My Bare Lady

    Reality television producers, it seems, will never run out of ideas. The forthcoming My Bare Lady is an experimental show that will follow the journey of four porn stars as they try to prove they’re multitalented by taking roles in a London play. The four girls in question are Chanel St. James, Nautica Thorn, Sasha Knox and Kirsten Price.

    The show will begin by highlighting the casting calls held in Los Angeles, and will follow the ladies through three weeks of an intensive training that covers everything from voice lessons to stage movement courses. Finally, the live presentation of their efforts will be showcased as they perform Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at London’s Garrick Theater.

    The production of the show has been contracted to Zig Zag, an independent studio that has produced several popular reality shows (The Real Football Factories, The Irish Are Coming) that air in England. Fox Reality is the American production outfit and has announced that American audiences will see this show by the end of 2006.

    The filming of the show took place during August and September of this year and has brought about much hype in both porn fanboy and serious TV fan blogs alike.

    The premise of the show is certainly an entertaining one, given that American porn actresses have been campaigning for years that they’re more than objects of lust: the race for California governor in 2003’s recall election actually saw Mary Carey, a well-revered name in the skin business, run as a gubernatorial candidate.

    She garnered just over 11,000 votes – about 2,000 behind Gary Coleman, who also ran that year – and placed 10th out of 135 hopefuls.

    Similarly, porn and reality TV has happened in the States before in the form of Adam “Seymour Butts” Glasser’s show, Family Business. The series, which has aired on Showtime since 2003 and is still on contract for a fourth (and final) season, tracks Glasser’s daily life and focuses mainly on him running the Seymour Butts empire with his mother and cousin. The show does reasonably well with fans beyond the porn market, hence the four seasons and decent DVD sales. Some critics have claimed that the Jewish-born porn actor leaves a lot of important points out, especially drug use within the industry (which is strange, given how often you see him and Alisha Klass smoking bowls in the High in Europe flicks).

    Glasser and Carey were both hopefuls for My Bare Lady participation, but the producers for both Fox and Zig Zag have expressed concern that bringing in too many figures prominent in the porn world would thrash any sense of seriousness the show intends to capture. After all, the goal of this show is to prove that four given porn goddesses can handle performing with more than just their flesh.

    The host of the show will be Christopher Biggins, a well-known stage and film actor in London. Biggins is your typical fat Englishman, a very witty and acerbic 400-pounds of un-fuckability that would likely never get this close to porn queens in the States. However, because he is a veritable genius in regards to pantomime (the style of stage acting that will be used for this adaptation of The Cherry Orchard), he will be the commentator for the audience, doing his best to translate the superior intellect of London’s West End into something that American viewers will appreciate.

    While neither the lead actresses nor the producers want this show to become yet another horrendous, typical American broadcast, it’s hard not to be a bit apprehensive. Chekhov isn’t exactly light stuff, and asking girls who’ve rarely had an audience without a cock nearby to impress perhaps the toughest theater crowd in the world is a bit much. There is yet to be an official airdate for the pilot, but as production wrapped up in London by the end of September, it’s expected that we’ll see the show right around Thanksgiving.

    For now, let us all place faith in the soliloquies of the sexual supreme.