UNDER YOUR SKIN: Channel 4 in Britain is apparently developing a new reality series which will send latter-day Cruela De Vil types out into the wild to track, kill, skin and wear their own creations, a show with the working title Kill It, Skin It, Wear It according to the UK tabloid The Sun. No news on whether they’ve contracted Ted Nugent – the only obvious choice – to host the show, but if Ted’s in, so am I.
The paper anticipates the usual outrage from animal rights organizations like PeTA, and exercises its own preemptory disapproval by recommending that readers “Just, Don’t, Watch, It.” As an enthusiastic carnivore – albeit one who thinks fur on men just looks tacky – I’m not so sure if this is a great idea. After all, no less than Jamie Oliver has taken part in hunts and showed animal butchering on his show as a way of getting viewers to understand and respect the process that brings meat into their table, and Gordon Ramsay “tearfully” killed and butchered two pigs he’d raised (and named with pointed enmity after the British hosts of What Not To Wear) on his UK talk show The F-Word.
“Not pleasant,” Ramsay apparently said upon emerging from the abattoir after the deed had been done. “I felt sick as a fucking dog in there.”
So if you’re one of those people who can’t watch Bambi or Dumbo, then you should know yourself well enough not to watch Channel 4’s show – should it ever make its way over here (I’m not holding my breath.) But anyone who’s ever held a placard or written clever slogans on their chilly naked skin outside furriers as part of some media-savvy protest should welcome the likelihood that some viewers could end up sharing Ramsay’s reaction in spite of themselves, and anticipate some potential converts to their cause. The rest of us will just have to wonder what a corgi car coat might look like.
NO REALLY – KEEP BELIEVING: Just after the overhyped shock over the finale of The Sopranos has finally been rendered absurd by its repurposing into a Celebrity Apprentice finale and relegated to 2007’s highlight reel, we read on the website of the New Jersey Record that the owner of Satin Dolls – the real-life strip club renamed the Bada Bing when it was used as the location for Tony Soprano’s headquarters – has put off renovations to the club in anticipation of HBO’s cameras returning to film a Sopranos movie in all the old neighbourhood locales.
“I got an inside tip that they’re going to do a movie, so I don’t want to make any major changes,” Satin Dolls owner Nick D’Urso told the Record last week. “I’m not going to reveal my sources, but we got a call from somebody [working] on the script.”
