Born to it – or just up for it? (2001)

"Alex the Animal"

TV Review from the June 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you a born athlete? A born artist? Naturally intelligent? Or were you born with the wrong genes?

There is something depressing about the assumption that to be good at anything. you have to he born good at it. It’s depressing because it robs us of control over our own lives, and seeing as we give up most of the control we could exercise over out lives to our employers for the vast majority of our time, it’s a loss we can ill afford to make.

It’s all part of the ruling ideology, of course. We’re told that the reason we don’t have any power over our lives is because we don’t have it, and we don’t have it because that’s part of the natural order of things, and we wouldn’t know what to do with it if we did have it. You’re either a born leader – or an entrepreneur – or a natural follower or employee. Socialism is against human nature.

But this is in contradiction to another ruling idea, namely that if you want to get on in life and achieve something worthwhile, or become an entrepreneur, all you have to do is “put your mind to it”. Hard work (i.e. hard work for an employer), dedication and long hours are all that is required and, sooner or later, you shall surely succeed.

The fallacy of the first idea was exposed in an entertaining way in Faking It, a Channel 4 documentary showing until recently on Tuesday evenings. The idea of the show was to take Joe or Josephine Public, and see if they could perform a role other than that which capitalist society had assigned to them. They were given a month’s training by people with expert knowledge on the role they had to play. Then they were thrown in the deep end: they had to perform the role for real alongside those for who it is a “natural” job. The “experts” were asked if they could spot the “fake”.

For example, a painter and decorator was trained how to paint modern art, and successfully fooled the art critics who instead denounced a successful modern artist as a fake; a cellist was successfully trained to perform as a dance DJ; and, in my favourite episode, an effete, toff homosexual Oxford student was trained up to be a bouncer working the door on a busy London nightclub.

Having been bought up on a farm in the country, the Oxford student’s only previous experience seeing their housing estate, all his worst prejudices were confirmed. “Oh my god,” he said in horror as he passed a discarded mattress in his taxi. “Did you see that? There was a mattress on the pavement. That’s exactly what I was expecting. Oh my god.”

Given everything that we knew about this student, the chances of his making it as a bouncer on the door of a nightclub could not seem more unlikely. When he met and stood side by side with his trainers – towering doormen experienced in the martial arts and in real-life street-fighting – the physical and cultural differences between them seemed all the more startling. The doormen looked “naturally” big and imposing, and the idea of turning this slightly built, nervous student into one of them was comic – plain impossible.

But the show demanded the impossible. We followed him as he went through a metamorphosis – not exactly waking up one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic fighting machine – but a gradual and hard process of training. He was put through his paces in martial art skills – including a few sessions in the ring so he would know what it feels like to get hit hard – and was given acting and voice training lessons so he looked and sounded the part – “y’aint caming in, y’ah daan’t meet the dress code”.

By the end, not only did he look and sound the part but, when he played for real on the door of a busy London nightclub, not one of the “real” bouncers identified him as the fake. Natural born bouncer?

Another essential part of the training process was a night of bonding with his new-found friends. He was taken on a piss-up, which rounded off the night in a strip club. When asked if he had enjoyed the night, the student came clean to the huge loud-mouthed cockney doormen, and told them he was gay.

The interesting thing about this was that the student assumed they would be horribly prejudiced, coming from the background that they did, and would turn against him – indeed, would feel dodgy about having rough and tumbled with a poof. As it turned out, it was the student’s prejudice about them that was unfounded. They couldn’t give a shite about his sexuality – and pointed out to the student that he was the one who was prejudiced for making assumptions about them based on their accents, their job, and their housing estate.

I loved the whole series because it showed that human beings are capable of a wide variety of behaviours and skills when given a favourable environment. It sent the mind reeling with what is possible when we assert our own needs.

Imagine what we could he and do if we participated fully in the creation of our own lives! Our social existence may determine our consciousness, but there is now no reason, other than the rule of capital, why we cannot actively create our own social existence, and therefore our own consciousness. This is real freedom – not just freedom from oppression or freedom to do what you want, nor even freedom to choose but a dynamic freedom to determine what the choices are in the first place

Stuart Watkins

Blogger's Note:

The Guardian's 'How We Made' column had a short piece on the "Alex the Animal" episode in September 2020.

Proper Gander: Flipped Off (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Property makeover shows have been a regular fixture-and-fitting in the TV schedules since the BBC’s ratings hit Changing Rooms in the ‘90s. This century, the genre itself has been made over, going upmarket from redecorating neighbours’ lounges to renovating entire houses. BBC One’s Homes Under The Hammer has been popular enough for 27 series of formulaic episodes of the presenters looking round tired properties being sold at auction, meeting the people who buy them, and catching up again after refurbishments have been carried out. Announcing any profit made from the homes’ recalculated monetary value is the programme’s punchline, and appropriately, its title sequence features model houses wrapped in banknotes.

Wanting to snare some of the BBC’s viewers, Channel 4 responded with The Great House Giveaway. This has taken the setup of before-and-after renovation and stretched it out to go into more detail about the process in between, adding a game show element with contestants and prizes. The ‘giveaway’ in the title is misleading, as the contestants aren’t given a house, but are there to win money towards a deposit to get on the ‘property ladder’. Paired up and with varying amounts of expertise, they revamp a dilapidated semi or bungalow purchased at auction by the programme makers. With a timescale and a budget to replace bathrooms, knock down walls or install new kitchens, the aim is to re-sell the house afterwards at a higher price. The format is televised ‘flipping’: the practice of buying a property to sell it again at a profit rather than live in it. This profit is the contestants’ prize, after costs for going over budget, stamp duty, council tax, auction fees, utility bills, loan interest, insurance, solicitors and surveyors are deducted. More recent editions were filmed when the property market ‘went haywire’, leading to many refurbished houses being sold at auction for less than expected, and sometimes at a loss.

