HIDDEN CAMERA Female tricksters take over your TV

A third season of 'Girls Behaving Badly' is planned this fall for Oxygen.
By ROGER CATLIN
HARTFORD COURANT
HOLLYWOOD -- The streets might be teeming with hidden-camera pranksters, from Jamie Kennedy to "Bonzai," but a growing number of the practical jokers are not of Alan Funt's gender.
A third season of "Girls Behaving Badly" is planned this fall for the Oxygen network, where the show has "helped to put Oxygen on the map and helped to define us in the comedy area," says Geraldine Laybourne, network chairwoman and chief executive officer.
A second season of a hidden-camera show, "Scare Tactics," is set for the Sci-Fi Network, hosted by Shannen Doherty, who often is seen on the site of many pranks.
And next month brings the practical joking of "3 Non-Blondes," a hit on U.K. television for what BBC America Chief Executive Officer Paul Lee calls "surprise television."
Victims are largely men on "Girls Behaving Badly," either gender on the other two shows. Many of the ideas come from the female casts. (Oxygen uses "girls" in the title, while the Brits use "women.")
'Girls Behaving Badly'
"So much of the pranks that we do on the show are culled from our personal experiences as women," says Melissa Howard of "Girls Behaving Badly." "We take our stuff to the writers, and we tell them what we would like to do, and they work that into our experience."
Howard, a former cast member on MTV's "The Real World" (New Orleans) works on the show with the revolving cast of Chelsea Handler, who once worked on "Spy TV," Kira Soltanovich and Shondrella Avery.
"All of us come from a comedic background," says Avery.
'3 Non-Blondes'
That's the case, too, on "3 Non-Blondes," where the three comics were put together by producer Gary Reich, who previously worked with "Trigger Happy TV," and Sacha Baron Cohen, better known as the spoofing hip-hop figure Ali G.
"I've worked independently with all three through the years," says Reich of his cast members. "I just knew there was a dynamic that probably would happen."
So far, they've shocked British passersby in a number of locations -- singing Tina Turner at the top of their lungs at a record-store listening station, stopping a couple and asking the man why he hasn't called, constantly stopping black people and asking, "Are you black?"
"We're always sensitive," says Jocelyn Jee Esien, who stars in the show along with Tameka Empson and Ninia Benjamin. "You can tell when you're doing a stunt on a member of the public, and you can sense how far you can go.
"We did a stunt on a girl where a guy had just lost his job, and he just came out for a break, and we actually made him laugh. And the mother said that he hadn't actually smiled in about two weeks, and we made him smile. So you've just got to be sensitive and see how far you can take it, and then you push it."
'Scare tactics'
It was a similar motivation for Doherty, who began her career portraying Brenda on "Beverly Hills 90120" and was among the original cast on "Charmed" before moving to "Scare Tactics."
"I like to be involved in shows that are good, that push the envelope and are successful," Doherty says.
The envelope might have been anthrax-laced, though, when they did a gag on a guy whom they told had been bio-contaminated -- a prank that would get some people arrested in the post-9/11 world.
"That bit was actually shot almost a year before 9/11," says "Scare Tactics" co-executive producer Kevin Healey. "We wouldn't do that bit today because it's probably a sensitive area." But the victim "in the end had a great time [and] laughed, stuck around and took pictures with us."