The task in last night’s second episode was to prepare and host a dinner party for a group of eligible bachelors. None of the seven girls has ever managed to scramble an egg, let alone pluck and draw a pheasant, so the ambitious menu of quail and pheasant ravioli, nine bird roast (a goose stuffed with eight different game birds in descending order of size) with dauphinoise potato, and sherry trifle with langues du chat biscuits was really going to test their mettle.
Essex hairdresser Fran (‘ever since I had my boobs done I just want to get them out all the time’) nearly threw up when confronted by her pheasant but after a pep talk from Rosemary Shrager attacked it gamely, heaving and retching all the time. Let’s hope it was only stuffing inside the goose!
The girls were treated to a mini-makeover to assist in the transformation from ladette to lady. 18-year-old Clara, brought up by her father and working as an engineering apprentice, the only girl among a team of men, had come to Eggleston Hall a self-confessed ‘geezer-bird’ who relished the chance to see if she could drop her masculine image and become a lady. She was almost overcome when she realized that she could look pretty and feminine after all. Suddenly she was standing tall and glowing with pleasure, loving the chance to bring out her feminine side at last.
On Friday evening the girls were rewarded with a night off and headed off to the local pub. Oh dear. While most of the girls kept in mind that this outing was just another test of their decorum and managed to behave reasonably well, Louise, the stunning scouser whose downfall is her predilection for fighting, found herself falling back into her old ladette ways. Downing pints of lager she treated the pub to an exhibition of loud shouting, swearing and football chants, leading a group of diners to demand a full refund from the manager as compensation for the disruption of their quiet evening out.
Of course this was bound to get back to her mentors and poor Louise was punished by being excluded from Saturday’s dinner party, her role was simply to be wine waitress for the evening. She was not allowed to dress up as the others were but had to wear her daytime green tweed suit and was forbidden to mingle with the eligible bachelors and the other ladettes, or do anything other than top up peoples’ glasses.
The ravioli were hard, the nine bird roast turned out very well, the sherry trifle was grudgingly admitted by Rosemary to be edible though the langues du chat were rather bendy, and Louise acquitted herself exceedingly well and redeemed herself enough to avoid the following morning’s invitation to leave. That honour went to Angela, a former page 3 model now working in recruitment.
‘She’s lost all her sparkle’ complained one of her mentors. Why the surprise? Angela suddenly regained her sparkle as she left Eggleston Hall and climbed into her taxi with a cheery wave and a gleeful shout of ‘I ain’t no lady!’