We watch these programmes to see the buildings being transformed from run down to done up, with the financial stakes intended to add some tension and adrenaline. The programme makers realise that paying stamp duty or calculating loan interest aren’t as visual as someone swinging a mallet at a fireplace, so it’s understandable that they don’t dwell much on accounts and bureaucracy. But emphasising the renovation over the finances, at least until the reveal of the profit or loss at the end, distracts from the tawdry basis of The Great House Giveaway. The contestants slog for months doing up each property for an uncertain amount of financial reward, if any, making it harsher than the average gameshow.

Both The Great House Giveaway and Homes Under The Hammer illustrate the commodification of where we live. The property being renovated is understood in terms of its financial value: the amount of money it sells for, the cost of materials and labour, the admin and legal fees, the hoped-for surplus. It’s a good thing that a house gets renovated in each episode, but in The Great House Giveaway especially, this is a means to a monetary end rather than because it benefits whoever moves in. Alongside this commodification is the separation between who owns a house and who lives in it. If we’re renting, we’re beholden to the landlord, and if we have a mortgage, we’re in debt for decades, and in both situations we risk losing the right to live in our home if we don’t keep up with the payments. In capitalism, much of our sense of security comes from how secure our home is, and this depends on how strong we are in the turbulent economic market.

People living in a future society of free access and common ownership of land and industries will have a different kind of relationship to where they call home. We can’t really empathise with this now, as our view is shaped by living within capitalism’s alienating system. The sense of security which would come with a home in socialism wouldn’t rely on something external and out of our control, as in capitalism, but on whether it suits our own needs. With production directly aimed at satisfying what communities require, there would be no reason for people to live in overcrowded, damp buildings made of shoddy or dangerous materials. We could have the flexibility to choose whether to remain in one home for years or decades, or to travel around, staying in different places for shorter periods. There would likely be a wider understanding of what makes a household, with the freedom to live by ourselves, in families, with friends or as part of larger groups. These variations exist now, of course, but the difference is that in capitalism, our choices are constrained by our economic position, while in a socialist society, our choices would be based only on preferences and practicalities.

Communities would still need some oversight of how housing is organised, with frameworks agreed democratically based on what’s needed. The concepts of ‘owning’ and ‘renting’ properties as we understand them now wouldn’t apply, as these relate to an economic and legal context which won’t exist. There could be some kind of agreement between a household and a community about how long they plan to live in a particular home, if the circumstances require it. And communities would still have to make sure there are the resources, the know-how and the means to build and maintain homes, which will be more straightforward without having to take finances into account. A socialist society might even have television programmes about renovating properties, although any retro broadcasts of The Great House Giveaway or Homes Under The Hammer will be nigh-on incomprehensible.

Mike Foster

Between the Lines: What are flies attracted to? (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

What are flies attracted to?

In a bid to bring to our screens even more odious real people than the invented soap-bubbleheads of EastEnders. BBC1 has collaborated with Australian TV to make what is called a fly-on-the-wall documentary series about the lives of a Sydney family. The folks of Sylvania Waters (9.30 pm, Thursdays) are a nightmarish image of capitalist family life.

In Sylvania Waters the chief topic of conversation (this being a euphemism for the screamed abuse and hostile grunts which constitute most of their attempts at communication) is money. Noeline, the mother, has loads of it. And she likes telling us how much she has and how much she likes having it. Her partner in this world of styleless and avaricious possession is Laurie, a quite detestable factory-owner who has his own boat and a racing car and personal sewer in this mouth from which come relentless insults against Noeline’s “useless, lazy and work-shy" kids—not to mention the rest of the working class who exhibit the same faults, according to this small-time capitalist bigot.

One of Noeline’s sons lives with a girl in a condition of poverty which is caused, according to Noeline and Laurie, by insufficient attention to the god of money. On her younger son's birthday, plans for the party omit all humane talk of jollity and parental love and celebration and instead consist of endless negotiations about the cost of hiring a bouncer (for a boys sixteenth birthday party?) and parts of Noeline's property which the forty-plus guests must be banned from. (In the end the party was cancelled after yet another angry exchange between Laurie and the lad he regards as being good for nothing.)

Life in Sylvania Waters is so devoid of mutuality and so permeated by monetary priorities and division that this family seems to be the ideal microcosm of what this system does to human relationships. Certainly, the theme of alienation jumps out of the sociology textbooks and hits us between the eyes as we observe these people who do not talk to each other, understand each other or want to be with each other. There was a deeply poignant moment in the programme on 1 July when Noeline's son (or is it Laurie’s son—who knows or cares?) walks into his living room, sits on a settee and then, observing that the TV is switched off, turns to his wife and says “Why’s this switched off? Is there something wrong? It’s like a bloody morgue in here”. What has life come to when you have to ask not why the TV is on but why its off, when no TV babble means that something must be wrong and home has become a mortuary. Perhaps we ought to refer to the room with the idiot box in the corner as the dying room rather than the living room. It is the room where alienated people let others live for them.

Sylvania Waters is a useful reminder that the rich might have money, but they sure don’t have any monopoly on brains. The standard of language between these affluent non-entities is charmless, to say the least. Their idea of luxury is reminiscent of that brilliant description of the capitalists at home written by Noonan in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. (Remember the Brigand’s Cave: “This was Mr. Grinder’s first visit at the house, and he expressed his admiration of the manner in which the ceiling and the walls were decorated, remarking that he had always liked this 'ere Japanese style. Mr. Bosher. with his mouth full of biscuit, mumbled that it was sweetly pretty— charming—beautifully done—must have cost a lot of money.") Indeed, Sylvania Waters must be the first ever fly-on-the-wall documentary in which even the flies exhibit higher tastes than the humans.

