Smiling on television: mere lip-service?

So you're miked-up, ready to go, having a laugh with the interviewer.

Then the red light goes on.  And with it the transformation of your personality.

Where there was natural human spontaneity, now there's a Soviet-era bruiser in an oversized fur hat with a red star in the middle, handing out one-way cattle-class tickets to Siberia.  Gordon Brown has taken over your face.

Unless we're American, we tend to find the business of smiling to order challenging.  And distasteful, too.  There's nothing more cringe-worthy than a false smile, we think, so best not smile at all.

And of course, as Americans delight in pointing out, the British have bad teeth.  (Although the new obsession with cosmetic dentistry over here means US grins are more widespread.)

The trouble is, when you're on telly, not smiling is not an option.  Not smiling doesn't make you look professional.  It makes you look unfriendly.  This is because smiling on television has nothing to do with humour.

A TV smile is the same smile of greeting, which, accompanied by a raised eye-brow or two, you give someone when meeting them for the first time.

It's a visual hand-shake with the viewer, who is indeed meeting you for the first time.  Or, if you're famous, seeing you again after an interval, which amounts to the same thing.

Smiling is not a pretence.  It's a courtesy.  Looking happy to see someone is as much a greeting as the words you use. Think of it in this way and you may find it easier to smile to order.

But crucially, it's got to be a proper smile, and this means more than mere lip-service.  If you think smiling is something you do with your mouth, then I'm afraid you've got it wrong.

I'm sure you're aware that on either side of your mouth you have a set of two muscles called Zygomaticus Major.  You use these to lift your lips into a smile.  But as any decent smilologist will tell you, if you only use these, your smile will be perceived as bogus.

The muscles you really want to be focusing on are the Orbicularis Oculi.  As their name suggests, they're around your eyes.  They're the ones that make your eyes crinkle into crow's feet.  And the ones that turn a fake smile into a genuine one.

You can see them in action in the pic below of sultan-of-suave George Clooney.

A man who knows his Orbicularis Oculi from his Zygomaticus Major

Now I don't know about you, but I'm not one of those body-builder blokes who's able to locate, isolate and twitch individual muscle groups to music.

So how to co-ordinate your mouth and eye muscles so you can produce a genuine smile to order?

Having spent far too long grinning at myself in the bathroom mirror, it occurred to me that the raison d'etre of the Clooney Zygomaticus could simply be to help push up the Clooney cheeks so that they in turn lift the Clooney Orbicularis to produce the eye-crinkling that makes feminine hearts throb the world over.  (You may have detected I'm not a physiologist.)

Add to this the raising of the eyebrows, (using another pair of muscles, the Occipitalis-Frontalis) and you have a general upwards movement from your mouth, through your cheeks, to your eyes and above into your forehead.

So could thinking 'up' help you produce a genuine pleased-to-see-you face to order?  Get into that bathroom and give it a try.

Because in the deeply superficial world of television, your face is worth a thousand words.