British television icon Vanessa Feltz is no stranger to getting people talking, but when her Channel 5 daytime show launched, it wasn’t actually the guests or the topics that got everyone’s attention.
It was the set design, more specifically, the very pink set. There was so much pink going on that people on social media quickly started comparing it to Babestation, which probably wasn’t quite the reaction Vanessa and the production team were hoping for.
So, what’s the fuss about?
Vanessa Feltz launched her daytime show, simply called Vanessa, on Channel 5 in 2023. The idea was pretty straightforward. It was a chat show covering the sort of subjects Vanessa has always been comfortable talking about relationships, family, health and all the messy bits of everyday life. Basically, give Vanessa a sofa, a few guests and something controversial to talk about and she’ll probably manage just fine.
But viewers seemed far more interested in what was happening behind her. The set was bright pink. Very pink. Pink walls, pink furniture and enough pink to make Barbie look like she’d gone for a more minimalist look, and naturally, the internet noticed.
“Barbie’s met Babestation”
One of the descriptions that started doing the rounds was that the set looked like “Barbie’s met Babestation”, and once someone says something like that online, you can pretty much guarantee it’s going to spread. The comparison was obviously meant to be cheeky, but it also opened the door to a fair amount of criticism.
Why was a daytime TV show being compared to an adult chat channel? Was the set deliberately provocative? Has Channel 5 gone a little too far with the pink? Or was it simply… pink?
Vanessa wasn’t having it
Vanessa herself didn’t seem particularly bothered. Rather than getting embarrassed about the comparisons, she basically dismissed them. Speaking about the criticism, she called it “rubbish” and pointed out that the show was brand new and that the viewing figures had actually doubled. She also mentioned that she’d had people messaging her on Instagram to tell her how pretty the set was. Fair enough.
To be honest, Vanessa has never really struck me as someone who is going to redesign her entire set because somebody on Twitter thinks it looks a bit saucy. She liked it. Other people liked it. And plenty of people clearly thought it looked like something else entirely.
Why did everyone think of Babestation?
I suppose you can see where the comparison came from. Babestation has always had a very recognisable visual style, and pink is pretty much part of the furniture when it comes to anything associated with glamour, femininity and sexy television. So when you put a huge amount of pink on a TV set, people are inevitably going to make comparisons.
Especially British people. We can turn absolutely anything into a joke. But there’s a difference between having a pink set and deliberately trying to make a daytime show look like adult entertainment. There’s no suggestion that Vanessa was actually trying to do the latter. It just happened to give the internet something to talk about.
And it wasn’t the first time…
Interestingly, this wasn’t the first time Babestation had found itself being mentioned alongside morning or daytime television. The brand had already received a mention on Good Morning Britain, so Vanessa’s pink sofa wasn’t the first time mainstream daytime TV and Babestation had ended up in the same conversation. And really, that’s probably the funniest part.
You can spend months planning a new television show, working out the format, booking guests and deciding what you’re going to talk about. Then everyone ends up talking about the colour of the sofa. Classic internet.
So, was Vanessa bothered?
Apparently not. Vanessa stood by the look of the show and seemed perfectly happy with her pink surroundings. And why not?
It was a chat show, not a political campaign. If she wanted a pink set, she was entitled to have a pink set without everyone deciding it was secretly a Babestation tribute act. Still, once the internet has made the connection, there’s not much you can do about it. And I have a feeling Vanessa probably got a good laugh out of the whole thing anyway.