The news between the ads

In 1990 the ITV companies entered into a sordid franchise war in order to carve up the commercial network amongst the highest bidders. Out of the auction has emerged some pretty cheap and lousy TV. notably Carlton TV which now covers London. Carlton’s nightly London Tonight (like its radio counterpart, LBC now owned by Thatcherite tycoon Lady Shirley Porter, ex-Westminster council leader and dealer in very cheap graveyards) epitomizes the worst in tabloid TV. But then, like the Sun. this mindless drivel attracts investment—in the form of advertisements. So, serious news analysis is abandoned for the sake of market forces.

Last month’s announcement by the ITV network that they want to move News At Ten from its long-standing peak-time position, because it fails to pull in a high enough audience to please the advertisers, is further evidence of the market on the rampage. It is all very well for political figures such as the unlamented ex-Minister of National Heritage, David Mellor, and the Prime Minister, Major, making speeches of condemnation against the ITV assault upon tradition. What do they expect? When they encourage TV companies to throw themselves fully into the market while seeking to retain certain standards of higher journalistic responsibility it is like inviting burglars into your home and insisting that they leave everything as they found it. Perhaps the advertisers would cheer up if ITN employed Noleen and Laurie to read the news, with deep analytical observations from them both on each item, followed by The Saint and Greavsie discussing international affairs—-such as the World Cup and the Test Match.

Steve Coleman

The Truman Show (1998)

Film Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998)

Truman Burbank is a happily married insurance salesman living in Seahaven, an island town in middle America. A regular guy, you might think, leading an ordinary, uneventful life. He jabbers to himself in the bathroom mirror, his neighbours smile benignly at him as he goes off to work.

But the audience is soon made aware that all is not well with Truman, even before he realises it. A cutaway shows us that everything in his life is being dictated by an unseen director to actors through earpieces, while five thousand cameras track his every movement. Truman’s whole life is a television soap in which he is the only unknowing participant.

Truman’s world, really just a giant TV studio, literally starts to fall apart. A piece of lighting crashes at his feet. More poignantly his father, who as a child he had seen drown, re-appears as a dosser in the street, before being dragged away. He yearns for a girl—in fact an extra who broke out of the programme’s strict plan—who he once fell in love with, before she, too, is led away from him.

As he gradually realises the scale of his predicament, Truman’s unease turns to paranoia and then to righteous anger. The audience is torn between laughing at some really funny scenes (Truman is acted by Jim Carrey, hitherto best known as a zany comedian) and moving cameos of a manipulated man struggling to “get a life”.

The critics loved this film and so did I. They summed it up in various ways—a satire on television, a moving statement about the human condition, a plea for freedom, an off-beat studio confection, a black comedy. To some extent, it is all of those things. But for me the Daily Telegraph‘s critic’s judgment was surprisingly more profound: a “penetrating critique of contemporary society . . . This is a world entirely of artifice, in which everything is for sale”.

The Truman Show vividly illustrates and confirms everything Marx wrote about alienation, although he could not have foreseen the detailed forms it would take. Truman himself is forcibly separated from a truly human life and society in a particularly cruel way, being an unwanted child adopted by a corporation. But all the thousands of bit-part players, extras and studio workers are also exploited—they sell themselves to the “project”, in this case the profit-seeking televising of Seahaven. The megalomaniac director is a metaphor for the ruling class, ostensibly running the whole show but himself a highly-paid executive of some national if not multinational corporation.

Stan Parker

Proper Gander: Remoulding The Activist (2021)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lurking as embarrassments in the TV archives are the series cancelled after a few episodes following complaints from offended and disgusted viewers, such as the 1930s Berlin-set sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home! and the disturbing Minipops. One recently made show has managed to get pulled due to negative reactions even before its first episode has aired, CBS’s The Activist.

Initial publicity bragged that The Activist would be ‘a first-of-its-kind competition series that will inspire real change’. Six specially selected activists campaigning for health, education and environmental issues would ‘go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes’, with tasks such as ‘missions, media stunts, digital campaigns and community events’. Their efforts to win each episode’s challenge would be judged by singer Usher, actor Priyanka Chopra and dancer Julianne Hough, and their success would be ‘measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input’. The series climax would see the activists attending the G20 summit in Italy to ‘meet with world leaders in the hope of securing funding and awareness for their causes’. ‘The team that receives the largest commitment is celebrated as the overall winner at the finale, which will also feature musical performances by some of the world’s most passionate artists.’

The programme-makers and whichever focus groups they tested their ideas on didn’t think that setting important issues against each other and turning activism into Reality TV would sound tawdry and exploitative. Yet this was the overwhelming response from critics and commentators on social media when the series was announced. Several tweets pointed out that the show was like the plot of a Black Mirror episode. One Alejandro Villegas tweeted ‘How corporate America appropriates and trivialises advocacy… monetising the imagery… channelling dissent into meaninglessness’ and made a comparison with the derided Pepsi advert launched during the Black Lives Matter protests which featured model Kendall Jenner healing rifts by handing a cop a can of cola. Some of those involved with The Activist joined in with the criticism by saying how its approach sought to simplify and mould the activists’ work. Clover Hogan of climate change campaign group Force Of Nature withdrew her application for a part on the show when she realised that they wanted marketable activists. She said ‘having been gaslit by this whole process personally, I can absolutely understand why you could be manipulated into saying yes to this type of opportunity’, adding that the competitive element of the format was downplayed when she was interviewed. The backlash against the programme led to Chopra resigning from her role as a judge, while Hough said ‘the judging aspect of the show missed the mark, and furthermore… I am not qualified to act as a judge’.

