Celebrity Culture in Excelsis

It beams the news, sport and weather directly into people’s homes. It screens movies and has bequeathed us the occasional wonderful series (how poorer would our lives have been without Fawlty Towers, Only Fools And Horses, The Office, The Sopranos and The Wire?). It used to even treat us to a regular stream of factual, hard-hitting documentaries — you may recall the glory days of Panorama, World In Action, Dispatches etc. — some of which proved hugely influential in exposing wrong-doing and reversing miscarriages of justice. These were rarely welcomed by officialdom. Thames Television produced a memorable documentary in 1988 entitled Death On The Rock, which demonstrated how three unarmed IRA volunteers were gunned down in cold blood by the SAS as they tried to flee. The Thatcher government rewarded Thames for its brilliant journalism by stripping it of its license to broadcast.
So, television had, and still has, its uses. But the general trend towards ‘dumbing-down’, evident throughout the ‘90s, became a race to the bottom of the abyss as the Noughties progressed, leaving anyone with a grain of wit in no doubt that television has become the orifice through which Satan skull-fucks the ignorant. It was the decade of what misleadingly became known as ‘reality TV’, of Big Brother and The X Factor, of popular culture becoming dominated by utterly vacuous half-wits with no discernible talent for anything at all beyond attention-seeking behaviour and a keen instinct for the quickest way to grab tabloid headlines. It was the decade in which the message went out loud and clear to kids and teenagers that the best thing one can aspire to is fame, and that the quickest way of achieving it is by prostituting oneself on live television for the vicarious entertainment of viewers either too thick to see through the charade, or too lazy to care.
Sure, there were precedents. Reaching back to the ‘80s, Candid Camera, Game For A Laugh and its successor Beadle’s About had offered glimpses of the depths to which TV could sink, and their viewing figures offered proof of the readiness with which viewers were prepared to have their intelligence insulted. The late ‘90s brought us The Jerry Springer Show, though that swiftly gained an ironic cult following among many people of genuine taste and discernment (in other words, I confess I enjoyed it).
But the phenomenal success of Big Brother, starting in 2000, broke the mould. One could switch on one’s TV at 3 o’clock in the morning to watch other people sleeping. Live. For personal entertainment. The format was ingeniously simple and brutishly exploitative: pile a dozen or so punters into a house, isolated from the outside world, with their every move and utterance watched by cameras. Broadcast it, and witness them make complete spectacles of themselves as they surrender their privacy in pursuit of a smallish cash prize and guaranteed instant celebrity. (Predictably enough, the inmates tended to become sexually involved with one another, whether out of boredom, genuine attraction or a handy short-cut to The Daily Retard’s front page).
It bequeathed us such giants of modern popular culture as Brian Dowling, Jade Goody, Chanelle Hayes and Chantelle Houghton, who would invariably stay in the public eye for quite some time, the tedious minutiae of their personal lives played out in the likes of Heat! magazine. It also spawned a succession of predictably lobotomised ‘reality’ shows, of which the quintessential example was possibly 2001’s Temptation Island, which placed several couples on a tropical island surrounded by abnormally good-looking single people in order to test the couples’ commitment to one another.
The latest phenomenon to keep the populace entranced is The X Factor, a ‘talent contest’ wherein singers of uncertain vocal prowess compete for a recording contract worth roughly £1 million, with a predictably damaging impact on the charts and the notion of musical originality (Nit-pickers might point out that, for instance, 2006’s winner Leona Lewis possesses a technically amazing voice capable of no end of swoops and ululations within a single lyric. Some may even care to listen to it. It’s all subjective.)
In a similar vein were programmes such as Strictly Come Dancing, Celebrity Bainisteoir, Hell’s Kitchen, Celebrity Fat Club and the like. All of them are individually just about bearable, but taken together, they have colonised the evening TV schedules without mercy, to the point where ITV’s Champions League coverage with Andy Townsend and Terry Venables often qualifies as the most intellectually edifying thing on the box of an average night. Sad but true.
We must fight back!