Terry Prone: How 'Operation Transformation' became unacceptable
Kathryn Thomas (centre) and the 2024 Operation Transformation team.
was the TV equivalent of the classic photograph of a woman — 90% of the time it was a woman —standing inside the jeans she’d worn when she was four sizes larger, holding out the waistband to demonstrate how big she had once been.
The factor that made it work, in the early days, was shame.
People actually volunteered to be humiliated. From the outset, they were mortified by having to be weighed while wearing Lycra outfits that turned their scale into something grotesque, of which they humbly indicated they were guilty.
Yes, mitigating factors were produced. Personal or familial tragedies were paraded as contributing to the shape they were in, and evoked sympathetic nods.
But no sympathetic nods were nodded when the series got under way and each participant had targets to reach.
More than 10 years ago, the ferocious Finn, Dr Eva Orsmond ate the face off a participant who had missed her weight-loss target by half a pound. When viewers gave out stink about this, Orsmond icily reminded everybody that was a TV show, and that anybody who met her away from TV cameras knew she was a caring person.
What she didn’t say was that she — Eva Orsmond — wouldn’t have been there to eat the face off the participant if it hadn’t made great television. Even 10 years ago, before social media had irrevocably hardwired the hunger for hostility into viewers, any TV producer knew that nice doesn’t play.
When it comes to weight management, viewers want controversy, enmity, reproach, reproof, tears, mortification with a bit of self-righteousness thrown in. Or did.
The diet culture of the time — most recently and repeatedly hammered by its greatest exponent over 50 years, Oprah Winfrey — permitted or promoted the controversies on a moral basis.
Orsmond, for example, brilliantly positioned the unfortunate carrying the extra half-pound by claiming the shamed woman was there to represent “all those young people who are either overweight or obese". The half-pound, accordingly, was the outward and visible sign of her failure to faithfully represent a cohort she was never elected to represent, never appointed to represent, never paid to represent.
Balance, in TV terms, was provided by crawling sympathy from other participants and joyful reinforcement of weight loss success. Education arrived in the form of friendly little lectures about empty calories. Fitness was gestured at.
It was hugely popular, not because of the friendly little lectures or the gestures towards fitness but because of the mortification. If you didn’t move along towards the photograph of you standing inside your jeans holding out the waistband, you were a real and present failure, redeemable only by extra effort the following week.
One would be unwise to suggest that all of that meant fed into the thought processes leading to eating disorder development, but the fact is that even 17 seasons ago, we knew that people who precipitously lose weight almost invariably put it back on. And then some. Yet the programme pushed what it knew to be a false scenario. Never mind the long term, check out the weight loss this week.
One of Orsmond’s doctor-successors, unbeknown to herself, articulated the death notice for the programme when she joined it, opining, as she did, that it hadn’t, up to that point, been kind enough. Kind enough? Was she kidding? Probably not. But she may have known more about philanthropy and relationship building than she knew about television. Because kindness ain’t the currency of television.
Once vitriol was removed, once it went all soft and supportive, once it was all about positivity with criticism amputated, was dead on the weighing scales.
And that was before weight-loss drugs globally changed the dialogue around the issue, making it unacceptable to talk about fat, overweight or obesity, making it clear that this was not an issue for personal blame but for chemical intervention, making all the guff about ramping up your willpower irrelevant.
Now, the unfortunates associated with aren’t the ones in the Lycra (although, in fairness, this last season was Lycra-free) but the experts, presenters, and producers. Because the science and attitudes and the very language have all changed so suddenly and so profoundly, some of the people involved in the earlier programmes must be quite glad to have had the association largely forgotten.
It’s also pretty certain that some of those involved in more recent programmes are not going to put their participation in bold type on their CVs. Moving on…