The series, due to air in America on CBS in late October, was produced by Global Citizen, an international education and advocacy organisation aiming for extreme poverty to be eradicated by 2030, and Live Nation, mostly known for ticket sales. When all the criticism went viral, they released statements solemnly stating that ‘It has become apparent the format of the show as announced distracts from the vital work these incredible activists do in their communities every day’, adding that ‘global activism centres on collaboration and cooperation, not competition. We apologise to the activists, hosts, and the larger activist community – we got it wrong’. For the programme-makers to do a complete U-turn on their stance shows how out of touch with their target market they were, particularly awkward for Global Citizen, which promotes itself as an international educator and advocate. Presumably the lure of publicity and money clouded their judgement.

The programme, which has already been filmed, will now be remade as a one-off documentary, removing the competitive aspect, with the same activists who took part originally. ‘We hope that by showcasing their work we will inspire more people to become more involved in addressing the world’s most pressing issues. We look forward to highlighting the mission and lives of each of these incredible people’ grovelled Global Citizen, CBS and Live Nation. They’ll now be hoping the new version of The Activist showcases, inspires and highlights enough to rebuild any reputational loss, as they would call it.

The Activist’s original format was scuppered because of how distasteful it sounds for campaign groups to be set up to compete against each other for influence, through corporate-driven media. But this is exactly how they have to function in the real world. Campaign groups have to compete for funding, hoping to convince us to support their single-issue campaign rather than any of the other countless single-issue campaigns. If they can package their message so that it’s acceptable enough, without any threat of fundamental change, they can attract more mainstream exposure. They become part of the marketplace because they’re only aiming to work within it and not challenge the system itself. Commodifying activism further by turning all this into a TV show weirdly makes the reality clearer. Writer Naomi Klein made the point with her sardonic tweet, ‘I’m confused: Is this an advanced Marxist critique to expose how competition for money and attention pits activists against each other + undermines deep change? Or just the end of the world?’

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Between The Lines (2021)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michaella McCollum, when aged 19, left her home in rural Northern Ireland for the flashy bars and clubs of Ibiza. She soon found that its clubbing culture was fuelled not only by booze, but also by drugs, especially cocaine, traded openly but illegally. Michaella met ‘a really easy going’ man and, while at a party on an LSD trip, agreed to pick up a package for him which she realised contained drugs. The following morning she was sent off to Barcelona on the Spanish mainland, where she was surprised to find that she and another woman, Melissa Reid, would be travelling on to Lima under the guise of being tourists. Text messages from one of the gang she was now involved with aimed to reassure her and distract her from how much she had lost control. The two women collected the package from their contact, which turned out to be 11 kilos of cocaine disguised as sachets of porridge. As Michaella said, ‘if you think taking coke is a rush, try walking a million quid’s worth of the stuff into an international airport’. Nervously lugging heavy suitcases across the concourse drew the attention of the security guards, and the two were caught.

BBC Three’s documentary series High: Confessions Of An Ibiza Drug Mule told Michaella’s story, with a caption at the start of each episode describing it as ‘based on the testimony of a convicted drug smuggler’. Alongside Michaella detailing what happened, the series included dramatisations and interviews with lawyers, journalists and people involved in drug trafficking, although Melissa presumably chose not to take part.

The police didn’t believe the women’s story that they had been coerced into smuggling the drugs, and they were locked in a grim cell to await their trial. The media latched on to the story, dubbing the women the ‘Peru Two’, and reporters flew out to South America, one even posing as Michaella’s boyfriend to get to see her in jail. At their trial they admitted they were complicit in order to get a lighter sentence, which was set at six years and eight months imprisonment after a plea bargain. A reporter from the Belfast Telegraph, Patricia Devlin, said that the ‘public mood’ changed after the women confessed they knew what they were doing. The ‘Peru Two’ then became a silly season story, jokey memes, and a target for criticism.

They were sent to Ancón 2, a crowded, oppressive maximum-security prison north of Lima; ‘everything about it was toxic’ said Michaella. To try and make her time there more bearable, she learnt some Spanish, worked in the jail’s salon and was voted in as her block’s representative. She made enough money from prison work to afford the bribes to bring her parole court date forward and get the necessary proofs towards it. Her release was granted after almost three years behind bars, and Melissa was able to leave soon afterwards. Michaella says that her story is a lesson for others, and the documentary ends on an uplifting note about learning and growing, with appropriately rousing music.

In framing what happened as a personal journey, the documentary tries to turn the wider issues into incidental details along the way. Money is really a main player of the story. Michaella herself said she was motivated by financial gain, although what she was promised was much, much less than what the higher-up dealers make. According to lawyer Alexandro Tirelli, the cocaine business in Ibiza alone involves up to half a million Euros each day. This is why the cartel wouldn’t have been too concerned at losing even the 11kg the ‘Peru Two’ were found with, as to them, this was only a small amount. That the women were easily captured suggests that it was expected, acting as a useful distraction while larger amounts of drugs were smuggled through. The women were manipulated by the cartel throughout, after being identified as impressionable and groomed in a calculated, well-rehearsed way, still under implied threats when in prison. They were used as a means to make money, which happens in mainstream employment, of course, the difference being that here, the methods used are more extreme due to the high financial stakes and the drugs industry’s illegality. So the other main player in this story is the legal system which the industry has to work around, embodied by the judges, lawyers and police, and with Ancón 2 as its squalid end-point for those convicted.

