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tion, and electrical businesses. When Steed describes the victims as “all in the top bracket,” she adds “where the vultures gather.” This skepticism about the patriarchal domain of capital is shown to be very apposite as the story develops. Mrs Peel directly encounters sexism at a karate school where the chief instructor says: “It is diffi- cult for a woman to compete in such company.” Her counter is good- humored but with an edge: “It’s the idea of competition that appeals to me.” Then she defeats an opponent and makes her point. The ironic deployment of strong female sexuality in concert with physical force is exemplified in “The Gravediggers.” Mrs Peel is on the ground. Steed, standing, holds a villain between her legs. She closes them around the man’s head, scissoring him into a nearby pond. Years later, Rigg looked back on the era like this: “kinky. I always seemed to be strapped into a dentist’s chair with my feet in the air,” while Macnee tried to scotch rumors that his early- childhood spankings at prep school and Eton had left him with a life- long taste for sado- masochistic sex (Miller 1997). Tex- tually, the program represented a Britain that was passing as an imperial, manufacturing power and regenerating as a cultural, service power, and a renewed moment of struggle in gender rela- tions. Economically, it stood for global success across a wide variety of places, formats, interpretations, and fans. It plays a starring role in the history of popular television by any measure.

The online application to appear on Extreme Makeover (2002–7) performed dual tasks. At one level, it was a recruitment device. As such, it was unreliable and rapidly becoming outmoded. In its second, covert, role – surveillance – it was a neatly targeted way of securing data about viewers that could be sold to advertisers, achieved under the demotic sign of outreach and public participation, via plastic surgery for the soldier who thinks his career is being held

back by ugliness, or Botox shots for the fast- food manager who wants to advance his job prospects (Heyes 2007: 25). Which is where we meet Extreme Makeover’s cousin in surveillance, com- modification, and governmentality – Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

(QESG). 1 It began on the Bravo network and became the station’s highest- rated hour ever; 3.35 million were viewing by the third episode. Parodies followed on Saturday Night Live (1975–) and MAD TV (1995–), while Comedy Central offered Straight Plan for the Gay Man (2004–5) (Nutter 2004; Heller 2006b: 3; Westerfelhaus

160 TELEVISION STUDIES: THE BASICS and Lacroix 2006: 429). Mark Simpson (2004) dubbed it Metrosex-

uality: The Reality TV Show, and the program avowed that it taught “the finer points of being a ‘metrosexual’ ” (bravotv.com/Queer_ Eye_for_the_Straight_Guy/Episodes/207/).

What are its origins, beyond unfurling commodity interest in the queer dollar? QESG is part of the wider reality- television phe- nomenon, a strange hybrid of cost- cutting devices, game shows taken into the community, cinéma-vérité conceits, scripts written in post- production, and ethoi of Social Darwinism, surveillance, and gossip – bizarre blends of “tabloid journalism, documentary television, and popular entertainment.” No wonder Ofcom embar- rassedly and embarrassingly distinguishes between “Serious Factual” programs – by which it means news, current affairs, and documentary – and reality, which it euphemizes as “Other Factual.” In 2006, “Other Factual” comprised 44 percent of peak- hour Channel

4 shows and 36 percent on BBC Two (Ofcom 2007: 38). Makeover, programs such as QESG take economically underprivi-

leged people and offer them a style they cannot afford to sustain, pro- moting the responsibility of people to get better jobs, homes, looks, and families. Reality TV is suffused with deregulatory nostra of avarice, possessive individualism, hyper- competitiveness, and com- modification, played out in the domestic sphere rather than the public world. The genre represents a moment in US television’s ongoing struggle with other media for the attention of young people, some- thing that began in the late 1960s, when popular magazines were locked in a contest with color TV for audiences. Both sides reacted by addressing young people as readers (through stories on popular culture) and as problems (through generational stereotyping). This practice continued as the cultural industries promoted the existence of catchy- sounding generational cohorts to advertisers (“the Greatest

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