The Deeply Wrong ‘Hot Tub Ranking’

While surfing my hotel room’s 14 channels the other night, I happened upon an odd gameshow on the UK’s newest terrestrial TV station, Channel Five (unrelated, apparently to Channel Four or BBC’s 1 through 37). It’s called Hot Tub Ranking, and it’s the ultimate in British yobby laddishness. I couldn’t find an official website, but here’s something from a game show site:

A group of women go through a series of beauty contest-style rounds. A group of men, meanwhile, are rating the women for attractiveness behind a two-way mirror. There’s rounds for the face, bum, boobs and the overall package. For every girl that places themselves in the correct position of the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 order, they win £500 for the collective prize pool. There’s something not quite mathematically correct about this, since 5, 1, 2, 3, 4 gives no matches with the correct order of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 even though essentially only one person is in the wrong place. In the final round, they get to double their money if they get the correct order based on their overall looks, with useful information gained from the previous rounds.

Hurray for progressive British television! To ensure that everybody’s offended, the hostess is a young, buxom Japanese actress spoofing stereotypical Asian madames. And, in the final round, the three judges strip down to their skivvies and the five women reverse the process.

I just noticed an ad for another program on Channel Five–“Hidden Lives: Having a Baby Ruined My Life”. Tragically, I’m leaving the country before this on airs.