The law is also shaped by money, especially in how a case’s outcome can depend on how much the defendant can pay out. The legal framework is there to protect the state’s interests, and limit the wealth and power of cartels competing with the elite. Drug laws aren’t officially presented to us like that, though, being instead supposedly there to protect the public against the risks of drugs, dangers which are amplified by their being manufactured in secret, and likely diluted with other substances to reduce costs. Even if drugs were made legal, as they have been to varying extents elsewhere, their production would still be driven by maximising profits for whoever owns the means to make them in bulk, and capitalism’s pressures would still push some people into problematic use. Both the money system and the legal system, as integral parts of capitalism, have shaped the drug industry and drug culture into the dark, seedy scene which Michaella and Melissa fell victim to.

Mike Foster

Squared Eyes (2021)

Book Review from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reality Squared: On Reality TV and Left Politics, by Tom Syverson, Zero Books, 2021

Why bother watching ‘reality TV’? For Tom Syverson, there’s more to the genre than just the convoluted relationships among the latest set of pampered exhibitionists being followed by a film crew. He argues that we can watch ‘reality TV’ to reveal how our ideology, views and understanding of ‘truth’ have changed in these media-dominated times. ‘Reality television is reality squared; it’s a form of representing social reality that says something about social reality itself’ (p.14). In exploring the subject, Syverson draws on the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Fredric Jameson and David Shields, among other thinkers.

To underpin his discussion of particular ‘reality TV’ shows, Syverson maps out the ideological conditions within which they and the wider media sit. Following political theorist Jodi Dean, Syverson says that ‘the left was so effective in shaking the foundations of conservative social values, in trading sclerotic public morals and trust in objective truth for progressive social liberalism and postmodern relativism, that the entire landscape shifted’ (p.114). What the left felt were victories were assimilated into the mainstream: neoliberalism has turned ideals about diversity, feminism and gay rights into a source of profit for media pushing a ‘woke’ agenda, and the right has embraced postmodernism, which denies grand narratives and attracts conspiracy theories, fake news and ‘alternative facts’. Through this culture, ‘we relate to each other only by interfacing with our own fragmented, interlocking personal narratives’ (p.113). With reality seeming unreal, ‘reality TV’ is ‘the shade of popular entertainment that best conveys how living life seems to us right now’ (p.50).

Syverson explains how several American series highlight where leftist ideology has gone. An example of where postmodernism has taken us is The Hills, a docusoap about a group of friends in Los Angeles which ran from 2006 to 2010 and was revived in 2019. Unusually, those who appeared on the show acknowledged that their on-screen relationships were faked. As well as saying something about the performative nature of real relationships (p.65), for Syverson, this adds more layers to the question of how real ‘reality TV’ is: ‘as lies contradict and reinforce each other, a dialectic of deception unfolds between the characters, transferring them to higher and higher levels of simulation’ (p.57). He then applies Baudrillard’s views to say that this kind of postmodern media has changed the nature of our acceptance of what is ‘true’ or not. ‘Understanding reality television isn’t simply a matter of negotiating a conflict between fact and fiction; rather, the genre is about generating their synthesis’ (p.12).

Syverson’s discussion of other shows is related more closely to our everyday attitudes. Considering dating competition The Bachelor (2002 – ), he points out that behind its ‘decadent pageant of polyamory, deception, and performative melodrama’ (p.69) it enshrines the conservative view that love is a process towards marriage. A sizeable proportion of The Bachelor’s audience are young leftists who, on some level, feel guilty about watching it because they’re ambivalent about wanting to abolish or reclaim the institution of marriage. Watching the show acts as a release for this tension: ‘it provides the same psychological function as patriarchy, but rather than having to play it out in our real lives, we can do so using the hyperreal frame of reality television’ (p.81).

Syverson says that other questions about feminism are raised by The Real Housewives franchise (2006 – ). This series’ characters are examples of a type of feminist who has compromised by ‘shedding her radical tendencies and realigning her goals to fit more neatly with those of neoliberal capitalism’ (p.84). These ‘power feminists’ claim to be liberated by successfully balancing a career with domestic duties, even though their ‘freedom’ is to be exploited in employment well paid enough for them to outsource childcare and cleaning. The show expresses what is an ‘unattainable aspirational fantasy’ (p.89) for most women struggling to balance childcare with a ‘career’ which is low-paid and unfulfilling. The women on The Real Housewives are shown as ‘having it all’, and they, like the ideal, aren’t quite real or imaginary.

Unsettled because of how its values have been used, the left is left ‘to embrace the fantasies of popular discourse rather than to take up concrete political struggle’ (p.115), Syverson says, returning to Dean’s arguments. He sits within the left, but with a viewpoint wide enough to be critical of where its stance has ended up. It might seem odd to use ‘reality TV’ as a barometer for political ideology, but in a sense this is no different to the approach taken by capitalism’s critics since the 19th century. They developed theories by studying the functions and effects of the major industries around at the time. Syverson and the other writers he quotes in his interesting book are doing the same, focusing on mass media and communications technology rather than mills and factories.

Mike Foster

Opera Winning Free? (2005)

TV Review from the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jerry Springer — The Opera Live at Cambridge Theatre Jan 8, 10.00pm, BBC2

Nothing is more likely to revive a flagging and esoteric artform than notoriety, and with a record 47,000 complaints to the BBC before it was even screened, Jerry Springer — the Opera has probably done more for opera in modern times than any number of Magic Flutes and Traviatas, even if the music wasn't quite that good. From the moment the curtain went up and the choir opened with 'She gave good head, slurp slurp, that chick with a dick' you just knew this wasn't art wearing a black tie, more a leather gimp outfit.

