'You've won a boob job!' – is The Surjury the sickest reality TV yet?

It’s never particularly good when a television series is forced to defend its own existence before it has even aired, but that’s the situation The Surjury finds itself in. The series has already been at the centre of a Commons culture select committee meeting about reality TV, with one MP calling it “tawdry, voyeuristic, titillating and essentially exploitative”. Its host Caroline Flack is already on the back foot on Instagram, after her announcement post drew questions over whether or not it constitutes a ‘freak show’. Channel 4 is making it very clear, as often as possible, that all participants will be psychologically assessed before they appear.

Of course, there’s a reason for all this controversy, and that’s because The Surjury sounds absolutely awful. It’s going to be a series about cosmetic surgery, where people who want free cosmetic surgery have to appear on television and essentially beg for a procedure. Whether they get it or not depends on the aforementioned surjury; 12 strangers who hold the final decision. If 75% of them agree with the contestant, it is performed. If they don’t, the contestant has to head home more miserable than ever.

As you’d expect, The Surjury is being pitched in a positive, lifestyley way. Channel 4, aware that it still has some semblance of a public service remit, would like the show to be seen as a measured reflection of an ‘image-obsessed generation’. Its executive producer, meanwhile, has suggested that the whole thing is a win-win for everyone involved, saying “Our pitchers will either get the surgery they’ve always wanted, or a massive boost in confidence when the public rules they don’t need work at all!”

Despite all this, The Surjury still sounds a hell of a lot like an extremely terrible version of Take Me Out, where people with body dysmorphia will have to charm an unsmiling wall of strangers into letting them cut their face open. It’s a show where the worst possible outcome for the contestants is that they’ll go home upset because they still look like themselves.

It doesn’t help that it’s called The Surjury. Not only is it a pun, and one so terrible it makes me wish I was dead, but you get the feeling that the name came first. It’s a reverse-engineered back of an envelope scribble. And while there’s theoretically nothing wrong with a pun-based title – Transparent is still the leader of the pack – the flippancy jibes a bit when it services a show about people so sad about how they look they have to beg strangers for surgery.

Flack’s appointment doesn’t exactly help things. As the host of Love Island, she is responsible for pushing an impossibly narrow aesthetic ideal on to viewers. When you watch Love Island, you’re essentially watching a bunch of attractive young people with the exact same body type become rich and famous for looking the way they do. And for all the chin-stroking faux concern Flack will doubtless employ on The Surjury, it still makes me uneasy that she’s jumped from a show that celebrates conventional attractiveness to one that makes people beg for it.

Now, obviously, nobody has seen The Surjury yet. It could still surprise us. But if it does, it’ll be down to the jury members themselves. If they’re simply made up of members of the public who want to be on the television, it’ll be awful. It’ll be Gogglebox for boob jobs. But if they’re made up of people with direct experience of cosmetic surgery – those who practise it, who have had it, who regret it – and they’re allowed time to put their cases forward without any sensationalism, there might be a glimmer of hope. But it’s a distant glimmer nonetheless.