No, What Did I Do Last Night? is not the latest Lifetime movie, despite the title.  (What Did I Do Last Night?: The Lisa Marie Bowman Story — I like the sound of that….)  What Did I Do Last Night? is a 30-minute “reality” show that currently airs on the Current TV Network.  Check your local listings.

Why Was I Watching It?

Originally, I had turned over to Current TV to watch Al Pacino in Scarface.  What Did I Do Last Night? came on immediately after Scarface and, as often happens with my late night television habits, I was just too lazy to change the station.

What’s It About?

Apparently, over the course of each episode, the show’s smug host (Jeff Leach) gets a different English person drunk and then films them acting like a complete jackass.  The next day, he shows the footage to his hungover victim and scares them sober.  Or something like that.

This episode’s victim was a cheerful blonde named Rita who, once she got intoxicated, ended up climbing on top of a table at a bar.  The next morning, Rita responded by saying that she was “disgusting” and then breaking down into tears.  That’ll teach her to try to enjoy herself when she goes out.

What Worked?

Well, Rita did say she was going to try to reduce her drinking so technically, I guess you could say the whole show worked.  Except, of course, that’s a load of crap because the show’s not about helping people.  It’s about humiliating them while the viewing audience thinks, “I might be an unoriginal, boring, unimaginative toadsucker, but at least I don’t ever get that drunk.”  And, taken from that perspective, the show again accomplished what it set out to do.

What Didn’t Work:

There’s a thin line between helping and victimizing and this show pretty much crossed that line from the beginning.

This show was a lot like Intervention in that it claims to help the addicted but only after they’ve managed to exploit that addiction for all that its worth.  Of course, there is a big difference in that the Intervention film crew doesn’t actually shoot anyone up with heroin while this show actually gets people drunk so that the smug host can criticize them for it.  The whole time that Rita was being shown stumbling around drunk, nobody ever asked if, under nontelevised circumstances, she usually drank quite as much alcohol as the show’s producers insisted on providing for her.

Plus, they pulled a very cruel trick on Rita early on in the show.  While Rita is debating what to wear on her drunken night out, the show’s producers are heard encouraging her to wear a white dress with a low neckline and a very short skirt.  What they didn’t tell Rita — but what they surely knew — was that her entire trip to the bar would be filmed with an infrared camera which would basically make that white dress transparent in a way that a non-white dress would not have been.  Since the dress itself was practically skin-tight, Rita didn’t wear any underwear with the dress which means that, for the final 15 minutes of the show, she’s seen thoroughly shitfaced in a see-through dress with a huge amount of pixels over her crotch.  And it’s impossible to maintain any sort of dignity when you’re climbing on top of a bar with a blurry twat.

I felt very bad for poor, exploited Rita.  I hope somebody bought her a drink afer this show aired.

“Oh My God!  Just Like Me!” Moment

At one point, after the producers have gotten her drunk, Rita is shown falling down and then falling again as she attempts to stand back up.  “Oh my God!” I shouted, “just like me!”  What’s sad is that, for the most part, I rarely drink.  Yet, I often fall.

Later on, as Rita was standing on a table and demanding, “Everybody look at me bum!”, my sister Erin said, “Oh my God, just like Lisa.”  As much as I love my sister, I have to disagree.  Obviously, not being English, I don’t use terms like “bum.”

Lessons Learned

Don’t wear white on reality television.