Diversity: The Ugly Truth

Prejudice against the ugly is the last unchecked prejudice of our time. But who’ll stand up for the face-aches?

It’s no secret that Doctor Who has been oddly tactful of late, with the thrills of time and space travel often seemingly taking a back seat to climate-change finger-wagging and lectures about historical racism / sexism. So I was a bit surprised to find myself irrevocably ‘triggered’ by something I saw in episode two of the new series: the Doctor, confronting an enemy whose features are entirely obscured by a battle helmet, yells, ‘Take your hat off, mate!’ – but when the enemy complies, revealing the hideous face of a Sontaran, she sneers, ‘Urgh – on second thoughts, put it back on!’.

Harmless? Perhaps. But only if there isn’t a single child anywhere in this country who looks even a little bit like a Sontaran – and, frankly, we all know that there are plenty. So why does the BBC feel it’s okay to show something that could lead to those kids getting bullied in the playground, when it is clearly so pathologically cautious about anything that could endanger any of the others? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is that ugly people have become the last under-represented minority on British television.

I personally have no problem with the steep upswing in diversity we’ve seen in TV shows and adverts over the past two or three years. It’s pandering and patronising, but it’s also given work to a lot of good people who would always have been unfairly sidelined otherwise. I just want to know why, at a time when there’s bags of diversity on screen, there are still no bags of spanners.

Presenters, newsreaders, weather people, soap stars – I’m not saying they’re all absolute knockouts, but can you think of a single one you’d hesitate to set up with a friend, based on looks alone? The soaps in particular have a long history of casting inarguably attractive people as outcasts no one wants to sleep with. (Hollyoaks recently killed off a creepy incel character who spent all his time spying on and stalking young women, yet somehow also looked like he could have been in a boy band and be going out with Hollyoaks co-star Jorgie Porter in real life). Even highbrow drama is just as liable to be afflicted by the same issue. Remember how former model Anya Taylor-Joy gets mocked by her classmates for being plain, in The Queen’s Gambit?

And then, of course, there are the adverts – so many adverts – that purport to feature ‘real’ people but actually feature gorgeous fat people, gorgeous spotty people, gorgeous people with surgically reconstructed faces, etc. The only truly homely faces on British TV tend to belong to game-show contestants, and then only on game shows where the format bars the production company from weeding them out. The starting line of the ‘fastest finger first’ round on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire can at times resemble a supermarket’s Halloween-mask display, but you’ll never see anything like that on Pointless, for example.

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