Who would have thought of doing a musical send-up of confessional TV? In retrospect, it was begging to be done, for this was a sassy, strutting, lewd and outrageous work of genius. Amidst the riotous satire of Act 1 was a man wearing a nappy proclaiming to his wife 'I want to be your ba-by!', a song and dance act from the Ku Klux Klan that was a nod to 'Springtime for Hitler' in Mel Brooks' The Producers, and a serial polygamist wife-beating trailer-trash whom the singing 'audience' lovingly taunt as an 'inbred three-nippled cousin-fucker'. Even commercial breaks are included on high floating screens, with the choir snapping off superb one-liners for liposuction, fast food and Prozac. Buried in the farce there are poignant hints of the real tragedy behind the lives of people who go on these shows, as a woman snarls to her psychotically religious mother 'You are just a sack of misery / Everything you touch turns to cancer', and vicious, stabbing sarcasm against the couch potato culture that has supplanted vitality with vicariousness: 'We eat, excrete and watch TV / And you are there for us, Jerry'. At times the show achieves genuine, almost Ole Man River pathos, as for instance when overweight trailer-trash wife who wants to be a pole-dancer sings a beautiful aria in these words:

‘I don't give a fuck no more / if people think I'm just a whore. / I wanna do some living / Cos I'm so tired of dying / I just wanna dance.’

Most of the complaints, by people who hadn't seen the show (of course), were about swear words (naturally), amplified by the Daily Mail (who else?) using the ingenious device of multiplying each word by every member of the 27 strong choir who sing it, thus achieving a total of 8,000. The rest of the fuss was over Act 2, a somewhat superfluous attempt to string out an already worked idea, which featured a dying Jerry Springer being forced by the Devil to conduct a show in Hell in an attempt to reconcile Satan with Jesus. Jerry, alarmed, turns briefly into WC Fields: 'I don't want to serve in Hell. At this stage in my career that would be a sideways move.' The reconciliation doesn't work, of course, as Springer had warned: 'I don't solve problems, I just televise them' and in classic confessional tradition degenerates into a multiway row between Jesus, Satan, God, the Virgin Mary and the audience. All very amusing, but the Christian objectors were too egocentric to see that this wasn't really the point of the opera at all, even if the religious hysteria that resulted certainly did wonders for publicity. The point was to confront Springer, Scrooge-like, with the consequences of his show, the real broken lives out of which he profits. How does he sleep at night, we are invited to ask? Only mildly chastened by an harangue from a dead woman with a monkey-wrench in her skull, he muses: 'A person with less broadcasting experience might feel responsible', but his real philosophy is summed up by his warm-up man (aka the Devil): 'You and I both know they're scum' and in the event he is exonerated even by the scum themselves: 'Jerry is not to blame / With or without Jerry's show / We'd all end up the same'.

The BBC deserves particular credit for not quailing under the religious onslaught, including direct action threats and a private prosecution for blasphemy, especially given the recent decision to pull another play about an abusive Imam after complaints from Moslems. London readers can see this sell-out show live, if they can get a ticket, while the rest of us have to hope the BBC has got the cojones to screen it again. It may not analyse class, it may not offer hope for the future, it may be just a tad elitist in its targets, but this is blistering stuff all the same, and satire doesn't get better. It's also the best performance David Soul's ever given.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Fame And Fortune (2021)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

BBC Two’s recent documentary series Celebrity: A 21st Century Story is thankfully more than just a bunch of talking heads reminiscing about the singers and models who dipped in and out of the spotlight over the last couple of decades. Running for four hours in total, the series has plenty of time to consider the place that ‘celebrity culture’ has in our society, and what shapes its changing trends. Commendably, the programme’s focus is on economics, and how celebrities contribute to the revenue of profit-hungry mass media giants. A famous person will draw in viewers to a TV show, readers to a magazine or newspaper, or subscribers to a social media account, as well as making money through sales of any music or other commodities they directly contribute to. Advertisers are particularly keen to latch on to celebrities, hoping to leech on their popularity to find customers for whatever tat they’re marketing. All of this is linked in with whatever technology is currently in vogue across the media, technology which itself is driven by what is profitable.

Narrating Celebrity: A 21st Century Story is Diane Morgan (otherwise known for her mockumentaries in the guise of Philomena Cunk), and alongside the archive footage are interviews with journalists, paparazzi and (now-faded) stars reflecting on the highs and lows of their time in the public eye.

The series begins with what could be described as an expansion in the market. When the first set of contestants walked into the Big Brother house and onto our screens in 2000, they also marked a shift in what we mean by a ‘celebrity’. Celebrity status was no longer just reserved for a distant few, but could also be for ‘ordinary people’. The exploits of the Big Brother housemates (especially when they found their own pantomime villain in ‘Nasty Nick’) were soon all over the tabloids and in office water cooler chats. Not long afterwards, the talent show format was revived, with Pop Idol and its ilk feeding on the aspirations of any of us proles to sell out Wembley and top the charts. The new breed of talent shows emphasised the contestants’ emotional journeys, and then let the public decide whose dreams would be crushed. The phone-in vote, also used for Big Brother, was less an exercise in democracy than a way of increasing revenue for the programme-makers; income from the cost of calls soon generated over £3 million for Pop Idol. More money came in from CD sales; combined, runner-up and winner Gareth Gates and Will Young’s first singles sold three million copies. Big Brother brought in a quarter of Channel 4’s advertising revenue in its early years due to its popularity. ‘Ordinary people’ being elevated to star status had become another source of profit.

