And so farewell then, Big Brother. Come the end of series eleven next year, Channel 4 has announced its intention to axe the ailing flagship of reality television, with the other major channels apparently also deciding they'd rather not step too close to its twitching corpse. The end of an era? The world has certainly tired relatively fast of this brand of reality, perhaps because real life, unlike art, tends wearily to end up repeating itself (forcing producers into ever-more-desperate attempts at enlivening). But BB's death represents not so much a victory for taste as a striking rear-guard action by the forces of talent, which in recent years have colonised a rather different and altogether more cheering kind of television. As Sam Leith argued in his piece on "the death of do-nothing celebrity" in Prospect earlier this year:
Look at what tops the ratings now… 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… 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.It certainly suggests a fundamental limit to the notion of everyone being exactly as interesting as everyone else. As a still more withering critic than Gordon Ramsay once put it:
You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerd-othon: a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent.The critic was Martin Amis, and the context was the Preface to his seminal essay collection The War Against Cliché (a version of which can be read online here). Amis himself finished the paragraph above with a telling final sentence: a shrug, perhaps, in the direction of Big Brother and its numberless associates. "Therefore, talent must go." In 2001, with reality television in its first flush of world domination, few would have dared to disagree with his gloomy prognosis. Today, though, it's BB that's gone; and talent that remains on our screens.
