and bludgeon them in their beautiful gawping faces with a nail bat.

The key to the show is that they are never told who the bachelor actually is – they just assume it is Harry, and then we are encouraged to laugh at them. Ha-ha, those damn Yanks, aren’t they silly? To help hero Matt Hicks pass of the illusion, he is taught to be Harry by his butler, Kingsley, a man with a stick up his arse. The only downside is that, despite Matt being a nice enough guy, he had all the charisma of a pee-stained rag on a bush.

The girls had lunch and got to know each other – apparently, they deem a 25-year old as an ‘olde’, which upset me personally. In between, we have many talking head interviews in which the girls big themselves up – this is essentially a bastard offspring of The Apprentice and America’s Next Top Model. Not-Harry arrives and the girls work themselves into a frenzy, before Kingsley tells them they are going to a masquerade ball and have some presents upstairs. These turn out to be dresses, and the girls scream again. There was a lot of screaming – it was like a horror film, but worse, and lacking in the requisite amount of butchery. The whole show would’ve been improved if Kingsley and the household staff were replaced with the Manson family.

At this point, we got to know some of the girls. The only remotely normal one was Leah (Georgia May Jagger), who I quite liked, although being surrounded by such shouty oppressive characters, she was quite negative and gloomy. Any good reality show also needs a villain, and it set up Meghan for this role – a catty artist from Dallas who looked like Mel Sykes possessed by a German war criminal – by displaying interviews of her slagging off the other contestants and claiming they aren’t princess material. Presumably, she learned her royalty lessons from Elizabeth Bathory.

To clue you in on the other ten, we have: Andrea (the lovechild of Idina Menzel and an eagle), Anna Lisa (Thai ladyboy), Carley (swimsuit model with a chimp’s face), Chelsea (a piranha), Jacqueline (Yarael Poof in a wig), Karina (the Stay-Puft man in a frock), Kelley (a half-inflated balloon with a face drawn on), Kimberly (concave mirror into a vortex of human depravity), Maggie (drunk Mr Ed) and Rose (slutty dolphin). There was pretty much no personality between them – it was just watching good-looking women potter around, taking up valuable seconds of your life that could be better spent trying to teach Urdu to a papaya.

Any good reality show also needs a villain, and it set up Meghan for this role – a catty artist from Dallas who looked like Mel Sykes possessed by a German war criminal.

So, for the night of the ball, and the girls must come and present themselves to ‘sir’ – the sheer excitement here causes them to wheeze and gasp down the red carpet like an asthmatic catwalk. Matt (the show helpfully refers to him as ‘not really Prince Harry’ in case we have become afflicted with a terrible case of the imbecilic) prances around like a man being ruled by his trousers, and the girls do not clock on to the deception due to the incredibly dull level of conversation they are allowed to make – ‘do you have a brother?’ being a highlight.

Not-Harry spends the night getting to know the girls, dancing and taking off to one side to indulge in duller parlance. The most interesting utterance was him telling Rose that American girls are loud, effectively causing her heart to infarct – we also had a sad moment when Not-Harry danced with Leah and she felt she had mucked it up, causing her to grow more despondent. I hope they gave her the number for Samaritans while she was over here. Then, the night ended in a bizarre cult-esque scene in which the girls were encouraged to unmask and present their grinning physiognomies to His Not-Royal Highness.

Not-Harry wandered off with Kingsley for a sadly-only-verbal dissection of the girls, before having Rose and Leah summoned before him. He got rid of Leah and gave Rose this week’s prize – the key to the grand bedroom next to his own. So, another catty remark from Meghan, then a clip from next week’s episode, which showed that we will be able to enjoy an increasing amount of bitch fights next week.

I can only assume that which each episode, the quantity of venom and hatred increases and so each visit to Not-Harry’s manor becomes a live-action portrayal of the subsequent levels of Dante’s Inferno. In the end, Not-Harry reveals the truth, hoping they will like his personality – which they won’t, as he’s more boring than parliamentary filibustering – so all this misery is a pointless waste of time anyway.

In summary, this is a pointless piece of fluff that darkens the world by existing. The idea of the fairy tale princess is a myth, and this show perpetuates a gross falsehood. Don’t show us glamour models with dark hearts intending to eat each other’s flesh – show us a stifled woman, walking around places she doesn’t care about waving to peasants she wouldn’t trust to lick dog faeces off her shoe, until the day she upsets the Queen and gets bumped off in a motor accident. Please, if you’re dreaming of being a princess, stop – go out and get a proper job, and do something helpful and worthwhile with your tragic life before you get bunged into the ground to rot away forever.

There’s a fairy tale ending.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwhHVNuHdjM&feature=kp