Gordon Ramsay in action: a scourge of the talentless
"I like blinking, I do." Uttered by a contestant on the second series of Big Brother, those five words are probably the most indicative quote reality television ever threw up. You could be famous, they seemed to say, for blinking. Not even for actually blinking. Just for liking blinking. Some people even got "I like blinking" T-shirts printed.
In Celebrity, her astringent and timely recent book, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde warns us that the blinkers are on the rise. What she calls the "celebriscape" is, she says, "expanding at least twice as fast as the universe it inhabits." And she has dozens of jaw-dropping examples to offer of this expansion into areas traditionally inhabited by—well, not by actors, anyway. There's Richard Gere announcing that he speaks "for the entire world" on the Palestinian question; Bruce Willis offering a million-dollar bounty on the head of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and explaining, when invited to stump up, that he had been speaking "metaphorically"; Angelina Jolie joining a foreign policy think-tank. Yikes.
The growth of the celebriscape has, naturally enough, been matched by the growth of a journalistic pocket industry dealing with them, of whom Hyde is a self-knowing example: the celeb-commentariat. And the currency of celebrity comment is—unlike the currency of currency itself—unfailingly inflationary. The temptation is to declare that the death of Jade Goody, or Peter André and Jordan's break-up, denotes a high-water or low-water mark for popular culture. Or—better yet—that it Changes Everything. That is the nature of the discourse.
Some things do change, though. As with climate change, so with celebrity. Even as the earth's overall temperature rises, the wriggling Gulf Stream can lead to unpredictable local effects. Similarly, even as the overall celebriscape goes critical, Britain's own celebrity microclimate has recently been shifting in an interesting way. An anti-blinking way. And, I think, there are two basic but important developments that you can see happening at the moment.
The first of them is a peculiar one. Just as the larger national picture appears to be risking a wholesale return to the 1970s, so do our visual media. The symptom on the big screen is a rash of remakes and silver-age superhero movies; on the small screen, it's reboots of Dr Who, Minder and all the rest. But above all, there's been a positive eruption of trad 1970s-style talent and variety shows. Hughie's in the ground, but Brucie—still vertical, and with his catchphrases intact—has been pressed back into service for one last work of noble note.
The second shift, however, is the more intriguing, and it is concerned with reality television. I risk a place in Pseud's Corner here, but I think it has undergone a telling change of ontological emphasis: from being to doing. The mainstay of reality television celebrity used to be all about who you were. Now, it's all about what you do. You could see it as the dynamic of the industrial revolution making its belated way through prime-time television.
In the early noughties, the shows that dominated ratings and canonised formats were Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! Both of these shows are, fundamentally, about boredom. They involve abstracting groups of people from everyday life and forcing them to pass very long periods of time with nothing to do but talk to each-other. Verboten in the Big Brother house are books, videogames, televisions, radios, or work—any of the things we ordinarily use to claim mental space for ourselves, anything that gives our brains something to do. Since in similar circumstances pigs are known to bite off each other's tails, it seemed a fair bet that the shows would be entertaining.
Those shows were, of course, competitive. Unless you're the Buddha, there's no pure state of being that's entirely free of doing. So they involved "tasks"—such as putting George Galloway in a crimson leotard and having him lick up imaginary milk. But the tasks were not the centre of the thing. The centre of the thing was the down-time: those hours of languid lounging on sofa or hammock; the sulks; the drunken outbursts; the bitchy comments, masked on the 24-hour feed by computerised birdsong. The idea was, depending on your point of view, either a profound or a profoundly dispiriting one: that, through 24-hour surveillance and enforced interaction, with nowhere to retreat or escape, the essence of each person would be revealed and made available for judgement.
So the stars that those shows made and the careers they revived were "personalities." The celebrities who joined were in most cases famous for doing something—singing, dancing, acting, playing rugby—but were bidding for recognition here by being something: they all wanted viewers to see "the real me." The model Jordan, for instance, was someone who already existed to be looked at. Continuing to be Jordan was what post-Celebrity celebrity required of her; she was paid simply to be herself on camera. The other superstars of that type of reality TV—Jade Goody, Kerry Katona, Christopher Biggins—are likewise digested more as spectacles than entertainers.
