Just minutes before the bombshell upset on last night’s Australia’s Top Model, Elle MacPherson sent a special video message to the three finalists.
In all the chaos I can’t remember exactly what she said but it was a sisterly little missive along the lines of, “Be true to yourself”.
Perhaps it was ringing in Sarah Murdoch’s ears, for clearly something was, when she mistakenly announced the wrong winner and had to do an embarrassing volto face in front of a live audience.
For amidst all the artifice – the hair extensions, the false eyelashes and Charlotte Dawson’s ridiculously rigid face, Sarah’s genuine mortification gave her shell-shocked protégés their first lesson in what it means to be true to yourself in an industry that is built on transforming you into something else.
As executive producer as well as presenter Sarah could have made a split-second call to let the error proceed and put out a statement after the show blaming a technical error.
But instead she let the full horror play out on her face as she realized that she had told 19-year-old Kelsey Martinovich that she was Australia’s Next Top Model when actually it was 18-year-old Amanda Ware that had won.
It wasn’t just a split-second error. Oh no. This was reality television at its most real. Kelsey, the shortest of the three finalists, had given a full thank you speech. She’d hugged Amanda. She’d hugged Sarah. In fact she was virtually driving off in her Ford Fiesta to jump on the plane to New York when the camera panned to her elated parents and then back to Sarah.
Now Sarah knows how to do pretence. She built a career on smiling through mid-winter swimsuit shoots, balancing on 10cm heels and making a pair of underpants and a cape look like the most natural things in the world to wear for a stroll over Brooklyn Bridge.
But last night she was Sarah the mentor not Sarah the model. Her blunder was compelling viewing – the sort of thing that makes you never, ever want to be on television. Yet as Sarah clasped her perfect charcoal-painted nails over her open mouth, and backtracked in front of the stunned live audience, she taught those girls more in two minutes than any glamorous photo shoot about how to retain their integrity in the most brittle and disingenuous of professions.
“Oh my God, I don’t know what to say right now,” she said. “I’m feeling a bit sick about this. No. I’m so sorry about this. Oh my God. I don’t know what to say. This was a complete accident. It’s Amanda, I’m so sorry. It was fed to me wrong. Oh God. This is what happens when you have live TV folks. This is insane, insane, insane, insane …”
Considering the tears this show has produced, Kelsey exhibited remarkable maturity, comforting Sarah and telling her it was “an honest mistake”. Amanda? Undoubtedly beautiful but unbecomingly smug.
As you’d expect Twitter went into overdrive after the show. “The election, the AFL, Australia’s New Top Model – it’s official, we are an indecisive country,” quipped one viewer.
“Oh..my..god..mega cringeworthy live TV stuff up from Australia!!!!!”, “ tweeted another.
Within the hour Foxtel’s publicity machine had kicked in, apologising to Kelsey and promising her $25,000 plus a trip to New York. In effect, Australia got its top model and its next top model.
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