An excellent article in the Daily Telegraph by Peter Whittle, journalist, broadcaster and director of the New Culture Forum, argues that television talent shows such as X Factor, The Apprentice, and Dragon’s Den are a good thing. The ‘fashion for ruthless competition on television represents’, he says, ‘one of the healthiest trends to emerge in broadcasting for decades, and one that shows conclusively that all mustn’t, and shouldn’t, have prizes’. He says this signifies a growing awareness that child-centred education is a destructive farce setting up self-esteem as more important than achievement. ‘Life is not about feeling good about yourself.’
All of which is worthy and true, so long as it’s balanced, but I think there are pitfalls in Peter’s panegyric.
For a start, we have cause to be concerned about the form of these competitions. In an environment where relationships have become transactional, competitions have become commodified. Peter’s strikes me as a market fundamentalist approach towards human endeavour which is unconcerned about the marketization of such cultural acts as singing. We should be hesitant to praise something if, as Hannah Arendt has said, ‘culture is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment’. And I think it is.
Connected to this is the fact that these talent shows, while not perhaps inherently bad, are, by their very proliferation and prominence, hallmarks of an age that dismisses perseverance and good old fashioned hard work. True, lasting success for most singers or artists, say, or even entrepreneurs, does not come in a few weeks on a television show, but over a long time, training, apprenticing, steadily ascending the ladder. The new paradigm is misleading because – by the pervasive insistence of mass media – it tells us that the best way to glory is the quick fix way. So these competitions actually trivialise notions of excellence and elitism. Admittedly, they are a nifty anecdote to the culture of flattery, but it’s hardly the kind of ideal that defenders of standards and quality should be, well, defending.
It follows that I’m also uneasy about the way these competitions feed the cult of narcissism. The prevailing mirage is the mirage of fulfilment through fame, the simulacrum of satisfaction. Everything is turned outwards. Contestants seek an audience to validate their own worth. The locus of self-esteem becomes the esteem of the press. Everything is performance. All must be played out in the public gaze. Nothing is private. Thus private endeavour is devalued. Surely, though, people should be willing to do things not just because they want to do them publicly.
It’s worth looking at the relationship between would-be-celebrity and audience in more detail. Peter pre-empts such an approach by saying that ‘these television contests are predictably condemned for being modish exercises in crass sadism’ – but the predictability does not necessarily render such scrutiny less valid.
In these competitions, there is undeniably an element of schadenfreude, the mob laughing at the hopeless aspirations of the useless. The shammers are shamed and the jeering pleasure we take is almost perverse. ‘Yes’, says an audience tired of a culture that tells us all must have prizes, ‘at last they’re exposing the crap ones.’ But hang on. Is this a good thing? Certainly these shows offer a way of putting into public circulation things that don’t easily admit of public acknowledgment, such as that celebrity is exciting and demeaning at the same time, but still, hang on.
There was a series of programmes a few years back by Piers Morgan – I know, I know – called ‘Celebrity’. Interviewing one rubbish contestant for an X-Factor style competition, he asked why she wanted to win. ‘Because I’m a nice person’, she replied in a pitiable estuary twang. It was not pitiable because it was estuary, it was pitiable because of the way the interview was edited. We were meant to feel spite: perhaps it’s right that we should despise such moronic equivalencing, but the individuals who have been warped by this culture are being used to make cultural capital for those who have in many cases been partly to blame for the warping.
And so we come to our dirty contract with the whole of celebrity culture. We create the conditions in which to build up that which we destroy. This is not a new thing, only a more out of control version of an age-old thing. The people made famous by these talent shows are on the upward curve of a trajectory that has been plotted so that they will fall. All live to die, said Marlowe, and rise to fall. But we have created a way of doing this that is unprecedented in the ersatz glitz of the achievement and unprecedented in the publicity of the humiliation when the love affair with the press – as it always does – comes to an end. Should we really be lavishing praise on a culture of talent competitions that feeds this culture of celebrity?
Perhaps I’ll be accused of being a hoary old reactionary – but as you can see I’m not sure that these competitions perform the wholesome function that Peter attributes to them. And as for the fight to end the culture of flattery in our schools, that still has a very, very long way to go.