TV SPOT - Rock of Love

For the first of my 'highlights of television' segments, I am going to focus on a show that encapsulates perhaps the worst of what MTV has given us. I could have started with 'I Love New York', but I'm saving that for another time - much in the way that when a man needs to visit the toilet, he will inevitably go again later on once he has eaten jalapenos and spicy salsa dip.



No, this time, I will start with the Bret Michaels vehicle 'Rock of Love', a three season reality show which garnered some of VH1's highest ratings, with some episodes attracting American audiences of up to 5.4 million viewers if you can believe that. The show revolves around this man...

Pure manliness.

...searching amongst women who look like this...

This is looking good, huh?

...in order to find true love. That's right, yeah. True love. We're not messing around here. Bret isn't looking for a crush, he wants true love. A fact he interminably wishes to remind them of at the beginning of every single episode. Now, let's start with the obvious bit: Who the hell IS Bret Michaels? Well, ol' Bret is the frontman for Poison, an old fashioned 80's rock band whose best days were probably over when I was learning to ride my tricycle for the first time. It makes sense that he'd want to start his search for true love on television, following a template that has spectacularly not worked for every other inverted-commas celebrity who has tried it. 'Flavor of Love' (the progenitor, in which Flavor-Flav tries to find true love) is now in its fourth season, showing that happily ever after seems to exist as long as MTV don't need a new season on air.

'This time it's forever, yeah?'

While I missed much of season one, it seems to have been near identical to Season two except with more psychopaths and more strippers (probably at the demands of Bret, who seems to have a minimum requirement of strippers in each batch of contestants who end up on the show) who all look like the lady who appears just below the Bret Michaels picture in this very blog. That lady in question is Daisy La Hoya, who lost out to the lady in the above picture, Ambre. The season ran like this: each week, Bret would set the girls tasks to test how much they 'loved' fame-sorry, I meant him (Gosh, what a mistake to make). Thence, a girl would be eliminated each week so that by the final episode, there were two girls duking it out for his affections. Of course, in between, there were antics and kerr-azy goings on that kept the show, for lack of a better word, interesting. Challenges such as being put into teams and then sent off around a roller-skating track with a baby-version of Bret in a stroller, while being pursued by a group of borderline psychotics hell bent on wrecking the baby stroller. No, I don't know which Freudian nightmare Bret entered into to conceive of this particular challenge either, but the fact stands it is still a challenge on the show.

Oh dear god.

If this sounds like lowest common denominator television to you, well, that's because it is. It's horrifying to watch, but like watching a gazelle being torn open by lionesses, you can't turn away. Like some perverse voyeur, we see him cackling from the sidelines issuing lines of wisdom such as this:

"There's something about girls on rollerskates that's just hot"
"Girls fighting over me is just hot"
"It's dangerous - but it's hot"

These are not verbatim quotes you understand, but this is pretty much all he says in his one-to-ones with the camera which are supposed to illustrate his current thoughts on the competition and the girls involved. Which I suppose they do. By now, if you hadn't guessed it, this show is almost unrelentingly sexist.

My god, surely not!

Like you hadn't guessed that was the case anyway. Part of you wonders if you should call some sort of abuse helpline, based on the stuff going on in the show. Admittedly, the girls don't do themselves any favours. They are nearly all fame-hungry slappers who turn on the waterworks the moment they are threatened with elimination, and some are stupid on levels incomparable to human physics - such as in Season Three, in which a drunk girl by the name of Ashley declared that 'parsley was stupid' - but then Bret rides in, and we just end up feeling sorry for them. Bret Michaels is no misogynist, don't get me wrong. He's just a big pervy neanderthal who spends the whole first episode taking photos of the girls taking off their clothes.

Bret Michaels: Amateur photographer

Yes, you did read that correctly. He spends a good half an hour 'introducing us' to the girls by dint of 'photography'. I chose to invert the commas around this particular word since watching Bret use his camera is a little like watching video evidence of a man on the sex crimes register hard at work. This is true of all the seasons. You start to feel unclean as the episode progresses, and even as the bubble brained girls all cheerfully introduce themselves you find yourself very much aware that you are essentially watching a television show disturbingly landscaped around the bizarre and narcissistic mind of Bret Michaels. Season Three showcases this in perhaps the most disturbing way: after his relationship with the Rock of Love 2 winner Ambre, broke up, he decided to change the format of the show. What did he do? He put them all on a tour bus and dragged them around the US with him. This was because he felt the main problem with the previous shows were that it wasn't a realistic setting - although realism doesn't really enter into the situation when you have a dating show set in a luxury mansion which is based around a bunch of plastic surgery rejects fighting for the attentions of a caveman with hair extensions.

The irony being that it didn't really change the shows. It was still the same thing, just with crazier and crazier girls. Then of course, came the dreaded elimination round of every episode. The eliminations were strange affairs, with a soft-voiced Bret telling the losing girl just how she wasn't good enough for him. There were tears, god, but were there tears and each one professed how he was making a mistake and how it was them he really wanted. But hey, it wasn't meant to be.

The one one the left didn't win.

So, you get the idea. However, I do hear you cry 'Why the hell did you watch it if you hated it so much?' Well, apart from the fact it makes me feel better about myself as a human being that I am none of the people involved with this particular series, it also reminds me that television is becoming a scary, scary thing and that in a way, it's good to watch bad television to remind you what good television is like. Believe me when I say this show isn't the worst of it. Bret Michaels maybe a faintly concussed rock has-been, but compared to some of his rival shows he might as well be Bruce Campbell. Will I cover those horrifying shows? You bet I will....until then, enjoy this group shot of good ol' Bret with season two's contestants.


And I still don't know who to feel more sorry for.