Model village

There's blood on the catwalk! There's vomit in the changing room! My favourite show in the world, America's Next Top Model, is back for its third triumphant season. What ANTM - as one of the aspiring runway rulers Magic Markered onto her buttocks in a fruitless attempt to impress the judges - has in common with American Idol is that it was created by someone on a mission to alter the exclusionary nature of their industry by throwing open its gates to those previously denied entry. In the case of Simons Fuller and Cowell, their ultimate goal was to drag their business back to the 1950s and throttle the last gasps of creativity out of it.

Model-maker Tyra Banks is up to something much more benign. In an effort to combat the eating disorders and zero self-esteem that the beauty business needs to induce in its audience to survive, Tyra has, from day one, made it explicit that among the contenders for her crown, she will be exerting a marked preference for those species who would normally be victims of modelling's heartless natural selection process: short girls, ethnic girls, post-teen girls and, most controversially, girls with a bit of meat on their bones.

Tyra's strategy has proved so successful and appealing that this season's competitors are made up of nothing but underdogs. There's big, bouncy girls. Black, bitchy girls. Butch girls. Bulimic girls. Bad-skin-afflicted girls. There's even a blind girl. As much as she's a candidate for sainthood, Tyra Banks is also seething with ambition and the main thrust of her desire is focused on staking a claim on the throne of Oprah Winfrey.

You don't get to demonstrate your empathy by trading watercress diet tips with a gaggle of botoxed beanpoles. But when you can coax waterworks out of a voluptuous survivor of a dysfunctional family, a secret puker, a backstabbing bitch with hidden sensitivity and a young mother whose vision will be entirely gone in 10 years, then you've erected a matchless platform for displaying your facility at dealing with uncorked emotions. Tyra's secure enough to continue employing the presence on the judge's table of inhouse Ugly Sister Janice Dickinson, whose melted candle of a face gets scarier every season and whose cawing pronouncements exactly echo the sweeping judgments and instant dismissals the coddled contestants will face when they're exposed to the true face of the fashion industry.

From between the water wings that were once her lips, Dickinson issues proclamations of "too fat!", "too short", "dead eyes!" and "blank face!" thus embodying the evil attitudes that Tyra tirelessly campaigns against. Unfortunately, evil has the last laugh. Even though the crowned queens walk off with contracts, endorsements deals and cover shots, the beauty biz, whose worker bees hold ANTM in contempt, has yet to embrace any of the show's victors or graduates as more than just run-of-the-mill working models. That's not going to stop Tyra. Season 4's around the corner and I'm betting there's going to be a midget involved...

The creators of Manhunt: The Search For America's Most Gorgeous Male Model are also on a mission. They're out to prove that Zoolander treated male models with way too much respect. Sucking in their guts and both sets of cheeks, the stunned-looking farmboys on display here - the proportion split pretty evenly between the dumb, the gay, the dumb gays and the ones that are too dumb to know they're gay - are put through trials that sheepdogs would refuse to participate in on the grounds that they're too humiliating. The humiliation is ladled on both by host Carmen Electra, who addresses most of her remarks to the contestant's crotches, and by a gruff veteran of the profession who puts them through a gruelling boot camp ("Give me your best look! Show me sexy! Show me sad! Show me how you looked when your dog died!"). If any show didn't need a hidden twist, it's this one. Yet Manhunt sneaks an actual male model in among the rookies, to report back their unguarded secrets. Tyra would never stand for this.