All the Pretty Celebrities
A month in which I visit Realitytvland....... and find it No Country for Old Men.
This month’s essay was inspired by an article in Unherd about tv celebrities and the Reality they apparently inhabit. *First though, a nod to the novels of the late Cormac McCarthy for my essay’s title and subtitle.
The article takes a cheekily mocking look at the celebrity break-up of a pair of celebrities - Molly-Mae and Tommy Fury - who famously ‘fell in love’ on the reality tv show Love Island. :
In All Bar Ones [trendy UK wine bar chain] up and down the country, a silence descended. In the aisles of B&M, in between pyramids of discounted Brazilian Bum Bum Cream, women softly wept. French bulldogs howled in unison from Astroturfed pens on their new-build estates. For Wednesday was the day that love died......
More snippets…….For celebrities, this schadenfreude is transactional: if your job is to be famous, as it is for Molly-Mae, a public break-up — particularly a “shock” one — is, perversely, the best thing that could possibly happen to you. A rebrand is sure to follow.... ..... it must be hard to be dazzled by someone everyone already knows everything about; it must feel like lying in bed with a hologram..... ....We are vengeful gods demanding sacrifice from indentured celebrities — blood is our reward for upholding our side of the bargain: using the code “TOMMYMAE4EVA” for 10% off our first purchase.
For those unfamiliar with Love Island (my readers are of course a highbrow crowd!) it is a British reality tv show (with American and Australian spin-offs) in which - according to this Spectator review - “bikinied women in high heels line up like Barbies on a Toys ‘R’ Us shelf [and] step forward if they like the man brought out in front of them The men choose their partner.... It’s ridiculous. That’s why 4.2 million of us tune in every week.” Stories about its famously/notoriously addictive character abound....for instance: a young lady who “quit her job as a solicitor to appear on the show [and] was booted off after just 20 days, one of five seemingly-fame demented law graduates to enter the villa.”
Reality TV...is it for real?
Because I am too serious-minded/stuffy (delete as appropriate) to ever let this stuff get past the few seconds it takes to switch channels, my depiction of it and discussion of its merits and demerits has relied heavily on second-hand sources: In the selection of journalist snippets that follows, I try to navigate the treacherous straights between excess sniffiness on the one hand and kitchiness on the other. My trawl netted a catch of three basic types:
1. those minded to see it as harmless fun and its undeniable tackiness as just part of the gaiety of nations.
2. those who view those self-same characteristics as unredeemedly awful
3. those who see it as one more tragic sign that our three hundred year Age of Enlightenment is now returning to darkness.
So, taking each type in turn:
Unherd again ....It’s never hurt that the sort of people I loathe hate reality TV. See Annie Lennox, sneering that The X Factor is “a factory, owned and stitched up by puppet masters”.....It proved that, at a time when real stars of screen and music increasingly scold from the same hymn sheet behind the high walls of their privately-policed gated enclosures — capitalism is evil; transwomen are women; Palestine is real — the reality stars, unschooled in hypocrisy, can still be a breath of fresh air. ......I’ll take a talent show over a Quality Drama showing the working-class being happy with their place below stairs any day.....
Ouch.... not much doubt which up-market British period drama series is in her sights there. Dare I say though that a Downtonesque landed estate where almost everyone - both upstairs and downstairs - is feeling OK with their lot.... sounds to me perhaps about as close to heaven on earth as we’re ever likely to get. But Yes, an end to actors (travelling players in other words) and tv presenters (professional intellectual lightweights in other words) treating us to the benefit of their political opinions....I’m with her on that one.
Time Magazine To the extent that the U.S. has become a harsher, shallower, angrier, more divided place in the 21st century, reality TV—which has helped normalize cruelty, belligerence, superficiality, and disloyalty, and rewarded people who weaponize those traits—bears a share of the blame......When social scientists study the effects of this entrenchment, the conclusions they reach are rarely encouraging. Reality shows have been found to exacerbate body anxiety, increase physical aggression, and mess with our expectations for romantic relationships....[As media critic Jennifer L. Pozner notes In her influential 2010 book Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, reality programming “has the power to influence our notions of normalcy versus difference”]
The Guardian Humankind,” in TS Eliot’s opinion, “cannot bear very much reality”, but our goggling, glutted species seems able to bear any amount of reality TV. .......today’s equivalent to the nightmare alleys in itinerant carnivals. In True Story, sociologist Danielle Lindemann takes a studious tour of the terrain. She finds toddlers with waxed eyebrows and spray-tanned legs competing in beauty contests: one precocious three-year-old mimics Julia Roberts playing a hooker in Pretty Woman ...... At the Redneck Games – an Olympiad for the obese – hillbillies perform belly-flops in mud pits. Elsewhere, a young woman snacks on the foam innards of her sofa cushions.....liberty and the pursuit of celebrity and reality TV is the approved career path for those whose only distinction is an exhibitionistic id. One of my favourites is a tiny, thong-clad hoyden known as Snooki, who rampages through a beach resort in Jersey Shore and tussles with randy young men in a frothing hot tub........Lindemann treats her own addiction to the genre as a guilty pleasure and frets to extract some educational value from it. She cites an ethicist who claims that reality TV is “a tool for inclusivity”.
