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Great LezBritain: “Candy Bar Girls” recap – Episode 1

“Great LezBritian” is a fortnightly stroll through the very best of British lesbo-centric entertainment and culture. Plus there will be some jolly good interviews with the top ladies who are waving the flag for gay UK.

Channel 5’s not-too-subtle marketing campaign for Candy Bar Girls kicked off a couple of weeks ago with giant billboards roaring: “Lesbians” which immediately set the lezzer world a flutter with chatter about just how good, or s–t, or so s–t it’s good, the show was going to be. Because we’re gays and we don’t see ourselves on the small screen very much, the key questions are always: “How will this represent me?” So let’s see, shall we?

The show’s opening credits, which appear to have cost Channel Five about 12 pence to make, introduce us to.”The Candy Bar, this is the story of the girls that work and play here.” Oh Candy Bar Girls we wait with bated breath to see what rounded delights of lesbionic culture you are going to dissect and present to us.

First up we have Sandra, the Candy Bar’s promotions manager who is aiming to revamp her bar into something all lesbians will want to go to. Sandra quite rightly feels that the bar used to be a hotspot for d–kheads and she wants to change that perception. As you would.

Her first job is to scoot around the bar’s dance floor looking for pretty faces to represent this new era of the Candy Bar and gather them all together in a photo shoot. Quite a lovely self-appointed challenge for Sandra we feel.

Sandra spots Danni, who like many young British lesbians has obviously spent a lot of time looking at Jessie J videos and has successfully morphed into Jessie D. Sandra tells Jessie D of her plan and she tries to suppress her glee in being picked as a possible new face of Candy, but we can see it. She is f–king delighted.

Jessie D, is a 22-year-old who seems to have moved to London after finishing her degree to try and become a model or a pole dancer or indeed anything that will get her known somewhere and somehow. There are many flaws within this new career plan, but who are we to rain on her parade, we shall not be negative and instead keep our fingers and toes crossed for Jessie D.

Jessie D goes to an audition and gets rejected by Models One.

But every cloud and all that, because she still has an audition at Candy Bar to be a pole dancer there. That sly fox Sandra must have set that one up when the camera was turned off.

We are next presented with Gary, the new owner of Candy Bar. He is determined to make his new venue a success and displays this by continuously ordering random people to get rid of things and pointing at a lot of stuff.

Jessie D: I’m just about to have my pole dancing audition with Sandra but I am getting in there early and have a bit of a warm up and get my blue on. I’m going blue today.

Sarah: Is this a double entendre?

Lee: I hope Sandra is fully prepared for this.

Jessie D saunters into the club’s main room in a blue twin set and in a honeyed tone calls after Sandra.

Sandra turns into a 14-year-old boy and giggles. Right now she is more Louis Walsh than Simon Cowell in the judging stakes.

To set the scene for the high level Sandra is expecting, we get a cutaway to a previous interview with her: “If we do have dancers on the pole then I want to see something more interesting.”

A tough standard has been set and cue Jessie D who tells Sandra that normally she uses UV paint but by Gordon Bennett she’s forgotten it. Sandra mentally stamps her foot because she wants to see Jessie D break out her moves with her paint on.

Without the paint, Jessie D gives the kind of performance that Sandra obviously finds interesting because Miss D is “worked into the schedule” and the story arc of Jessie D has well and truly begun.

Those devils at Channel Five next throw Alex into the mix. She’s an Australian Bartender at Candy Bar who tells of a time she kissed a man and how there was too much hair and saliva going into her mouth – her eyes don’t move once whilst she tells this cute little anecdote. We are told that although she’s mostly a shy girl, when Alex gets behind that bar she acts all crazy. We might have a wildcat on our hands here.

Both Jessie D and Alex are at the Candy Bar photoshoot with a bunch of other lezzers that we’re not introduced to. Each has apparently been picked to showcase today’s lesbian diversity, and if diversity is a handful of skinny, white femmey girls then they’ve got it spot on. Because Alex is not behind the bar she is a quivering wreck. But fear not! Sandra is on hand to plough her with booze.

We suspect that this photographer is not really a photographer and this is his first ever photo shoot because he’s wearing a tracksuit, advises the girls to “just roll with it, yeah” and puts half-cut Alex into a pose which makes her look like a Christmas tree in her satin green dress.

