Originally posted in May 2014, this blog aims to explain what a superbabe is and whether they still have…or rather had, (back in 2014) a place on the shows: ‘Superbabes’. They’re not just live babeshow girls – they’re luminaries; celebrities. Their names transcend the confines of the show schedules and remain in public consciousness, regardless of where they are or what they’re doing. There are lots of ‘Superbabes’, but they mainly belong to another generation of babe channel development. Most of them made their name in the noughties, and whilst there have been a few very notable exceptions arriving on the scene this decade, the flow of new ‘Superbabes’ coming through does seem to be slowing to a standstill. So are we seeing the end of the era of babe channel ‘Superbabes’, and if so, why might that be? Let’s talk about attention spans and celebrity…
ATTENTION SPAN HELL
This blog is historically focused and features a lot of babes who are no longer in the limelight. These models do still have lots of people who remember them and who have evidently retained an interest in them over the long term. But the main thrust of the lust with live babeshows is fuelled by current profile and presence, and it’s a much shorter-term type of interest than you might think. If the babe is currently in the limelight, she’s the best thing since the discovery of the penis, but she can be forgotten very quickly. In some cases, we’re not talking in months, or even weeks. We’re talking in hours, or maybe just minutes.
Some years back the comedian Vic Reeves was asked which comedy act he thought would win a viewer poll, and pardoning any paraphrasing, his reply was: “It’ll be whoever’s on TV when they run the vote”. He was of course right, and this incredibly fickle mass audience behaviour is just as applicable to the world of babeshows.
Routinely, text votes on old babeshow forum “Best Babe” polls would be won by whoever was chatting up viewers at the time of the vote. In the run up to Christmas 2009, for example, Babestation Xtra ran a Queen of Babestation poll over three nights. Geri took a comfortable lead over the two nights on which she was the show’s main presenter, but she wasn’t around on the third night, when presenting duties were mainly shared between Jodie and Alex Adams. At that point Geri’s votes completely died, Alex went into the lead whilst she was MC-ing the contest, and then Jodie took over the mic for the final portion, and won. Importantly, the winners of these contests (which were common in the noughties) were not the models viewers had just been watching naked on set – but the ones who were talking to them.
It’s not really clear how much of the voting was influenced by straightforward presence-in-mind (the model is there, and she’s likeable, so people just think: “Why not her?”), and how much was influenced by a desire in fans to actually ingratiate themselves to the model and be noticed by her. I suspect both factors were at play in one ratio or another, but that doesn’t really matter. The key factor is that it didn’t appear to be the girl’s tits or arse that was winning her the poll – it seemed to be her conversational connection with the audience, and that’s something that’s much harder to establish within the current show formats.
Daryl Morgan’s celebrity factor came naturally and she never had to ‘maintain’ or ‘enhance’ her fanbase. She memorably said on Twitter when approached with a proposition to buy followers: “I’d shoot maself in the fuckin face before I had to buy/beg peeps to be mi mate!”. The pic shows the long-time ‘Superbabe’ on Glamourchase in spring 2011.
Twitter provides more interesting analysis. Search the @mentions for babes who haven’t been on TV for a while, and the count is typically pretty low – often bordering on non-existent. In other words, if they’re not on TV, not that many users talk about them or message them. There are some exceptions to this, but even the exceptions will need to be active on Twitter in order to attract larger numbers of @mentions. If they go quiet for a couple of weeks, people tend to stop talking about them. But search the mentions for high profile babes who are on TV literally now, or on Twitter literally now, and it’s often chaos. An absolute deluge of mentions and/or messages from fans.
CELEBRITY
The exceptions I mentioned above – the models who don’t necessarily have to be on TV right now to attract mentions and messages across the Social Web – are the ‘Superbabes’. As long as ‘Superbabes’ are considered to be paying some sort of attention, fans will continue to message and mention them. These girls have celebrity, and it’s this that sets a ‘Superbabe’ apart. It gives their online presence strong viral elements, and means they don’t need to badger for attention. Just being there is enough.
Today, however, there’s evidence that this type of live babeshow celebrity – the ‘Superbabe’ – is dying out as a breed. The existing ‘Superbabes’ are certainly not losing fans’ attention on the Social Web, but there looks to be a lack of scope for newer girls to build that same kind of eminence and buzz. Models who have long histories in the genre and have been active on the Social Web for years are still maintaining and increasing their huge Twitter followings. But the notion of a live babeshow babe coming new to Twitter today and attracting hundreds of followers and a swamp of messages before the end of day one, is very difficult to envisage – even for regulars on the Freeview shows.