Look at what tops the ratings now, though. The key shows are Strictly Come Dancing, The Apprentice, The X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Personality and essence remain a vital component, but here are a quartet of television programmes that are predominantly about doing. You won't triumph on them just because of what you're like, but because of what you can do: play the tin whistle, clack the spoons on your kilted knee, belt out a Leonard Cohen song like you mean it. Sure, some of the shows have a Big Brother-style campus aspect. But it is secondary: what's on stage is what counts. This is a distinctly anti-Warholian current: not everybody will be famous.
The relationship with the voting public was a direct one in the previous generation of shows; now it is mediated. A panel of professionals, in each of the shows I mention, is there to guide the voting. The stand-off over John Sergeant on Strictly Come Dancing—who was shamed into leaving because he couldn't actually dance—looks a bit like a watershed. The voting public and the judges were at loggerheads; Sergeant deferred to the judges. On The Apprentice, the public doesn't even get a look-in.
Some kind of a flight towards authority—towards excellence, even—is taking place. Witness that other staple of the reality television diet, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, in which the super-chef descends upon a hapless restaurateur and brutally reminds them of the gulf between bad, merely decent and excellent.
All of which leaves the commentariat—a crew of professional amateurs if ever there was one—in a rather complex position. Are they to judge ad hominem or by the works? Get it wrong and the public might just crucify you. As Maggie Gee describes elsewhere in this issue (Britain's got talons), in the instant stardom of Susan Boyle, media chatter—albeit in the most intensely patronising form possible—hit on the disjunction between the idea of her being (shy, hirsute) and the accomplishment of her doing (singing pretty well). Doing, we're given to understand it, won out in Boyle's case. Yet it was allowed to win by those judging and reporting only because it stood in the dowdy shadow of her being. Let's not get out of hand celebrating just yet.
Still, a culture that celebrates people who can actually do stuff, and invites professionals to judge them, is surely a move in the right direction. A confession, though. I like blinking, too.
"I like blinking, I do." Uttered by a contestant on the second series of Big Brother, those five words are probably the most indicative quote reality television ever threw up. You could be famous, they seemed to say, for blinking. Not even for actually blinking. Just for liking blinking. Some people even got "I like blinking" T-shirts printed.
In Celebrity, her astringent and timely recent book, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde warns us that the blinkers are on the rise. What she calls the "celebriscape" is, she says, "expanding at least twice as fast as the universe it inhabits." And she has dozens of jaw-dropping examples to offer of this expansion into areas traditionally inhabited by—well, not by actors, anyway. There's Richard Gere announcing that he speaks "for the entire world" on the Palestinian question; Bruce Willis offering a million-dollar bounty on the head of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and explaining, when invited to stump up, that he had been speaking "metaphorically"; Angelina Jolie joining a foreign policy think-tank. Yikes.
The growth of the celebriscape has, naturally enough, been matched by the growth of a journalistic pocket industry dealing with them, of whom Hyde is a self-knowing example: the celeb-commentariat. And the currency of celebrity comment is—unlike the currency of currency itself—unfailingly inflationary. The temptation is to declare that the death of Jade Goody, or Peter André and Jordan's break-up, denotes a high-water or low-water mark for popular culture. Or—better yet—that it Changes Everything. That is the nature of the discourse.
Some things do change, though. As with climate change, so with celebrity. Even as the earth's overall temperature rises, the wriggling Gulf Stream can lead to unpredictable local effects. Similarly, even as the overall celebriscape goes critical, Britain's own celebrity microclimate has recently been shifting in an interesting way. An anti-blinking way. And, I think, there are two basic but important developments that you can see happening at the moment.
The first of them is a peculiar one. Just as the larger national picture appears to be risking a wholesale return to the 1970s, so do our visual media. The symptom on the big screen is a rash of remakes and silver-age superhero movies; on the small screen, it's reboots of Dr Who, Minder and all the rest. But above all, there's been a positive eruption of trad 1970s-style talent and variety shows. Hughie's in the ground, but Brucie—still vertical, and with his catchphrases intact—has been pressed back into service for one last work of noble note.