Back at Candy Bar, Gary the owner is busy making the bar look new and different and has developed an obsessive hatred with anything pink.

Gary: I won’t be happy until I have got rid of everything pink.

Lee: I think Gary is afraid of the vagina.

A maintenance man walks in with a pink light filter and Gary nearly has a meltdown and spits out the word pink as if it was venom on his tongue. Or a vagina.

Due to Alex chucking back all the available vodka, the photo shoot descends into chaos. Alex is stumbling about all over the shop and waves her breasts in the photographer’s face before crumpling in a heap on the floor.

Sarah: Alex is my kind of woman.

Lee: You always love the drunkards.

We also notice that Sandra has put herself into the picture with all the pretty girls she’s selected, she really is a sly fox.

Lee: This is sounding like we think Sandra is using Candy Bar Girls as her own personal pink sofa?

Sarah: We don’t?

Lee: I think she’s just getting to know her market.

Next up, we have former Big Brother contestant Shabby. Since leaving the Big Brother house, she’s become a clothes designer, a DJ and she sings in a band. She amuses herself by describing all this “multi-tasking” as pie-fingering. Get it? Like a real cockney rebel she also sticks her middle fingers up at the camera.

Shabby is about to meet Red, a lady who has been away for a few months and who she has missed. She wants to move their relationship from friends to the bedroom but, my oh my, she thinks it’s a risk.

Lee: I don’t get why Shabby is in this show. There’s no way she’s been hanging about the Candy Bar.

Sarah: She’s in this show purely because they needed a name attached to it.

Lee: And they couldn’t get Sue Perkins.

Sarah: No, Sue was busy.

Shabby and Red meet in Yo Sushi and are wearing very similar hats. Soon however these things don’t matter and they’re kissing one another over the conveyor belt of raw fish. We somehow can’t help feel Channel 5 would like us to make a cheap fish joke here, but we will not. And it’s fine because Shabby has just made it for us.

Jessie D lives with her girlfriend of three years, Lucy, who perhaps is being presented as the first butch of the show because she recently broke a door down for a reason that was not divulged.

Lucy: I said, “Stuff it, I’ll just kick the door in.” And so I did.

This couple is no regular Mrs. & Mrs. Smith, because since they recently moved to London they’ve begun an open relationship. They seem to blame London, the city itself, for the open relationship.

Sarah: Yes, London that total bitch. It’s been forcing happy couples to f–k other people for decades.

Lee: When will it end? When will London finally let us be monogamous?

Although, all is not ideal with “London living,” as Jessie D recently kissed one of Lucy’s friends.

Lucy: I am trying to teach her about the lesbian code. As incestuous as lesbians are portrayed to be we are all still loyal to each other as friends.

Sarah: Is that the lesbian code? To not get off with your girlfriend’s friends?

Lee: It’s number two of the code, just behind, “Don’t finger your girlfriend’s sister.”

Gary and Sandra are trying to pick a photo from the photo shoot. Gary wants to pick just one girl to represent the new look Candy Bar. He wants the image to comprise of a “here and now girl” and “a lesbian with attitude.” We don’t know who Gary wants yet but he has some very weird ideas, muttering something about straight men not liking the look of one of the girls.

Sandra helpfully reminds him that straight men are not target market.

Gary also doesn’t want to pick Alex. He believes her look appeals more to a gay man. He obviously didn’t see her pass out in her own vomit at the end of the photoshoot.

Shabby and a very intoxicated Red head for a second date in a club in Camden, again in very similar hats.

However they get into a drunken argument in the club and like a metaphoric gesture of their broken love, Red’s hat falls off mid- argument.

Jo is our next Candy Bar girl. She has just returned from a jaunt of traveling, where she hoped for a bit of self-discovery. But Jo is not the first and won’t be the last girl to discover that self-discovery is an expensive girlfriend and she’s has had to return penniless and jobless to live with her parents in North West London. She admits she can’t even feign excitement about her return because she once lived in… Shoreditch. Wow.

Jo’s mother is thus far the star performer in this tale of people connected somehow to the Candy Bar. She admits she never knew any lesbians before Jo’s coming out and always thought back in her heyday that lesbians only existed because they were left on the shelf and rather ugly.

It’s back to the Candy Bar and Gary is in another flap. He’s only spotted some pink on the actual Candy Bar sign. F–ksake vagina lovers. Whilst everywhere is a mess with paint and equipment Jessie D goes to practice some pole dancing — and weirdly there is a really contrived scene that shows the bar’s builders arrive to perv all around her.