It’s a Celebrity....get me out of here
So reality tv and celebrities?....where would we be without them. Well – many of us would say - a lot better off obviously:
The most depressing place in the known universe is the “Stories” section on the Snapchat app. Have you seen it? It’s a veritable gushing river of postmodern celebrity, X-Men stars and left ass cheek models and dudes with tattoos on their incisors all whizzing past your head. ....A third says simply: “Lu.” And that’s just it. I don’t know who in the hell Lu is. Yet I feel like I should know who Lu is,... the Joneses except that the Joneses keep multiplying and trying to sell us T-Mobile plans..... There are simply too many of these people and not enough warehouses to lock them all in
If only we could just re-tighten the entry requirements....I mean radically re-tighten them….back to those celebrity halcyon days of yore. Some people should be celebrated Yes...great leaders, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs and so on. It would still be a very long list...Shakespeare, Beethoven, Einstein and so on would still be in there... along with thousands of others of their elevated kind – even a smattering of Rock Stars. The list would just no longer be added to at the rate of several every day (or do I mean hour?)
You are Watching Big Brother…..as Orwell didn’t say in 1984
“What Orwell failed to predict was that we'd buy the cameras ourselves and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.” Comedian Keith Jensen.
I suppose the question is how and why did all this reality tv and surfeit of celebrity stuff get inside our heads? I am a creature of the Western Enlightenment and so its ideals are – broadly speaking – my ideals....its embrace of Reason; its Christian (former) moral compass etc. So the puzzle is why do we fall so far short of these ideals in our cultural reality? Is part of it a kind of enervated boredom induced by excessive ease and leisure? Perhaps the sanest thing is to note the gap between Ideals and Realities whilst cheerfully – or at least stoically - accepting this appetite for reality tv as a necessary counter and by-product of Western man’s better angels.....his amazing technological ingenuity. As sociologist Danielle Lindemann notes in her True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us: “reality TV reflects how regressive we truly are.” Well our technological communications wizardry has given us a dose of who “we truly are” in spades. Some are saying that we Westerners are returning to paganism...... But I’m rambling.
Amusing Ourselves to Death?
Amusing Ourselves to Death is regarded by many as a seminal book on television’s transformative effect on society, even though - published in 1985 - its persective is pre-internet and pre-reality tv. I read it many years ago and now have only a hazy recollection except that it is very much in the mould of items 2&3 of the above typology. It is described in its Amazon listing as a “groundbreaking polemic about the corrosive effects of television on our politics and public discourse..... a prophetic look at what happens when politics, journalism, education, and even religion become subject to the demands of entertainment.”. Some choice quotes from it can be found in this link. My favourite is this one: Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?
According to Homo Ludens an influential thesis written in 1938 by the eminent cultural historian Johan Huizinga:
“Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play. Wisdom and philosophy found expression in words and forms derived from religious contests. The rules of warfare, the conventions of noble living were built up on play-patterns”.
In other words reality tv et al is just a media-age manifestation of man’s eternal, primordial urge to play? And given the serious business of real life and of the artistic/cultural high ground is the answer that people like to leaven it all with a bit of trash culture. An interesting perspective certainly but it begs some questions:
· Is it fair to grade forms of play on a sliding-scale from more-civilised to more-barbarous....and which of these types does our 21st c. television output most fit? It’s not pure poetry, that’s for sure.
· Where was this universal “play urge” finding expression pre-21st century in the societies currently awash with Reality tv?
I’ll finish with a withering observation - about the corrosive effect of things like reality tv - by my favourite contemporary philosopher John Gray. Writing of our 21st culture - with its Reality Television freak shows as its Huizingan forms of ‘Play’ – he predicts:
In the years ahead American politics will be driven by the people dismissed as ugly, feeble and deplorable by Ayn Rand, Bronze Age Pervert and liberals alike. Whoever succeeds in lodging themselves in the White House in January 2025 will preside over a failing state and a country descending into civil warfare. The hyperbolic liberalism of past decades will be locked in a deadly confrontation with the “populist” mass blowback that is its ever-present and lengthening shadow. The ensuing upheavals will not be pretty, but only fools have ever supposed that politics could be the pursuit of inchoate visions of beauty.
So that is a definite ‘3’ then on my typology! I like to think my essay, on the other hand, is more a synthesis of all three…..Your thoughts too would be most welcome.
I’ll end this essay with a brief detour down another tv alleyway....another kind of tv ‘reality’. And this is one that, unlike reality tv, you cannot switch channels out of....not if you want to watch any kind of commercially funded television.
Advertising?...I’m not buying it
I’ve long felt an itch to do a bit of a rant about the awful people who work as advertising ‘creatives’ and the awful psychobabble they try to sell you. I try to steer clear of rants as a rule because it’s not how I want this Substack to be. Your old Grandpa dispensing words of wisdom from his armchair whilst puffing on his pipe... is more my particular shtick. But something about finding myself suddenly assailed, in my twilight years, by a combination of the apotheosis of Woke in Lefty Landslide UK - plus the prospect of an AI-generated avatar called ‘Kamala’ as president of the Free World – temporarily put me off balance.
