Beauty & The Beast is an
Australian lunchtime
talk show which could pretty much be summed up as: “Media
fatcat gets paid to be as chauvinistic as he can towards a panel of six women”.
Stan Zemanek is “the Beast”, but I really think he is an adorable old pussycat in an expensive suit. He belittles the Beauties and comments on their breasts and has a lot of opinions about ‘druggies’ and ‘left-wing no hopers’ and “all the bleeding hearts out there”, but his arrogance I think is largely for the benefit of the ratings. He’s a darling man who claims to be naïve to the fact that women flirt with him (besides the fact he mentions it at least once a week) and sometimes his incredible generosity and general soft-heartedness accidentally shows through. He is in complete subservience to his wife Marcella. (Who takes his gold card and goes crazy.) Stan always says that 50% of viewers love him and 50% of viewers hate him. What makes the show so popular is that those who hate him still watch.
Basically they take letters from viewers asking for advice with problems or for opinions on recent events. Usually Stan gets off the subject somehow and everything relates back to breasts. When they actually stay on topic, it often results in a fiery debate in which Stan gets the last word because he gets to decide when to go to a break and cut people off mid-sentence. The panel of six women changes daily, but there are a group of regulars. Among these is poor, idealistic and naïve Jan Murray (an aforementioned bleeding heart). Stan, for whatever reason, gets really personal in his attacks towards her and has on occasion made her cry and run offset.
Then there’s the husky voiced Carlotta who is either a transsexual or has had a sex change. Others include Annalise Braakensiek the model, Charlotte Miller, Prue McSween (brash), Johanna Griggs (swimmer), Ita Buttrose and her lithp, Maureen Duval, one time winner of the Miss Australia and is now the Mother Teresa of the beauties; there are lesbians, astrologers and writers.
But my most adored, the one with the most panache and character is by far, Jeannie Little: a tiny, withery elderly woman with a scratchy, whiny voice and an Ab Fab dialect. An absolutely hideous and brainless woman, she comes up with the most eccentric, tangential responses. She disparages people in this really naïve unknowing way, and no one listens to her or gets offended, 'cause it's just Jeannie. She hates fat people and she wears an intense amount of makeup. You couldn’t tell if she was an annoying little man in drag or not. She is colourful and insane, her clothes are completely wacky, big purple rosettes on her tiny chest, abnormally huge gaudy plastic jewellery, horse pins that keep falling off her shoulder, blinding glitter, clown ruffles, earrings that weigh down her head. She says ooOOoo DARling a lot, annoyingly enough. She’s a gem :)
PS. I want to marry Stan.