Tanning Tales: radio review

The walnut veneer-look ... Posh Spice

Glastonbury, Wimbledon and fake tan. Summer officially arrived on the radio this week, with two major pieces of (admirably brilliant) BBC coverage and one faintly wry documentary on Britain's love affair with fake tanning. Tanning Tales (Radio 4) shepherded plummy, former musical star Kit Hesketh-Harvey up and down the country to investigate the shades "from Rich Tea to Oreo", calling in on industry experts on the way.

First stop was Michelle Feeney, CEO of St Tropez, the company that quickly became synonymous for selling us the solidified walnut veneer made popular by David Dickinson, Posh Spice (pre-VB rebranding days) and Jordan.

"It makes you look better and feel better because of the reactions other people have to you. It's fantastic. People feel thinner," burbled Feeney before reeling off an anecdote about a 1950s experiment with children and sugar that led to the accidental discovery of fake tan. "Like penicillin!" shrieked Hesketh-Harvey, caught up in?the wondrous miracle that is dihydroxyacetone – the chance chemical that gave us artificial tanning.

In an offbeat side-step away from vox-popping the young, fake-baked and evangelical, one Cardiff landlord was interviewed about the "mysterious" rising costs of maintaining his student digs. "Mattress covers", he kept repeating. "75% of the young girls use fake tan, we're dealing with a phenomenon – we've had to replace thousands of pounds of mattress covers."

Professor Ruth Holliday, a gender studies expert, went one better and began quoting Thorstein Veblen to give us a rounded view of the leisure class. In case you hadn't noticed, she pointed out, the gothic pale idle rich of the early 20th century have morphed into bronzed, leathery superaristos swanning around on yachts on the pages of OK! and Hello!. Which, really, was a roundabout way of saying that we now all aspire to the K-Middleton family aesthetic: always orange, never underdone. Which might go some way to explaining the programme's most mind-boggling claim: 58% of Liverpudlians, men and women, are spray-tanned at all times. Liverpool is the tanning capital of?Britain. The further north it seemed Hesketh-Harvey found himself in England, the deeper and faker the tans went, the sillier and shallower the reporting got.

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