Still in the running towards becoming America's Next Top Model

It feels like an aeon since I've dipped my toes in the utter camp insanity that is America's Next Top Model, so when a magical little bird dropped a few episodes of the latest cycle in my letterbox, I was happy to return to Tyraville.

Because, like death and taxes, America's Next Top Model keeps on keeping on. The reality series has been churning them out at a rate of knots; ask any casual viewer what Cycle the show is up to and they might guess, at most, the fifth or sixth iteration. WRONG: it's just finished its TWELFTH. After the nuclear holocaust, there will be cockroaches, Keith Richards, and America's Next Top Model.

Currently (courtesy of Fox8) we are midway through Cycle 12, and Episode Five (due to air next week) is a vintage ANTM hoot. The girls are first thrown a slumber party from notable former contestant Toccara, who brings a whole lot of pajamas to the model house - which is, as ever, wallpapered with pictures of Tyra - in an effort to teach them about what she sees as crucial to a model's career: "Person. Allity."

They then take their newfound intimacy with Mr Allity to a hysterical "pose-off", in which expat Australian and "DJ sensation" Sky Nellor brings the beats while they pull shapes - instructed by the marvellously OTT Bobby Ninja, posing expert - in front of a crowd of baying Leigh Bowery lookalikes, who are instructed to cheer the successful poses and boo the failures.

While the models compete for cheers, they'll be wearing clothes from The Blonds, aka Philippe & David Blond:


It is, quite possibly, the campest five minutes of television in history, and I LOVE IT.

The show remains intensely enjoyable, brain-free viewing, but what America's Next Top Model lacks is any real sense of the stakes being high. Very rarely are the models particularly "top", and the show has been through so many Cycles you get the sense the modelling industry at large just shrugs en masse whenever another winner is turfed into the pages of Seventeen.  

The reality is, Tyra's show has long since been overtaken by its overseas franchisees in the fashion stakes: Russia and Australia have produced actual top models, while Australia and Britain's photoshoots rival proper high fashion editorial - America's shoots are commercial at best, farcical at worst. Who remembers the "krumping" photoshoot?



Essentially the issue is that America doesn't really have a high fashion, top model industry. "But what about Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and Alexander Wang?" you say - well, in effect you've answered your own question. America does simple, effortless classics best - look at Ralph Lauren or Bill Blass - so there's not really any need for the sort of models who have an otherworldly look (in other words, the sort of models with longevity). When America's fashion industry attempts haute couture or "event" fashion, you end up with something like Episode Five's pose-off.

The main reason, let's face it, most people watch America's Next Top Model is because of the D.R.A.M.A. This show, through its lifetime, has given us dummy spits and bitch fights the likes of which Dynasty's producers could only dream of. Like this:


And then there's the "fashion roadkill" element:


Personally, I love America's Next Top Model and always will, for it gave me Jade. For those of you who didn't have the fortune of watching Cycle 6 (still my favourite, give or take a few moments here and there), Jade Cole was nothing short of a force of nature. Not to mention a dictionary unto herself, too: