Sasha: Beauty Queen At 11, BBC3
The Seven Wonders Of The Muslim World, Channel 4EVERYONE, quick, sharpen your claws and gather round to condemn Jayne Harris! Jayne is a self-confessed former glamour model in Burnley who hopes
her 11-year-old daughter will be the next Jordan. She blatantly enters her in beauty contests decked out in enough make-up to restock a small branch of Boots. Clearly the woman – who pathetically seeks reassurance that she still looks the same as in her old pictures – is an Evil Mother living vicariously through her kids, no?
Well, that's what you're supposed to think every time this kind of story is trundled on to TV, as it is with surprising regularity (most recently in Painted Babies Growing Up). But Sasha: Beauty Queen At 11 left me with an unpleasant feeling that Jayne wasn't the main one exploiting her shy preteen.
It filmed her and the family being filmed on the Lorraine Kelly show, then reading Lorraine's inevitable comments about them in her newspaper column ("Och, she's very very very very pretty but I just don't know if it's right and neither does my wee Rosie," or words to that effect). It was just the latest in a line of media outlets rolling out Sasha Harris and her pushy mother for everyone to sanctimoniously tsk over.
So, to make the documentary different, the family were persuaded to enter her in an American pageant – supposedly, we were told, they had been 'considering' entering one at some future point but had 'agreed' to go for a particular contest which suited the production time.
In other words, the programme, not her mother, really pushed the girl into it – just as the exponential requests to cover her exploitation simply increase the family's misguided belief that she could be famous, the ultimate goal of our celebrity-obsessed culture.
For it became sadly clear that poor Sasha, as pretty as hundreds of other pretty 11-year-olds, albeit wearing more make-up, wouldn't make it. The fake plastic nails and dyed hair ruled her out for a conventional modelling agency, who wanted more typical-looking young girls for adverts.
And she stood no real chance against the ferociously drilled American pageant girls who grew up using tiaras as teething rings. She placed third in her age group. Out of three. It was inevitable, and the programme-makers' role in setting her up to be let down left a nasty taste.
Sure, Jayne Harris has some sadly limited ambitions for her daughter and yes, it's disturbing to see a youngster primped and pushed so much. But it's easy to whip up indignation against that kind of thing; it's easy to make programmes designed to provoke the reaction: "Oh my god, did you see that thing on TV last night, it was terrible!" This documentary wasn't just part of the problem.
The Seven Wonders Of The Muslim World did, indeed, cover seven important places to the faith, as well as the Five Pillars of Islam and five pilgrims making for Mecca. It was, perhaps, over-ambitious to combine an explanation of the religion's basic tenets with its most significant buildings and follow their journey as well – maybe just one aspect at a time would have been more manageable.
Still, this was a worthy attempt to show the spread and structure of Islam, from Africa to Spain, as well as the Middle East. It was interesting to see the simple box building, the Ka'ba, which millions face in prayer five times a day. As the crowds performed their ritual circles around the plain, intensely sacred cube, the camera pulled back making them blur together, flowing round like a river.
The full article contains 627 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
