Tom Chatfield
Big Brother will no longer be watched by you
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.
Brian Semple
Nestor Kirchner's reluctance to go on reality TV meant he didn't get the thumbs-up from the Argentinian electorate
As our television screens are swamped with this year’s deluge of vacuous, talentless, fame-hungry nobodies (ie Big Brother contestants), take comfort in the thought that reality TV does not, as yet, decide our national elections. For this, writes William Gill in a free to read web exclusive for Prospect, is the bizarre state of affairs in Argentina, where the public elected not to give former president Nestor Kirchner another term in Congress thanks to his refusal to appear on reality TV show Gran Cunado (Big Brother-in-law).
The show, which is part of popular comedy programme Showtime, featured doppelgangers of the main candidates for the Congress elections, with the public invited to eject whoever they didn’t want. The trouble for Kirchner started when the real politicians were invited onto the show. All initially refused, but one—Francisco de Narvaez, whose popularity soared as a result and who then when on to beat Kirchner in the real election.
Should Kirchner, who is notoriously humorless, have set aside his pride and given into the demands of a reality TV-obsessed public? And how long will it before Cameron and Brown are duking it out in the Big Brother house to secure our votes? As ever, leave your thoughts below.
Tom Chatfield
Lakewood Church, Houston: the triumph of mega-religion
This month’s arts and books section features two lead articles on, first, the changing nature of global religion and, second, some more local shifts in the minor faith that is British reality television. In the first piece, Eric Kaufmann, a fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Centre, looks at John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s much-discussed new book God is Back. It’s an urgently important book, he argues, because it takes the established “religious markets” arguments—that a highly entrepreneurial incarnation of Christianity lies behind much of the influence of religion in modern America—and applies this to the world as a whole. Among other things, Kaufmann notes that China is currently “the world’s wild west” in religious terms—and that at current religious growth rates it “could be both the world’s biggest Muslim and Christian country by 2050.” Secularism, according to the authors of God is Back, may prove to be just one of those comforting myths the future will have to learn to live without.
In our second long arts piece this month, Sam Leith tackles the cult of “do-nothing celebrity”—and traces its happy demise in the relam of British reality TV. “I risk a place in Pseud’s Corner,” he ventures, “but I think [reality television] has undergone a telling change of ontological emphasis: from being to doing.” All of which puts, as he explains, the bulging ranks of the celebrity commentariat in an increasingly complicated position…
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