TV production companies, record labels, advertisers and agents weren’t the only ones keen to make money from this new trend. Celeb-focused journals saw a boost in sales, with Heat magazine’s circulation doubling thanks to it tapping into the popularity of Pop Idol in particular. A gossipy article about any celeb needs to be accompanied by eye-catching photos, and the mid ‘00s was a lucrative time for the paparazzi. Candid shots of Fern Britton on the beach or Charlotte Church in Tesco were sold for thousands of pounds to glossy mags such as OK!, Hello! and Heat. Their online equivalents were the even trashier websites like Holy Moly! and Pop Bitch, which had the advantage of being able to share snaps and titbits with their voyeuristic viewers straight away. The push for more brazen and irreverent content led to many women celebrities being victim to body shaming and upskirting. Even a celebrity’s mental health problems and substance misuse (usually fuelled by being in the limelight) have been turned into a spectacle by websites and print. One of the most severe examples was in 2007 when singer Britney Spears (struggling in her personal life) confronted one of the photographers stalking her, and attacked his car with an umbrella. This turned out to be another goldmine for the paparazzi who sold pictures of the incident for $400,000.

A consequence of the profitability of celebrity gossip magazines and blogs was a decline in newspaper sales, with tabloids losing millions of readers in the mid ‘00s. One way they responded was by branching out online. A newspaper’s website, unlike its printed version, can be used to find out how many people read each article, just by measuring how many clicks they attract. This data, along with statistics on the demographics of those who clicked, can then determine the interests of readers so that adverts can be targeted to their most receptive audience. This advertising then, of course, provides revenue for the newspaper and the products being flogged. These websites are really just marketing platforms, with articles to draw the punters in. Other tactics used by newspapers have been far more surreptitious and cynical. Journalists found material for stories by digging into the tax and medical records of celebs and their families, and hacking potentially thousands of peoples’ phones, most notoriously for The News of the World.

Celebrities had lost control of what details of their lives were made public. Some, like Britney Spears, suffered under the pressure of being constantly scrutinised and used. Others turned this to their own advantage, such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, who both became famous through ‘sex tapes’ being leaked onto the internet. This exposure gave them hundreds of millions of fans, who became the audiences for their newly commissioned reality TV shows. Having a fly-on-the-wall documentary is a tried-and-tested way for celebs to keep on delivering new content to fans; model Katie ‘Jordan’ Price and the Osbournes had discovered this by 2002. And when broadcasting their usual routines becomes stale, there would be the option of reinventing themselves by signing up for Celebrity Big Brother, Strictly Come Dancing or I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!.

Capitalism turns us all into commodities, things to be bought and sold, but celebrities take this to an extreme by commodifying everything about their lives, and turning themselves into a brand. And this brand has to both stand out and be malleable to what the public supposedly wants. Around 2010, this approach morphed into the new genre of ‘structured reality’ TV programmes like The Only Way Is Essex and Made In Chelsea. These shows stuck to the template of having cameras follow people round, but with the twists that these are ‘real people’ and that their lives have been made more watchable by producers giving them scenarios to improvise, such as ‘x dumps y after being told y was flirting with z’. The participants’ public profiles were raised not just by the shows, but also by their social media accounts, which have become an increasingly important way for celebrities to manage their image, or have it managed for them. When pop band One Direction were manufactured from X-Factor contestants, each member had their own social media profiles to gauge the views of their fanbase. A Facebook page or Twitter account became a valuable combination of instant market research, an advert which distributes itself and, especially importantly, a means to sell endorsed products. Viewers of matchmaking show Love Island use an app not only to vote for contestants but also to buy whichever design of bikinis are being worn on that week’s episode. The app has generated £12 million in sales for ITV and its brands. Stars have been endorsing products for decades, but what was emerging was the ‘influencer’, who uses social media to tie together their fame and what they market. The biggest influencers have had enough clout to shape trends, and not just in what clothes or jewellery people buy. For example, Kylie Jenner rose to prominence by being part of the Kardashian family on their TV show. By the age of 20, she had over 100 million followers on social media app Instagram. Because of her influence, one message she posted criticising Instagram’s rival Snapchat apparently took £1 billion off the latter’s stock market value.

Social media isn’t just used by influencers, it also helps create them. Bedroom broadcasters became a new type of celebrity from around 2012, when 4G technology had spread enough to enable more people to make their own videos and upload them to YouTube. A gaming or make-up vlogger whose videos get hundreds of millions of views a month represents hundreds of millions of potential customers to target with adverts and endorsements. By 2015, ‘YouTube creators’ had become more popular and influential than ‘traditional entertainment stars’, according to a survey carried out by Variety.

Social media has become the main way for anyone with a public image to stay relevant. The Royal family, who a few years earlier would have thought that such things were beneath one, also jumped on the bandwagon, led by Meghan Markle. Before she married into The Firm she had already used her acting roles to attract readers to her lifestyle blog, which brought her tens of thousands in sponsorship and endorsements. Now, she and Harry have their ‘Sussex Royal’ Instagram account to promote themselves, while other Windsors also have profiles on Twitter and Facebook. This allows them to shape whatever pronouncements they make, without needing to go through traditional intermediaries like the press. Politicians have done the same, and Donald Trump took full advantage of this, using his Twitter feed to criticise much of the mainstream media and inflict his many deranged thoughts on us.