The second shift, however, is the more intriguing, and it is concerned with reality television. I risk a place in Pseud's Corner here, but I think it has undergone a telling change of ontological emphasis: from being to doing. The mainstay of reality television celebrity used to be all about who you were. Now, it's all about what you do. You could see it as the dynamic of the industrial revolution making its belated way through prime-time television.
In the early noughties, the shows that dominated ratings and canonised formats were Big Brother and I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! Both of these shows are, fundamentally, about boredom. They involve abstracting groups of people from everyday life and forcing them to pass very long periods of time with nothing to do but talk to each-other. Verboten in the Big Brother house are books, videogames, televisions, radios, or work—any of the things we ordinarily use to claim mental space for ourselves, anything that gives our brains something to do. Since in similar circumstances pigs are known to bite off each other's tails, it seemed a fair bet that the shows would be entertaining.
Those shows were, of course, competitive. Unless you're the Buddha, there's no pure state of being that's entirely free of doing. So they involved "tasks"—such as putting George Galloway in a crimson leotard and having him lick up imaginary milk. But the tasks were not the centre of the thing. The centre of the thing was the down-time: those hours of languid lounging on sofa or hammock; the sulks; the drunken outbursts; the bitchy comments, masked on the 24-hour feed by computerised birdsong. The idea was, depending on your point of view, either a profound or a profoundly dispiriting one: that, through 24-hour surveillance and enforced interaction, with nowhere to retreat or escape, the essence of each person would be revealed and made available for judgement.
So the stars that those shows made and the careers they revived were "personalities." The celebrities who joined were in most cases famous for doing something—singing, dancing, acting, playing rugby—but were bidding for recognition here by being something: they all wanted viewers to see "the real me." The model Jordan, for instance, was someone who already existed to be looked at. Continuing to be Jordan was what post-Celebrity celebrity required of her; she was paid simply to be herself on camera. The other superstars of that type of reality TV—Jade Goody, Kerry Katona, Christopher Biggins—are likewise digested more as spectacles than entertainers.
Look at what tops the ratings now, though. The key shows are Strictly Come Dancing, The Apprentice, The X-Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Personality and essence remain a vital component, but here are a quartet of television programmes that are predominantly about doing. You won't triumph on them just because of what you're like, but because of what you can do: play the tin whistle, clack the spoons on your kilted knee, belt out a Leonard Cohen song like you mean it. Sure, some of the shows have a Big Brother-style campus aspect. But it is secondary: what's on stage is what counts. This is a distinctly anti-Warholian current: not everybody will be famous.
The relationship with the voting public was a direct one in the previous generation of shows; now it is mediated. A panel of professionals, in each of the shows I mention, is there to guide the voting. The stand-off over John Sergeant on Strictly Come Dancing—who was shamed into leaving because he couldn't actually dance—looks a bit like a watershed. The voting public and the judges were at loggerheads; Sergeant deferred to the judges. On The Apprentice, the public doesn't even get a look-in.
Some kind of a flight towards authority—towards excellence, even—is taking place. Witness that other staple of the reality television diet, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, in which the super-chef descends upon a hapless restaurateur and brutally reminds them of the gulf between bad, merely decent and excellent.
All of which leaves the commentariat—a crew of professional amateurs if ever there was one—in a rather complex position. Are they to judge ad hominem or by the works? Get it wrong and the public might just crucify you. As Maggie Gee describes elsewhere in this issue (Britain's got talons), in the instant stardom of Susan Boyle, media chatter—albeit in the most intensely patronising form possible—hit on the disjunction between the idea of her being (shy, hirsute) and the accomplishment of her doing (singing pretty well). Doing, we're given to understand it, won out in Boyle's case. Yet it was allowed to win by those judging and reporting only because it stood in the dowdy shadow of her being. Let's not get out of hand celebrating just yet.
Still, a culture that celebrates people who can actually do stuff, and invites professionals to judge them, is surely a move in the right direction. A confession, though. I like blinking, too.
