Party Girls – The Final Night

@Babe_TV’s blog from 12 Jan 2014 comes from their now defunct Tumblr account but we have been resurrecting the content for a window into the past years of Babestation’s history.  Today’s blog talks about the final night of Party Girls.

On 16th March 2009, a grim inevitability struck the Freeview EPG, as the bizarre Cellcast experiment of SmileTV2 on Channel 46 reached its final day. In the course of the previous six months the channel had brought a new kind of chaos to terrestrial screens, but the night show, Party Girls, had proved the greatest success. Party Girls – a parallel version of Babestation – was not only the first full-strength interactive babe channel night show on Freeview, but also, due to its novelty factor, its personalities, and the lengths to which it went to engage viewers, the most exciting.

In the final show compilation image above, clockwise from top left there’s… 1) Dionne Mendez introducing her midnight roleplay, 2) Morgan (Preece) and Donna Duke introducing the final show at 9pm, 3) Dionne Mendez in the very last frame of the very last show, and 4) Donna Duke introducing an early hours section.

NEVER TO RETURN

Over the course of the final week, fans were advised that Party Girls would, in due course, be returning to Freeview with all the premium trappings (i.e. Babestation 1). But actually, the essence of the Channel 46 night show never really did return. Babestation 1 hit Freeview in May 2009, but much of what had made Party Girls so exciting was lost. The novelty, the dynamic, interactively driven programme structures, the themes, fun tasks and events, the early (9pm) start, the long and entertaining introductions sometimes lasting an hour or more, the commitment to costumed roleplay, the powerfully sexual visuals, even the main core of nightly texters… All gone. On Freeview, there’s never been another live babeshow like Party Girls, and it looks pretty certain now that there never will be.

By the 16th March ‘09 some of the live daytime programming had already disappeared from Channel 46. Longstanding day show The Chat, for example, left Freeview on Sunday 8th March, reverting to Sky-only status from the next day. Party Girls was the final broadcast on the original SmileTV2 channel (46), running from 9pm on 16th March ’09 to 05:30 the following morning. It featured Morgan (Preece), Donna Duke and Dionne Mendez as the main hosts, and Charlie C as a special guest.

Charlie was a very well-liked Party Girl who’d been on the show from Day One, but the significance of bringing her in as a guest on this particular night was probably more connected with her historic contribution to the show three months earlier. On the night of 15th to 16th December 2008, a Charlie and Morgan 2 for 1 massage section officially became the first topless babeshow sequence on Freeview. There were topless sections before that on Party Girls, but not without nipple-tape, body-paint or ‘hand-bra’ protection. The 2 for 1 section featuring Morgan and Charlie on the final Party Girls show was a re-enactment of the historic lifting of the terrestrial babeshow nipple-ban. In the above image, you can see that the re-enactment was a slightly more humorous version. Charlie has Morgan pinned to the bed, in the process of squirting her with virtually a whole bottle of cream.

The final night of Party Girls priced calls at 75p per minute for the whole show (except via the mobile shortcode). The regular price had been £1.50 per minute, and whilst for the previous week call prices had been slashed to the half price rate from around 2am, this was the first time Party Girls had ever run for the whole 9pm to 05:30 period at 75p per minute.

FINAL SHOW SCHEDULE

At 21:00, Morgan and Donna introduced the show, and Donna was the first model to take calls, from around 21:10. After Donna’s first section, the programme up until midnight ran as follows…

• 21:40: Morgan, phone section.
• 22:10: Donna, phone section.
• 22:40: Dionne, phone section.
• 23:10: Morgan, phone section.
• 23:30: Morgan and Charlie, 2 for 1 ‘massage’ section.

Around midnight, Dionne perfomed a typical Party Girls costumed roleplay, afterwhich she, Morgan and Donna continued regular half-hour-ish phone sections for the rest of the night. For the record, the girls’ final appearances were timed as follows…

• 04:15 – 04:45: Morgan.
• 04:45 – 05:05: Donna.
• 05:05 – 05:29: Dionne, the last onscreen model on Party Girls.

The text-driven themes and tasks for which Party Girls had become renowned, were absent on the final night, and had been dropped from the schedule more often than not over the previous ten days or so. But the compilation above gives an impression of the kind of fun that would take place in between the main phone sections. Clockwise from top left the compilation shows: 1) Donna and Jodie’s famous “Banana” task, 2) Morgan and Donna picking tasks from the Party Girls Action Bowl (on this occasion they had to do topless star-jumps whilst singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star), 3) Geri and Jemma Jey kissing (a simple “vote for a snog and see it live” arrangement), and 4) Rachel Cole and Kelly Carter’s famous Twister game.

THE END…

Whilst Dionne was the last of the Babestation girls on screen, Donna and Morgan were chatting on the mic as the final show came to a close. Like the true babeshow trainspotter I am, I’ve transcribed the closing words from Donna and Morgan below…

DONNA: “We wanna say a great big thank you to all of you guys who have made Party Girls an absolutely amazing show to work on. Thank you for all your texts over the months that we’ve been on your screens. Thank you for all of your phonecalls. Thank you for every way in which you’ve participated, and we cannot wait to come back in a couple of weeks, with a vengeance… So stay tuned…”

MORGAN: “We love you lots like Jelly Tots.”

DONNA: “We do love you lots like Jelly Tots, (panicking, to squeeze in more than she has time to say) and… and we’ll find out when we’re on, and tell you – we love you (closing graphics cut in)…”

The broadcast was immediately followed by a static ad for the forthcoming Channel 50 babeshow, Partyland, but there was to be no more live TV on the Channel 46 incarnation of SmileTV2. It had served its purpose. The game-changing night time TV revolution had come to an end.