There is a scene in Tina Fey’s comedy show 30 Rock where the small-screen diva Jenna Maroney must reluctantly accept that she has been cast in a YA show not as one of the main characters, but as the ailing mother. Her final line? “I’m 41 now,” she says, falling back on the sofa. “Time … to die.” Tina Fey also appears in the famous Last ***kable Day sketch, from Inside Amy Schumer, in which various female actors d’un certain age gather over wine to mark the passing of the days of being cast by male directors.
The cultural obsession with youth – especially in any kind of visual medium like film and TV – is a widely recognised, if not widely addressed, phenomenon. But it is at its most unbending when it comes to the reality show genre. There, in whatever sun-kissed villa or island the participants have been put into in order to discover their soulmates and/or a new strain of chlamydia, anyone over the age of roughly 25 can expect to become den mother at best, or left out in a bathchair in the broiling sun at worst. It is an unspoken rule that anyone over 30 approaching the love palace is shot on sight.
