I recently read the following article in the guardian about the repugnant production company Endemol’s latest televisual stroke of voyeuristic and sickening public nuisance, “Someone’s Gotta Go.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/09/endemol-us-reality-tv-unemployment
That’s right, you can now get sacked AND made to feel worthless AND be humiliated in front of a live studio audience, or thereabouts. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about reality TV and its impact on society versus its relation to society, and I can’t get passed the idea that we are beginning to live vicarously through our TV screens. This isn’t a Ballardian metaphor…
Watching the slow decline of Jade Goody, I constantly considered her dalliance with the dailies a masterstroke of PR (I hate Max Clifford too, but bear with me). For a woman who grew up, matured and lived her adult life in the spotlight, now blighted by the most terrible of diseases, what else could she do but rinse our public grieving for all she could. Her career in real terms can be counted in newspaper pages, sentences, photos, appearances. Her income was based on voyeurism. Ultimately, her pension and her last will and testament was bled into the redtops over the course of a month or two, leaving her kids with more photos to add to the scrapbook and many more pounds in the bank. She grew up in an unreal world, and played its game.
That was her choice.
But the idea of being publicly humiliated and losing one’s job is a step further. This sense of public invasion is worrying, but it’s the logical conclusion of the public fascination with a televisual community. Where people used to gossip about their neighbours over the garden fence, now they gossip over internet comment boards, and down “vote off your least favourite” phonelines. They play these people’s lives like the newest add on to the computer game Sims. We all play our part.
The digitisation of reality and the need to understand electronically (wikipedia versus the britanica etc) culminates in the expectation of perfection and immediate gratification in watching someone getting sacked and eating popcorn, rather than hearing about it from Betty at no. 24 and realising that this thing is REAL!
A recent conversation with a stupid rich girl, daughter of a banker, who justified banker’s bonuses in relation to their “miniscle wages” made me realise that young, naive working class women like Jade Goody don’t represent anything more than a cartoon to most people, and the divisions in society remain, and remain deep. To do well and line one’s pockets with the public’s gullibility is the perfect inversion of the usual trend towards entrenchment of stereotypes. And yet I can’t help but feel that anyone sacked on “Someone’s Gotta Go” will soon find work in a similar line of empty fame, and riches beyond the walls of their previous position of employment. Perhaps the goal for all of us should be to reach the promised land beyond our own, in front of an Ant and Dec hosted celebration of uniform mundanity. We love it. Britain’s Got Talent has just restarted celebrating that our great isle loves crapness, and rewards it many times over. Meanwhile, thousands with real skills and abilities remain unemployed.
It is not the people perpetuating and wrapped up in this unreal televisual world of fake money who I detest, but those who choose blindly to subscribe to the world which created it, the world which forced its hand. The bankers who waved money out of the bank’s of England and Scotland at protestors during the G20, missing entirely the position this country is in, and their position in it.. They may only be pawns in the game, but they are far more stuck in their roles than any social movers from the world of documentia, and far more deserving of an almight public argument than Jade Goody. She might have died without dignity, but at least her lack of diginity didn’t sap our society into a massive recession.
May “Someone’s Gotta Go” come to our shores and remove some of those foul toffy nosed pompous bankers who fail to partake in the reality of society (their aren’t many garden fences in the limehouse penthouses and shoreditch lofts so forgive them) , keeping only those willing to show some compassion for their fellow humans. Reality TV has a funny way of filing the dregs of society into the world of unreality anyway. Put them their. No, let’s make a larger, more programme-atic removal of the bankers and the toffes and the TV executives who roll in the money created by other’s misfortune, gather them up and give them and all-mighty gunging on national TV, hosted by Dave Benson Philips, then spend weeks argueing over whether watching the slow decline of their Gucci suits is our final social indignity.
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