I won’t claim that I have any great ability to look into the future — the nearest I come to soothsaying is being able to say the word “soothe” — but last week’s pictures of the original
Charlie’s Angels gave me a spooky premonition of things to come. Ye Gods, but it was an alarming sight: three women in their fifties who seemed to have been ziplocked into one of those preservative salad bags since 1981, and had all, gradually, by a process of osmosis, turned into each other. Kate Jackson had Jaclyn Smith’s nose, Jaclyn Smith had Kate Jackson’s mouth and they all appeared to have agreed that Farrah Fawcett’s chin was the best on the market. Additionally, and somewhat distractingly, Fawcett had hair like Noddy Holder’s.
As I stared into their eyes — all newly and oddly skewed, as if their agents had informed them that there was a putative Chinese Angels in the offing, or even a Chinese Angles — I had a thought. And it was: people really won’t be doing this for much longer.
Of course, from a legal point of view, we must remember that Smith, Jackson and Fawcett have not admitted to having any cosmetic surgery done on their faces, and that from what we can gather from the Living Channel people are being abducted by aliens and suffering weird intergalactic experiments upon their selves all the time. This may well be what has happened to Charlie’s Angels, but they are understandably too shy or traumatised to talk about it.
If this is the case, it is certainly unfortunate that the alien experiments have left the Angels looking as if they have had vast amounts of very extreme plastic surgery done all over what is left of their faces. Partially because that’s what everyone has concluded has happened to them anyway, but, mainly, because I suspect that having vast amounts of very extreme plastic surgery will become déclassé very soon.
I’d like to think that plastic surgery’s oncoming non-U status would spring from aesthetic disdain. After all, there’s no two ways about it: most such surgery makes clients look as if their faces have been only partially downloaded. Or like the cake from MacArthur Park. Or as if the cat’s had a go at them. Like . . . wrong. Sharon Osbourne and Cher are the only women to look better after having cosmetic skullduggery committed. All the other celebrities who are suspected of having had it (Anne Robinson, Mickey Rourke, Axl Rose, Melanie Griffiths, Meg Ryan, Courtney Love, Leslie Ash, Priscilla Presley, Michael Jackson, Jodie Marsh, Pete Burns, Joan Rivers), look notably, and famously, worse.
But, as a quick tour around Harvey Nichols or Harrods will confirm, people habitually spend huge amounts of money on items that are wholly aesthetically risible, simply because it proves that they have huge amounts of money. Dresses with Swarovski crystals on the arse. Those huge leopards you put on either side of the fireplace. Fur coats that make you look like the Honey Monster. Jewellery so chunky that it looks a bit like a surgical brace made by Liberace.
I can only presume that the popularity plastic surgery has hitherto enjoyed — while unable to smile about it, because 90 per cent of its facial muscles are in a surgeon’s bin — is because it signals the owners’ wealth. After all, there’s nothing quite like wilfully screwing up your face to prove that you’re above the petty concerns of the quotidian. The classic plastic surgery look does not play very well in day-to-day situations. It kind of looks as if you’re perpetually doing an impression of Frank Spencer going “Oooooooh!” on the occasion of having discovered a whoopsie in his beret. It’s not, in short, a face that you can take to Halfords.
But now the exclusiveness of looking like an alarmed Frank Spencer is gone. Let’s face it — quite literally — anyone can get plastic surgery these days. It’s as cheap as chips abroad. One phone call to Ocean Finance and a flight to Croatia later, and everyone can start to look terribly wrong. In Turkey you can get a new arse for the price of a sofa. You can go to Kenya for a fortnight, spend half of it watching rhinos and the other half having rhinoplasty. You can go to Egypt, spend the morning in the Nile on a boat cruise, and the afternoon in denial on the operating table. By 2008, I expect that you’ll be able to go to an ATM and remove subcutaneous fat from your arms at the same time as your cash.
And this is why, clearly, plastic surgery will soon be non-aspirational. The way of these things is that, as soon as the Take A Breakeratti start doing it, the glitterati stop. Wealthy people dislike having anything that their cleaners might also have (see Burberry, Louis Vuitton handbags, a small weekend crack habit).
Plastic surgery already looks like the quick, cheap option. For those dedicated to unambiguous displays of considerable wealth, you can spend far more time and money on “looking good naturally”: yoga holidays in the Blue Mountains, food supplements made of rare sponges, and whatever mad-bat stuff Madonna’s into this week.
Poor old Charlie’s Angels. Now they literally look like a Charlie’s Aunt.
Y'all better hitch up - or pay up
In Dallas, Texas, councillors have proposed a new law: those who expose their underwear, mainly via low-slung trousers, will be fined $50 (£27) on the spot. “It’s disgusting and embarrassing,” says councillor Ron Price. “I’m against people walking around with their trousers below their buttocks and underwear exposed.”
I suspect that, should the intergalactic prison the Phantom Zone crash into Dallas, releasing the evil Colonel Zod and his two equally unpleasant henchpeople, councillor Price will regret stinging Superman with a $50 fine.
Out til it's over
Here’s a cheering tale from a friend of a friend: last week, on a Virgin flight to the States, police boarded the plane just before take-off. They removed a man “of Asian appearance”, then came back ten minutes later for the rest of his family. Just as the other passengers thought they were about to taxi to the runway, the police came back and took the vacated seats to pieces. Finally the plane took off for a ten-hour flight — one that all the passengers surely found relaxing and enjoyable, and in no way like a psychological voyage to Hell and back.
I reckon that the days of conscious air travel are drawing to a close. Soon, once we have gone through check-in, stewards will stun-gun every passenger — maybe as we run through duty free — then put us on the aircraft in crates. It’s the only way to be 100 per cent sure of stopping terrorists doing something vexing mid-flight. And, for the rest of the passengers, surely our nerves can’t take being subject to fretful, waking travel much longer.
