Weekend Watch: This Year's Model
Will Jenny Jay Become Britain's Next Top Model?
I’m far from glamourous, and I certainly don’t turn heads when I walk down the street - not for the right reasons anyway. But some people have it, that intoxicating mixture of beauty and glamour, and we can’t help but admire, applaud and commodify it. And that’s exactly what young Sadie (Jenny Jay) discovers in This Year’s Model. However, will it be a dream come true or a fantasy which crumbles once real life sticks its grubby fingers in?
This Year’s Model emanated from the long-running Scene, originally part of the BBC Schools strand, and made its debut on a Thursday morning in December 1987. An evening repeat followed in February 1988 before This Year’s Model was banished to a dusty, forgotten shelf in the cavernous BBC archive. Thankfully, YouTube has come up trumps again as this short play was uploaded there a couple of years ago in all its fuzzy glory.
I wasn’t aware of This Year’s Model, but an old friend of Curious British Telly recently recommended it, so I decided to take a look. What I was aware of, though, was Jenny Jay. One of the stars of Behind the Bike Sheds, Jenny Jay popped up regularly throughout the 1980s and always brought a stamp of quality to any production she appeared in. So, I couldn’t resist and it turned out that This Year’s Model was such a fine watch, I had to pass this recommendation on to you.
I don’t want to provide too many spoilers, but I’ll provide you with a brief overview. Sadie - young, ambitious, and brimming with the naïve confidence that only a Miss Bletchley Gazette title can grant - wants to be a model. At present, though, her career trajectory is more Woolworths bargain bin than the catwalks of Milan. Signing on the dole and flicking through the record racks with her friend Mary, played by a youthful Kathy Burke, Sadie certainly has the looks but the modelling industry isn’t handing out golden tickets.
Luckily, Sadie’s tenaciousness soon pays off and, in amongst the mounting rejections, a glimmer of hope emerges when a model agency takes her under its wing. Sadie soon discovers, however, that competition is fierce, experience is crucial and a willingness to whip your top off is no guarantee of securing a peanuts promotion. If Sadie wants to start making money, she may well have to take off a little more.
This Year’s Model is a whistlestop tour of a dream turning sour, and it could certainly have been given more room to breathe. There’s a rich, sordid underbelly to explore at the here, crafted by the critically acclaimed writer (and ex-boxer) Tony Marchant, and it would have been intriguing to expand this universe a little more. But that’s the constraints of the schedules rather than a creative choice, so it would be unfair to hold this against the production.
Nonetheless, This Year’s Model remains a captivating watch thanks to Jenny Jay’s central performance - and it’s a mystery as to why she didn’t go on to become a household name. The denouement is also rather hard hitting, with Sadie confronted by a potential future which is less glamorous and glittering, more seedy and humiliating. This Year’s Model asks a simple, devastating question: when our dreams start to rot at the edges, why do we keep on chasing them?
It tells a familiar story in a minimalist, succinct style, but is all the better for it. Jenny Jay gives a fine performance, an underrated actress who should've achieved more, as this short TV play appears to have been her only leading role, but she at least made the most of it, and the accompanying songs in the background, written especially for the programme, showed she wasn't a bad singer either, though every time Kathy Burke appeared, she threatened to steal not just scenes but practically everything else except the camera,as at least she went on to better things, unlike Ms Jay.
It's tone is very realist, not remotely sanitising the kind of modelling work depicted, but neither melodramatic,as could have happened, with harsh truth that produce some rather touching,moving moments.
Contrast this about two years later with Dennis Potter's serial "Blackeyes", the first and only time he directed his own script, and as it turned out,unwisely, which had a similar plot of a young female model being exploited in a male dominated industry, but this time with a much higher budget, big name actors, stretched over 4×50 minute episodes.
I'm an admirer of Potter and his works on TV, a medium he genuinely thought was for intelligent artistic expression, but he could occasionally lapse into pretentiousness and self-indulgence, and he came a cropper with the critics if not audiences with this work, his usual non-naturalism, portentous narration (voiced by himself), leaden direction and lingering explicit detail marring any laudable attempts to disparage the treatment of the eponymous young female model superfluous, especially in serial form over three hours in length.
Unusually for a Potter play or serial, it was never repeated. At least This Year's Model was shown again, and was far more effective in what it had to say in a more modest but compelling manner.