 Print this page |
TV PREVIEWS
Dangerous Jobs for Girls, Wednesday 10pm, Channel 4 
|
So, it’s that age old question which has dogged us since TV scheduling began: can a woman do everything and anything a man can do? Episode one of this new Channel 4 series aims to find out – by introducing us to a trio of well-spoken horsey women and packing them off to Brazil to be cowboys.
At this early point, the somewhat flimsy premise of the show had me wondering whether the ability to do such a job has anything to do with gender at all. I mean, I was male last time I looked, but pack me off to South America with a lasso, stick me in a pair of leather chaps and plonk me on a horse, and I’m not altogether sure my gender would be of any help whatsoever.
But anyway, after a couple of gratuitous “look at the silly women using GHD hair straighteners in a Brazilian shed” close-ups, we get to find out that being a Brazilian cowboy is a fairly tough job involving driving cattle around the floodplains for months on end with only your buddies for company. And, luckily for the producers, we can rely on this rugged bunch of buddies to harp on about how the women “should be in the kitchen", or trot out the requisite chauvinistic comments like “take it like a man” when the girls get to sample some of the local firewater.
The girls do OK in some aspects of the job, but rounding up cattle isn’t the half of it. When Nicola, Laura and Gemma don’t get too excited by the prospect of killing, skinning and barbecuing a buffalo within the space of about 30 seconds, or castrating a horse with a rusty penknife, the cowboys conclude that their job is, well, too dangerous for girls.
But do they go through with it? Ropey premise aside, tune in tonight to see if they succeed. It’s a bit like giving a plumber a scalpel and asking him to perform a heart transplant.