Few things can get your blood up like watching a string of commercials on British tv. The Britain depicted in tv ads has a statistically improbable number of people of black African ethnicity and a statistically improbable number of women who appear to lean towards the Sapphic passion. Such men as exist in this Britain – white, black or other - seem to be merely an embarrassment..... even to themselves. An increasingly common sales pitch is the one that seeks to get you - as you lounge on your sofa - to devolve all your purchasing decisions to some or other kind of autopilot.... thereby allegedly ”freeing you up with more time for the things you love”. Imagine being a fly on the wall in the places where this stuff is ‘created’.....paint in the mind’s eye a picture of these young advertising ‘creatives’. No..... I must look away!
After a stiff brandy I have now recovered my habitual phlegm of course and will take a brief look at a question that many have puzzled with....does this multi-billion dollar advertising nonsense actually work? Actually increase sales and pay for itself? There is a long thread about this question on the Freakonomics website:
“It’s a puzzle about something that you encounter all the time. Every day, we are each exposed to hundreds, even thousands of advertisements — a number that’s grown exponentially thanks to the internet. In the U.S., more than $250 billion a year is spent on advertising; globally, the figure is more than half a trillion dollars. So, it would seem there’s a basic question worth asking: does all that advertising actually work?”
According to a study by Anna Tuchman (professor of marketing at Kellogg) “the return on investment for TV ads is dismal”. And according to research reported in this Spectator article “woke advertising un-sells products. The infamous 2019 Gillette advert critical of ‘toxic masculinity’ dropped sales by 9 per cent”. The article sends this message to the industry “Earth to marketing execs: we like adverts that are funny....Three’s 2014 ‘Sing It Kitty’, in which a lip-synching little girl on a tiny pink push-bike belts out ‘We built this city on ro-ock a-and ro-oll!’, was a corker.” All of which tends towards a confirmation of my log-held instinct that advertising ‘creatives’ – whether in-house or agency – are more in the nature of a parasitic organism feeding off rather than being an integral part of the business enterprise that hosts them.
Another instance of Surplus Graduate Syndrome I suspect. If only we could shrink the non-STEM universities back to the size they were before the All Must Have Prizes ‘Progressive’ madness kicked in in the 1970s…..even the ads might be at least slightly less annoying. Oh No…. I’m ranting again
Your informed rants are an excellent illustration of the difference between the reality TV audiences you discuss and the clearly higher educational standard of previous generations. I see this as pure social engineering for venal purposes, both corporate financial interests and sociopolitical control mechanisms. This is directed by technocratic elites who, as Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul explained in his prescient and vital book "Voltaire's Bastards" 30 years ago, are themselves culturally illiterate, thanks to the deification of STEM culture. Just yesterday another British writer, Nina Welsch, put her finger on it when she described the phenomenon as "the nurseryfication of culture." https://thecritic.co.uk/the-nurseryfication-of-culture/
For some time now I've been saying that, while in the past in Western culture we were creating an adolescent culture (remember the "good old days" of sex appeal as the main motivator in ads and movies?), lately we've moved into an infantilized (when not nihilistic) culture. None of this, of course, is by accident. Social engineers like people who behave like infants because infants are 100% dependent on their caregivers—in this case, the State. The "pandemic" a prime example of this principle in operation.
Whereas, adolescents can be tricky to manage, since their minds are beginning to wake up and their impulses are often conflicted—thus, far less controllable than infants. Sex appeal has thus been replaced by both a parochial "let us tell you what to think" cultural messaging, combined with constant crises and shocks that cause the frontal cortex to go offline, driving the infantile into the arms of Mommy or Daddy State and its Woke catechism.
Note also the frequent use of primary colours on banners, badges and flags—something I think you originally pointed out, Graham. Primary colours are said to have strong visual appeal to children as young as kindergarten age. So it's appropriate that the level of popular entertainment be similarly lowbrow and below the belt.
Compare the average script of even a mass appeal TV series from the 1960s with today's reality TV to drive the point home. There was so much witty, intelligent dialogue in series like "The Saint" in Britain or even the comedy spy satire "Get Smart" in the US. You can see the deterioration in the decades since, especially if you compare series like "The Prisoner" or the original Star Trek, which relied heavily on Shakespearian and Greek mythological themes. After the "Next Generation" and "Deep Space Nine" series, even the Star Trek franchise has devolved to mere action-suspense movies in space with mostly witless or mere Woke dialogue.
I don't see reality TV and TikTok culture as innocent fun at all but as a debasement of the human intellect and spirit, and a calculated one at that. It's flushing down the toilet 2,500 years of human accomplishments in higher culture. It deserves to be ignored, even boycotted. We shouldn't give a damn if it makes us sound like old men lecturing young people. That succumbs to the false notion that people with decades of experience somehow have nothing to offer the young—another deliberately promoted lie that keeps mainstream culture infantilized.
Every single element of the media, in all its various forms, is corrupt, lying and manipulative.