I am trying really hard not to hate every single person on Australia’s Next Top Model Series #7

Let’s be honest, Australia’s Next Top Model is – and will forever remain – a penniless gal’s version of the US original. The same goes for Britain’s Next Top Model, New Zealand’s Next Top Model, and presumably for the other gazillion variations of the Top Model franchise in languages I don’t understand. For no matter how famous their hosts nor how beautiful their contestants, they will never have the sheer batshit crazy awesomeness that is this woman:

 

 

Dear Tyra Banks,

I love you.

Never stop being you. Please also never stop thinking you are a fashion icon despite a penchant for ill-fitting onesies and perma-camel toe. And definitely don’t ever stop making up stupid words for things that don’t need words. But most of all promise me you’ll continue doing hilarious impersonations of hood rats and hoochie mamas (as I believe they are called on the street) until the day you die. Peace, Nadine von Cohen. P.s. Please tell Andre Leon Tally I would do anything for his love, even that.

 

Anyhoodle, despite being a poor cousin to America’s Next Top Model, I have always watched and mostly enjoyed, the Australian iteration of the show. Sure Jodhi Meares was kind of dull and Sarah Murdoch, although charming, is not much more exciting. Plus Alex Perry and his douche sunglasses crown make me want to stick hot pokers in my eyes. But ANTM does have its merits. There’s…um…well really I just love watching skinny chicks pretend to like each other. Also, CHARLOTTE DAWSON! CHARLOTTE ‘CHAR CHAR’ DAWSON!

 

Can somebody explain to me when exactly Charlotte officially became Char Char? Every time one of the girls calls her this I imagine her standing over them with a riding crop and threatening to whip them if they don’t call her by her chosen moniker. Then I imagine she makes them repeat “I love you Miss Char Char” over and over while scrubbing the orphanage floors and waiting for rich bald men to save them from their hard knock lives. 

 

But I digress. Again.

 

This year the makers of the show seem to have assembled what may be the bitchiest, brattiest, vainest and most self-serving group of contestants the series has seen so far. Now before you get all shouty at me about confidence being a virtue and TV editors being Machiavellian villains out to ruin lives and destroy dreams, please take a pill of the chill variety. I appreciate a self-assured teenager as much as the next person (as long as I don’t actually have to talk to her), but in the case of many of these model wannabes, the self-esteem train flew straight through Confidence on an express mission to Stuck Up Little Bitch.

 

Remember back in cycle 4 when “Queen Bee” Demelza and the other “Dapto Dogs” bullied fellow contestant Alamela and then it became a massive media thing especially because the show didn’t handle it very well and Demelza ended up winning proving once and for all that bullying gets you EVERYWHERE? Well I believe some of the girls this season could give Demelza (or as I like to call her, El Jefe) a run for their bitchy money. The only difference is that this season there appears to be no individual bullying. But I would bet my left boob that the editors are under strict instructions to keep any evidence of girl-on-girl hate parties away from the public eye. Their evil asides to camera, however, are fair game.

 

So now every week for an hour of a Monday evening I sit glued to my TV trying desperately to remember that these girls are foetuses, and thus do not know what they do. But it is hard when presented with a bunch of egomaniacal princesses who think they know everything. Take contestant Caroline (now eliminated) who on a shoot in Paris called the stylist a bitch for not letting her choose her own dress. QUELLE HORREUR! Or Simone*, who am I beginning to think is actually made of evil and cheap perfume, who has so far confessed to hating “nature”, “water” and fellow contestant Neo. And last of all we have Amelia, she who spent last episode lamenting how being told she’s perfect all the time is just such a downer. I hear you, Amelia. Life is hard.

 

I’ll stop picking on teenagers now as I am a thirty year old woman who has had many more years than these girls to realise that nobody likes a diva - unless of course that diva’s name is Babs, Bette, Beyonce or Elton.  

*Simone is also responsible for what is my favourite quote of the season so far: “I was asked to walk futuristically and I had no idea what to do ’cause we’re not in the future yet. It’s still 2011.”