Ground-breaking? Or car-crash TV?

By Emma Bowler

A BBC Three series is causing quite a stir and it hasn’t even been made yet.

Britain’s Missing Top Model will pitch eight disabled women against each other in a battle for a prize of a fashion photo-shoot to be featured in a top women’s glossy magazine.

Message boards are alive with comments such as, “missing – as in missing from BBC One?”, fears over eligibility criteria, eg what’s the lowest level of disability they’ll accept: “a broken fingernail?”, annoy­ance over the 18-30 age restriction, as “it implies that anyone over 30 cannot be beautiful”, and worries that the wide-ranging disability criteria could make the selection process “car crash TV”.

The controller of BBC Three, Danny Cohen, says: “This series aims to challenge the artificial boundaries that seem to exist in the beauty and fashion industries.”

But Flash Bristow, a wheelchair-user, feels this is unlikely to really happen. “I’m a size 18. I know a disabled lady who’s attrac­tive, bubbly, gorgeous. Anyone who met her for the first time would agree. She’s bigger than me. They are careful to not to say they want thin people but they don’t make tank-sized versions of fashion clothes, do they?”

Billed as “ground-breaking”, the idea of a disabled modelling competition isn’t actually remotely new. Louise Dyson at VisABLE People, the world’s only agency uniquely representing disabled models, has organised three such competitions. “There are already disabled models out there doing the job, trailblazing, but this is a fashion competition and we get very little mainstream fashion work because it is a very exacting industry,” she says.

It seems unlikely that a reality TV show is really going to make this exacting industry see the error of its ways in terms of its exclusion of disabled models, but we’ll just have to wait and see exactly what effect the series will have when it goes out later in the year.

Picture: VisABLE model Shannon Murray by photographer Sarah Doyle.