01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, August 21, 2004

BY MAUREEN RYAN
Chicago Tribune

If you're a fan of quality reality programming, you shouldn't forget to pay homage to British television, which has spawned some of the unscripted genre's finest fare.

Faking It (season debut 8 p.m. tomorrow on BBC America) is a deceptively clever fish-out-of-water reality show. "Deceptive" because one might assume that asking a bike messenger to pretend to be a preppy polo player is a straightforward, fairly unsurprising endeavor.

But as with all good reality shows, the premise isn't as important as the emotions aroused in the participants. The Brits are supposed to be an unflappable, stiff-upper-lip tribe, but if Faking It is any indication, that stereotype is due for some revision.

In the first episode, we meet bike messenger Malcolm "Woody" Woodcock, an amateur artist covered in tattoos and spiky earrings. His challenge is to train with some of the polo world's top talents in an effort to fool a panel of experts into thinking that he knows what he's doing on top of a horse.

Just to skip ahead -- but not to give too much away -- at the end of a month of training, Woodcock and three more experienced players are sent out to play a "chukka," or inning, of polo in front of the expert panel. The panelists then decide which of the four riders is the guy who has just learned to ride.

Gaining skills with a polo mallet, however, is only part of the story. Woodcock must shed his 3-foot-long ponytail, be able to blend in at a swanky polo party, and most importantly, make his teachers proud of him. And therein lies the crux of the show.

Woodcock's commitment to gaining skills at the upper-crust sport is really a factor of his affection for his trainers Casper and Claire, who are tough on the bike messenger in ways that he has never really experienced before. The real question behind Faking It is, "Do you want to challenge yourself?" How the participants answer that question makes for some interesting television.

"What they do, they love doing," Woodcock says of his polo instructors at one point, with wonder in his voice. "It's not strictly a job to them. That's the best career you can possibly do."

Though Woodcock had a very difficult task, upcoming challenges may not be quite as brutal -- not physically, anyway. In a few weeks, a newsstand owner will go from selling newspaper stories about celebrities to writing them. And let's face it, how hard can it be to write about people on TV?