Faking It - Part Two

It's taken me a while to come round to writing the second part of this article. You can read the first one (written in March 2015) here. Now that I read that article again, I am amazed to realise how far my journey has come.

Much as I adore Freakonomics Radio, that wasn't where I first heard the idea of Faking It. Instead, it was a British TV show which premiered in the year 2000. The premise was simple: they would take an unlikely ordinary person, have them intensively transformed and coached by a team of experts in a particular field--for a short time--then the contestant (known as the "faker") would have to perform in front of a panel of judges (who know they are looking to spot a fake), to see if they could pass.

Title card for the show

As one example, take the very first episode. Alex Geikie, a gentrified English youth from the Home Counties of England, who liked to ride horses, had to pass as a hard-man bouncer in an East London pub. He was coached by Tony Agastini, a kick-boxing champion. Alex shaved off his hair, gradually ditched his pukkah accent in favour of East-End hardman talk (think Guy Ritchie movies), learned to fight by getting beaten up by Tony's girlfriend (!) in the boxing ring, got fake tattoos, and finally worked as a bouncer for a night, among real, hard-bastard bouncers.

Guardian: At RADA, Alex was coached in talking common: "The word fuck is desperately important to all Londoners. Fuck you, fuck me, fuck off! Lengthen the vowel. Let the breath be the impetus. Farkin' 'ell! Don't smile! Mean it." In grammar: "I was, you was, she was, they was."

After a month's training, Alex was one of several bouncers at the Hippodrome on the night of the England v Germany match and the head of security failed to spot the imposter ("Nah! Honestly?"). Tony was much moved. "It's like seeing your kid walk and talk for the first time, innit? Very proud. Very proud. But he should be proud of himself too."

The show drew very positive reviews (such as this one from the Guardian, which is where the quote above comes from, written by Nancy Banks-Smith). Subsequent episodes featured burger flipper Ed Devlin who was trained to be a chef (by Gordon Ramsay, no less); classical cellist Sian Evans who was trained to be a nightclub DJ; and cleaner Sharon Pallister who was trained to become Scarlet Fever, a burlesque performer, by Immodesty Blaize with input from Dita von Teese. You can see this last one starting here on YouTube.

I've already mentioned on this blog how I believe that there is something liberating about stepping outside your normal life, and being someone else for a while, and how I wonder if some actors and other performers enjoy this aspect of their work. It's this, I think, which the show attempts to recreate.

The show has several brilliant features. First the fakers are deliberately selected to be hopelessly inappropriate for their adopted roles. Almost all are quiet, soft-spoken, lacking in self-confidence, set in their ways. They all have a metaphorical mountain to climb to pull off their new roles. Second, the mentors, often in initial despair or exasperation, become fond, and eventually proud of the fakers. Third, the fakers almost always manage it: to pass unnoticed by judges and onlookers. Finally, it's clear that the experience of the training--and the faking--opens up new and undiscovered vistas for most of them; they discover qualities in themselves that they never knew they possessed. In short, it is visibly life-changing, and often this is very emotional for them. It all makes for extremely compelling television.

The producers made at least one follow-up episode, where they revisited the fakers a couple of years later. Almost without exception, they had reacted positively to the experience. I notice, for example, that the Scarlet Fever episode was uploaded by Scarlet Fever herself on her own YouTube channel.

Drag: Dave Lynn

There are only a few episodes of Faking It available on YouTube, and this is not one of them. However, the Guardian reviews are very helpful and give a real flavour of the episodes.

One episode featured an ordinary bloke (who has asked me not to mention his name) who was to fake it as a drag queen. His mentor for the show was veteran British drag queen Dave Lynn. This episode was one of the most popular episodes of Faking It ever produced. The normal hour-long episode was stretched out to 76 minutes, because there was so much good material to include.

Lynn and the Faker strike up an unlikely friendship, helped perhaps by Lynn's straightforward, matter-of-fact approach to a man shaving his legs, wearing stilettos and false eyelashes, tucking ("you sort of shove them back in their sockets"), and all the other activities required to become a drag queen.

We follow the Faker through a series of increasingly uncomfortable experiences. More than once, the producers may have thought that their show wasn’t going to happen.

But he sticks with it until the end. Later, he struts his stuff on the stage, in full drag, and the judges don't spot him as the fake. At the end of the show, the Faker muses about his initial prejudices; how he felt he had overcome them, and how shallow and misplaced he now felt they were. It's a powerful moment.

Guardian: But what made Faking It so gratifying were the clear, measurable results of the experience for both student and mentor. The Faker was euphoric in his realisation that life is a great big fruit salad, and that "prejudice is just balls" (and therefore best tucked out of sight). Dave Lynn, the hardened old pro, softened up and admitted that he'd learned even more about his place in the world. The two bosom buddies closed with a duet of Stand By Your Man; seldom have the words "sometimes it's hard to be a woman" rung so true.

The episode resulted in Dave Lynn getting a considerable boost in popularity, and he made several subsequent appearances on TV. He’s still doing drag.

So what relevance does this show have for me? I don't especially have any affinity for drag as an art form. I've never been to a drag show. I think drag is a form of performance art, whereas Vivienne feels very much part of my identity; an inextricable part of me, not some persona that I adopt when I get dressed.

I suppose the first part of it is that I am envious. Our Faker gets four weeks of intensive tuition in performing as a woman: make-up, clothes, hair, shoes, gait, the works. Perhaps four weeks would be too much, but I certainly feel I could use a few tips from the experts about how to improve my overall look as a woman.

Second, there is permission. All of the fakers in the show get encouragement, verging on a requirement, to step outside their ordinary world and embrace something entirely new: a new way of doing just about everything. Some of the rest of us (i.e. me) hesitate at every tiny step outside the comfortable boundaries of what others expect of us. The fakers blasted those boundaries wide open, and did it with the support of those around them. And for each of them, that must have been a very powerful and long-lasting experience. Faced with the end of my marriage, I am contemplating what the new me will be like. Some of those boundaries will need to be redrawn: but which? And I will need to make my own permission to make it happen.

Ultimately, though, the people in the show are literally faking it. After the credits roll, they can, if they choose, return to their previous lives and pick up where they left off, as if nothing had happened. This is not true of me: Vivienne remains an awkward, uncomfortable part of my life, and my future life will need to include her, one way or the other. The faking it, for me, was pretending Vivienne didn't exist.