UR TV CAST

On the original Big Brother in the Netherlands, former soldier Bart Spring in’t Veld was caught having sex with fellow volunteer, Sabine Wendell – and won. The final episode was watched by 73 per cent of the national TV audience, and Spring became a national heartthrob He now has an agent and a website. Wendell was signed up by Playboy, and became a television presenter.But even losing doesn’t seem to be a barrier to stardom. A 24-year-old Macedonian-born mechanic won his own spin-off programme after being voted out of the German version of the show, and has since topped the German charts with a single.

So the British public should no doubt prepare itself for a summer of chart hits featuring the words “housemates” and “hell”.. To the cynical, British women’s magazines can easily blur into a parade of identikit blandness. At their worst, they deliver a glut of formularised advice – “Look one size smaller just by changing your hairstyle”, “the cheat’s way to losing weight”. Tessa Jowell’s Body Image summit focused its ire on emaciated models, but there’s little doubt that the adolescent preoccupation with dieting is equally founded in magazines’ obsession with scales-watching and cottage cheese. To the cynical, British women’s magazines can easily blur into a parade of identikit blandness. At their worst, they deliver a glut of formularised advice – “Look one size smaller just by changing your hairstyle”, “the cheat’s way to losing weight”.

Tessa Jowell’s Body Image summit focused its ire on emaciated models, but there’s little doubt that the adolescent preoccupation with dieting is equally founded in magazines’ obsession with scales-watching and cottage cheese.
As irritating are what have long been known as puff pieces: celebrity interviews whose sole function appears to be the gratification of their subject. No matter that a magazine’s readers view celebrities with irreverence and amusement – to snag an exclusive, most titles will all but dissolve in awe-struck simpering.A quick skim through this month’s racks hurls forth an embarrassment of examples. Recounting its encounter with the pop star, Louise Nurding, New Woman writes, “Louise asks ‘Do my boobs look dodgy?’ They don’t – they look as near-perfect as the rest of her.” She’s profile of David Beckham features such nuggets of interest as “he looks incredibly handsome in the flesh, the boy is a looker” and “the reason people give you and Victoria a hard time is because they’re green with envy.”When it comes to both strands of coverage, it doesn’t have to be that way. The American women’s market is far more conservative than its British counterpart, and the tyranny of US PR departments is legendary, but one New York-based title has pointed a way out of the mire.Jane was launched at the tail-end of 1997. It was named after its founder: Jane Pratt, who stamped her mark on the female teenage market with Sassy, the much-admired US magazine. She left soon after a corporate acquisition and the magazine quickly foundered, but the idea of a grown-up Sassy had been planted in her mind.Pratt is a 37-year-old native of North Carolina whose scattershot, laugh-laden conversational style is the embodiment of her approach to publishing. She has enjoyed sideline careers as a host of US talk shows (one of her programmes mutated into Ricki Lake) and author of advice books, but she remains a publishing zealot.

“The idea of Jane came from getting letters from readers of Sassy saying, ‘I’m 26-years-old, and I’m still reading Sassy – it’s a little embarrassing’,” she recalls. “They were asking, ‘Could you do something for women my age, that’s a little more modern and more hip than most women’s magazines’?”Jane initially took shape at the offices of Time Inc, before Pratt decamped to the then-independent publisher Fairchild. She found Fairchild’s small-scale set-up more in keeping with her maverick instincts: here, she could wage war on the anodyne ways of the women’s mainstream magazines. “I wanted to do a women’s magazine that would make you feel better about yourself instead of worse.