Indeed, I’ve been surprised to find that some new TV babes’ Twitter followings have not grown any more quickly or extensively than those of a regular, private individual, and in one or two cases have been dwarfed by the followings of some of their fans. Building a Twitter following can be a very tactical affair and is certainly not necessarily a measure of popularity. But people with some element of celebrity status have always been considered exempt from the norm, and guaranteed to amass a substantial following by default. If new TV babes’ Twitter followings are now falling more in line with those of your Uncle Pete or Auntie Janet, the only conclusion you can reach is that celebrity is getting harder for them to acquire.
Preeti Young is one of the ‘Superbabes’ who didn’t enter the arena until this decade. Preeti and her twin sister Priya who together became Preeti and Priya the tantric twins, showed that becoming a ‘Superbabe’ doesn’t necessarily have to take years, and that it can actually happen very quickly. It does, however, take something very special, and looks to have been getting progressively more difficult since the close of the previous decade.
Exactly why it’s looking harder for girls to build ‘celebrity’ on the babe channels today isn’t something with a single, simple explanation I don’t think. It could be that the live babeshows have generally lost the viewer’s ‘ears’ and mainly now communicate visually – which doesn’t so easily allow the girls to engage and connect in a meaningful sense with the public. The idle adult sex chat that routinely used to win the babes viewer polls is long gone.
It could equally be that it’s very hard now for newer girls to stand out doing things that have never been done before, because the experimental phase of babe channel development is, at least for the time being, over, and behaviour is very tightly managed.
Or it could even just be that the shows no longer encourage long attention spans and in most cases are doing the exact opposite courtesy of overly repetitive marketing and a general lack of ideas. Everything’s much more mechanical now than it was in the noughties. An audience can celebritise a girl, but they can’t really celebritise a machine. Oddly enough, because it portrays the human as opposed to the mechanical side of the girls, Twitter seems to be doing a lot more for certain models’ celebrity status these days than the actual babe channels. But if newer girls can’t now make enough of a connection through TV to prompt fans to find them on Twitter in the first place, what chance do they have?
One further element, which I think is more significant than a lot of people realise, is the importance of the girls introducing themselves and the decline in focus in this department. The big names of the past never failed to inform viewers, clearly, who they were – and keep doing so, regularly, throughout a show. Look at someone like Tiffany Chambers, and even though she’s among the biggest ever names in the genre, she never assumes people know who she is. But basically, all models who were prominent on the Cellcast channels in the noughties introduce themselves very clearly, virtually on autopilot.
Regular introductions are not a stand-alone route to stardom, obviously – the babe still has to be amazing. But if she’s on TV, and she doesn’t tell viewers who she is, no matter how good she looks or how sexy she sounds she’s never going to maximise a celebrity profile. And that’s bad for the channels as well as for her. If all viewers watched for half an hour minimum they’d probably (but not definitely) find out the girl’s name from onscreen promotions on channels like Babestation, but as I mentioned earlier, attention spans and babe allegiances do not necessarily last a full five minutes. If a high proportion of guys are gone before they even know the babe’s name, it’s a big opportunity wasted. Channels that don’t denote the girls’ names on screen should do so by default – especially if levels of on-air verbal communication are low. But it shouldn’t be either/or – all babes should introduce themselves verbally when they get the opportunity.
You can never overlook the fact that the legends of babe TV have all been immensely strong characters with exceptional personality skills and massive doses of X factor. Not the sort of women the market can snap its fingers and conjure up out of thin air – especially in its current condition. But if the all-time ‘Superbabes’ of the genre turned up on the channels as young unknowns today, how many of them would achieve the same level of live babeshow stardom? I think they’d all find it a lot more difficult, and some may not reach first base. Not because they don’t have the ability, but because there’s rarely the space, the freedom or the viewer engagement for them to put across what’s so special about them.
There’s also a school of thought which believes that due to the reality or perception of declining rewards, integrity and/or career security across the babe channel market from Studio 66 to Red Light Central, even across smaller shows like Xpanded or even the other shows under the Babestation banner such as Sexstation, the potential ‘Superbabes’ of tomorrow would be a lot less likely to consider working on a live babeshow in the first place. You might expect the right new girls to make the sacrifices necessary for adult TV work if they can see five years of good, solid income ahead. But they’re not going to do it if they can only see five minutes of all-expenses-squabbled-over fame, which isn’t even likely to build them a competitive industry profile.
There’s a lot to take into account, but the one thing that does appear pretty simple, is that the live babeshows need to find an answer to the question of where their next generation of real celebrity ‘Superbabes’ will come from.
