Any rival reality-TV makers watching Channel 5 on Thursday will, I suspect, have been both mystified and slightly embarrassed at not having thought up Bad Habits, Holy Orders themselves. After all, the concept is a blindingly obvious one. Take five young women whose primary interests are selfies, booze and clubbing and make them live like nuns for a month. And not metaphorically either: the five are staying with the Daughters of Divine Charity at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Swaffham, where days filled with prayer, reflection, manual work and wholesome play end at a 10 p.m. bedtime.
The first episode began by taking perhaps unnecessary care to make sure we understood the contrast between the two sets of women: cutting from the nuns praying in chapel to the girls twerking in nightclubs, from the taking of the communion chalice to the swigging of vodka. Less predictably, all concerned were then asked to describe their ideal man, with the girls mostly citing footballers and the nuns mostly pleading the fifth amendment — although one did admit that she’d favour somebody who’s ‘tall, slim’ and, maybe not insignificantly, ‘a carpenter’.
And just as The Apprentice participants start by assuring us what prats they are, so the five here were keen to point up their credentials as what euphemistic obituary-writers tend to call ‘party girls’. ‘I don’t know how many people I’ve slept with,’ explained 23-year-old Paige. ‘I have one-night stands all the time,’ declared 19-year-old Rebecca, whose job title seems to be ‘notorious Newcastle clubber’.
The five duly turned up at the convent in their full mini-skirted glory, lugging several cases of shoes and causing the nuns to whisper ‘Oh my goodness’ a lot. In fact, though, the girls plainly had no idea what their destination would be — which is why the rules came as such a shock, with bans on drink, make-up, phones and, to Paige’s especial alarm, bad language.
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