Watch Beauty & The Beast: Ugly Side of Prejudice now on 4oD

Meet 50-year-old plastic fantastic Sarah Burge, a self-proclaimed ‘Real Life Barbie’ who has had over half a million pounds worth of cosmetic surgery since the age of seven, not to mention her £22k annual bill for maintenance treatments, and a needle at the ready in her handbag in case of a wrinkle emergency. Cue the introduction of her total opposite, Susan Campbell Duncan, who has had over sixty operations since having a rare form of cancer removed from her jaw as a 4-month-old baby. The resultant surgery has been an attempt to reconstruct the half of her face that had to be removed, and she has lived her whole life with a facial disfigurement. But now enough is enough for Susan; she’s happy, successful, and unconcerned with looks.

And there we have the basic premise of Channel 4’s Beauty & The Beast: Ugly Side of Prejudice: bring together two people from opposite ends of the conventional beauty spectrum and see what they learn from one another – which usually means not much. Each week it’s a different person with a different facial disfigurement, paired up with a ridiculously vain and incredibly low self-esteemed celebrity-come-cosmetic surgery beauty obsessive.

Doing his bit of investigative journalism to add a bit of society feel to the programme is Adam Pearson. Himself with a severe facial disfigurement caused by neurofibromatosis, he sets out to challenge major media-industry figures such as ex Spice Girls manager Chris Herbert as to why people with conditions like his are underrepresented in the media. The answer is always a blunt and predictably resounding ‘because beauty sells, and facial disfigurements don’t represent beauty’. The simple truth is that people would rather buy pants from David Beckham than from Adam Pearson, and merely asking people why that is isn’t going to do anything to change it.

From impossibly skinny size zero models to boy bands who are tone deaf but are apparently as hot as a Vindaloo, it’s no secret that the media is deeply and unjustly superficial. Unfortunately, Beauty & The Beast: Ugly Side of Prejudice barely breaks away from this media standard, and gives too much sympathy to the poor stunner wearing a low-cut top who gets her enormous cleavage ogled by pervy blokes. These easily rectified insecurities are in no way comparable to the distress, prejudice and truly unwelcome attention of having a facial disfigurement, and if the one programme aiming to condemn superficiality struggles to do so, it only goes to show just how far removed the media is from reality.

Stop! Try not to panic, but I’m having a wrinkle emergency. Where’s my Botox needle? I know it’s somewhere in this bottomless-pit of a handbag…