• by John Gaffney , December 5, 2002

OPR’s: The UK Edition (Kind Of)

It Was The Best Of Times, It Was The Worst Of Times: Loquacious UK Guardian New York columnist Tina Brown wrote this dispatch from someplace north of 72nd Street this week: “The wounded city still glitters but the current budget crisis, with its constant drum roll of whopping deficits and grinding service cuts, has already dirtied it up in our mind’s eye. There was a Seventies-style demo protesting against the cuts on the steps of City Hall at the end of November. Casual sex is doing well again, but instead of looking for Mr. Goodbar in noisy Seventies-style singles saloons, there is a vogue for surfing silently for digital dalliances on the internet. Instead of Seventies spouse-swapping, New Yorkers invite their exes over for comfort sex, the erotic equivalent of macaroni (and) cheese.”

Jerry, Jerry, Jerry: An opera based on Jerry Springer's will have its world premiere at Britain's National Theater. In concert form, "Jerry Springer: The Opera" was one of the biggest hits at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now it is to be given a full-scale production in London next April. British composer Richard Thomas joined forces with comic writer Stewart Lee for an irreverent take on the American talk show that has become a worldwide hit with such programs as "Pregnant by a Transsexual" and "Here Come the Hookers." Among the opera's showstoppers are a diaper fetishist confessing all to his true love, a dance routine by the Ku Klux Klan and Jesus launching into a swearing tirade against the Devil.

You Want Reality? I Don’t Think You Can Handle Reality: According to Independent UK C-list celebrities will be shown vomiting and analyzing their bowel movements in a new Channel 5 reality show. Eighties singer Kim Wilde and comedian Richard Blackwood will be among four "contestants" sent to an island to undergo a week of enemas and colonic irrigation in the interests of science – and voyeuristic television viewers. A Channel 5 spokeswoman said the new show, to be broadcast next year, would not shirk from focusing on the scatological ordeals of its celebrity subjects. But it was likely to stop short of dwelling too closely on the gorier details. "The celebrities will have to survive for a week on oral enemas, which basically means drinking things like olive oil," she said. "They'll also be analyzing their own poo and things like that."