Sarah: It’s like they suddenly realised they’d forgotten to sexualise the show for straight men.

Whilst in North West London and not Shoreditch, Jo can’t help but be negative about her mother cooking her some salmon, because Jo has also been to Paris.

Whilst she chews on her fish, Jo’s dad tells her how her lesbianism has made him more accepting and less judgmental. Jo’s mum has a face consumed with awkwardness and scratches the table, but does later suggest that maybe because there were rumours at Jo’s very, very good school that lesbianism was rife that maybe gays are more intelligent than the average. Jo’s mum is a keeper.

Jessie D takes Lucy into their bedroom, but has much trouble trying to form a sentence and instead keeps gulping air and then acting surprised by her own nonsensical actions. She finally spits it out.

Jessie D: I think we would be happier if we were just friends.

Then, what follows is one of the most bizarre conversations two people have ever had in the entire world. Lucy is understandably a bit distressed at being dumped and asks for confirmation that she Jessie D does indeed not want to be with her.

Jessie D: I think we would just be happier apart, nothing really changes

Lucy: Well it kind of does, I kinda got to leave. I’ve got to find somewhere else to live.

Jessie D: It’s not like that; I look after you all the time.

Jessie D fakes yawns and keeps repeating that nothing has to change — except that actually they are no longer girlfriends and that maybe to offer this smooth transition she could go and live at her mums for a bit. Lucy asks for a future heads up on anything like this.

Lee: A future heads up on being dumped again? How would that work?

Like a sad “Where’s Wally?”, Lucy departs with a rucksack into the streets amid a melancholy piece of piano music. We’ll bet she blames London for this.

To be fair, Jessie D also seems sad to see her three-year relationship end.

Jessie D: I fear I may go a little wild now, because I have that single thing going on.

Jo is going to a job interview with her former employer, G3 Magazine, a free lesbian monthly magazine. It’s not a normal interview. There are no questions like, “Where do you see yourself in five years’ time?” Instead, Jo She regales her former boss with tales of her travels and a recent 11-day relationship. Her ex-boss can hardly contain her disgust at such a feeble attempt at a relationship. But despite this, she does offer her a job once again. Her first assignment is to cover Candy Bar and thus the connection is made.

Shabby meets a friend who is wearing a hat very similar to hers and they discuss her relationship with Red.

They come up with a genius plan to write a message, “I like you lots,” in red paint, take a picture of it and then send it. Red replies.

Red: [text message] That made my willy smile…

Jessie D goes to meet Sandra and Gary at Candy Bar at the request of Sandra. They have picked someone from the photo shoot that they want to represent their new lesbian empire and go to reveal who the devil it is.

Lee: Please let it be Sandra.

Of course though it’s Jessie D, although she is not best pleased with her pose which has her smiling emphatically, indeed that mouth couldn’t be stretched anymore if she tried.

Gary is in another flap, Candy Bar opens in three hours and the place looks in no fit state. Plus Gary has eyeballed some pink balls. He looks like he is about to take a proper wobbly. Sandra hotfoots it to do an interview with new G3 employee Jo, who only happens to be wearing a pink dress. She’s playing a dangerous game if Gary sees her.

Gary opens Candy Bar’s doors. There is not an expectant throng quite at that point, but later Jessie D, Shabby and Red in unmatching hats and Barmaid Alex drinking in her bra are all having the time of their lives. Sandra tells how the night has been a success and thus the new Candy Bar is born.

Sarah: Sorry my love, what did you say? I’ve blanked off.

Lee: A bit dull wasn’t it?

Sarah: Yes and I’m in two minds about whether to be glad that at least it’s a bit dull and not a horrendous car-crash like The Real L Word — but we’ve got to recap this for six weeks so I hope something happens.

Lee: I hope they change the voiceover, make it funnier, introduce a few new characters and make Jo’s mum be all over this show like a rash.

“Great LezBritain” authors Sarah, a Londoner, and Lee, a Glaswegian, met in a gay discotheque one bleak mid winter, eight years ago and have been shacked up together ever since. When not watching Tipping The Velvet, they find time to write, run a PR company, DJ at their own club nights and love a bit of jam on toast. Follow them on Twitter at greatlezbritain.

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