Friday, May 11, 2001
There was a great moment in this week’s ‘Faking It’ (Channel 4, Tuesdays), when Alex, the frightfully posh, 5’6”, gay student from Oxford University, looked straight to camera and said in his new bouncer brogue, ‘I AM a doorman’. He wasn’t faking it any more.
The format is brilliantly simple – take an unlikely candidate, give them four weeks’ training in a new discipline, then set up a competition where experts try and spot the imposter. So we’ve had a classical musician taught to be a club DJ, a painter and decorator taught to be an artist, and the fey student taught to be a bouncer.
There are echoes of any number of other shows (anyone remember ‘In At the Deep End’?) but the show triumphs by getting real people rather than journalists to undertake the challenges.
For the first 15 minutes, the audience is convinced that it will never work. Sian the musician asks the cool DJ if you follow sheet music while working the decks, and Alex arrives at an estate in Hackney wearing a Barbour jacket, tweeds and a tie. Different sort of estate, mate.
But the intensity of the work then involved is immense – the fakers live with their teachers and have to transform their appearance, their accents and their back-stories as well as learn the craft they’re supposed to be faking.
Watching Sian emerge as a club kid was fantastic – the scene when her movement coach has her dancing round the room shouting ‘Coxie took the ROOF off last night!’ will live long in the memory. And Alex going to the barber’s for a number 1 complete with Nike swoosh shaved on the back of his head was the start of an amazing transformation.
The teachers deserve a great deal of credit. They offer support and encouragement, but they also offer friendship and are completely delighted when their charges fool the experts. ‘It’s like seeing your little brother take his first baby steps,’ marvelled Chris, the huge kick-boxer that looked after Alex.
If the mentors get a lot out of it, then the effect on the fakers themselves is amazing. At some point during the preparation, the fakers get so into their new life that they stop faking. They still have to concoct a plausible set of lies, but when it comes to performing their new skill, all of them actually mean it.
Sian’s growing sense that she genuinely enjoys this new form of musical expression was borne out by the set of decks sitting behind her when she was interviewed at home after the test was over.
And Paul felt early on that his immersion in the art world chimed with something that he’d sensed was already in him. He had something to say in his painting, and watching this self-discovery was deeply impressive.
Being a bouncer might not be so creative or obviously fulfilling, but even this got Alex in touch with a part of himself that he scarcely knew was there.
There’s also a class angle that makes the program very British. Sian and Alex were decidedly posh, and part of their training was to lose their plummy accents. But in the course of the four weeks, the bonds they built up with their teachers show an impressively healthy attitude on both sides to take people as they find them.
Paul didn’t have to lose his Scouse vowels, but he did have to learn a new vocabulary (his use of the word ‘serendipity’ in the final test was masterful), and also a new way of thinking about himself.
You might expect ‘Faking It’ to be merely a diverting hour’s TV which tells you a little about a range of professions, and lets you laugh at an amateur making a hames of it. Instead we get to watch brave people learning valuable lessons about themselves and about the good people who take them under their wings. ‘Faking It’ is for real.