The rise to power of both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson can be attributed in part to how they celebrified themselves by building their brands through the media. Johnson came from a journalistic background, and Trump was the star of The Apprentice USA, so they were both aware of the need for media presence. Before Trump started presenting The Apprentice in 2003, his business had been in the doldrums, and the show made his companies and therefore him look bigger than they had really been. As the documentary says, Trump then ‘used the tools of reality TV not only to win viewers, but to win votes’. Boris Johnson was keen to use any and every publicity stunt to further his career, including appearances on Have I Got News For You and EastEnders. It’s nothing new for politicians to use TV to talk at the public, but recent years have seen them using the medium to try and make themselves more relatable. Johnson himself once quipped during a speech ‘if Parliament were a reality TV show, then the whole lot of us, I’m afraid, would have been voted out of the jungle by now’. Politicians have seen how celebrities use TV to gain a following and want to ape this for themselves. Jeremy Corbyn went on Gogglebox, Ann Widdecombe and Ed Balls rhumbaed on Strictly Come Dancing, George Galloway pretended to be a cat on Celebrity Big Brother, and even Boris Johnson’s family have got in on the act, with his father and sister slumming it on I’m A Celebrity… Interviewed for the documentary, ex-Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Balls says that being a politician put a ‘thick prism of glass’ between him and other people, and his appearance on Strictly broke down this barrier so people could see the real him. He adds that doing Gangnam Style meant that ‘I’d done my bit to make the country feel a little bit better’.

While politicians have tried to tap into the world of celebrity to get support, celebrities have also used their status to make a political stand. Kim Kardashian was influential enough to encourage Donald Trump to pardon and release Alice Marie Johnson, who had been convicted of drug trafficking. And actresses attending the 2018 Grammy and Golden Globe award ceremonies wore black and brought Me Too and Time’s Up activists with them to the red carpet in support of the movements, given impetus when film producer Harvey Weinstein was revealed as a sex offender.

Celebrity status now carries some political power, as well as economic power. How this has been expressed has changed over the years, alongside the developments in media technology, from print journalism and TV through to the internet and, especially, social media. And as technology has become more sophisticated, it has led to more precise ways of analysing us as consumers and pushing us to follow celebrity trends and buy more. Watching reality TV, or flicking through a copy of Heat, or subscribing to a YouTube influencer is often just a ‘guilty pleasure’, a brief escape from our own humdrum, stressful lives. But as Celebrity: A 21st Century Story illustrates, celebrity culture has been shaped by what the media industry finds to be most profitable for its owners, and so manipulates and exploits both celebs and ourselves.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: ‘I’ve Got Nothing. I Ain’t Got No-one. But I’ve Got The Shops’ (2020)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The High Street was already on the financial skids before the pandemic, which has sped up the shift to online shopping. And these days, going to the shops has the added considerations of facemasks, social distancing, arrows on the floor and sanitisers by the doors, making it more of an ordeal than before. Despite all this, slick, brightly-lit shopping malls are still there to tempt those looking for either retail therapy or a five-finger discount. The latter were the focus of Channel 5’s recent Shoplifters: At War With The Law. This fly-on-the-wall documentary series follows the security guards and their quarries at two interchangeable shopping centres: West Orchards in Coventry and Weston Favell in Northampton. It was filmed pre-Covid 19, so since the cameras left, the guards are presumably on the hunt for people not wearing masks as well as people not paying.

According to the programme’s voiceover, last year, there were 400,000 shoplifting incidents reported nationwide, with the number of those that go undetected estimated to be 20 times higher. Of course, we don’t see any of these, and the shopping centres understandably want the programme to emphasise the chances of getting nabbed. Regardless of this, the show has plenty of tips for would-be pilferers, such as going with a group of friends to distract the guards while items are slipped into pockets elsewhere. And higher-end goods with electronic tags attached can be dealt with by snipping them off with pliers or hiding them in a bag lined with foil so they don’t set off the door alarms.

Watching out for all this are hundreds of HD CCTV cameras, whose footage is relayed back to each shopping centre’s control room. When the guard on duty there sees someone acting shiftily or gets a tip-off from one of the shops, they can radio down to their colleagues to find their target. It’s all quite sad to watch this game of cat-and-mouse, although a couple of the guards get a kick out of their work. ‘I always catch my prey,’ boasts one, ‘that’s why I do my job. I love it’. The guards can only apprehend someone once they’ve left a store, although they cynically assume ‘anybody that’s in the shop is a shoplifter until they go to the till’. Those who are caught are led to a bleak holding room to be questioned and have their bags searched. The police will be called if the person has ‘gone equipped’ with a foil-lined bag or pliers, or if what they have stolen is valued at over £200. If the goods are worth less than this the police won’t usually be involved and instead, a year-long ban from the shopping centre is issued. If the accused says they have no ID, they’re asked to bring up their social media profile instead. Their name, address and date of birth are taken, as is a mug shot for the database. If they are seen to return to the centre, they will be trespassing and the police will be called. The guards have had plenty of practice with the procedure: the West Orchards team ‘take down’ up to ten shoplifters a day, as they put it.

The programme-makers blur out the faces of the people caught, which also has the effect of emphasising how dehumanising the need to shoplift is, and the rituals around it. Some of the people featured have been recruited by gangs, and probably have very little choice in the matter. They tend to be from Eastern Europe, not able to claim benefits and without much chance of securing better paid work, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation from organised gangs. Most of the value of any successfully shoplifted goods is likely to go to the gangmasters, with those who take the risks receiving little back; a more extreme version of mainstream employment. These gangs tend to move between areas once they become too well-known in one place. Nearly three quarters of shoplifting in West Orchards is carried out by a small group of local repeat visitors. Many of these are homeless, with or without a benefit claim, either stealing to get enough food or to fund a drug habit. One man speaks to the camera crew after he’s thrown out for the umpteenth time: ‘I’ve got nothing. I ain’t got no-one. But … I’ve got the shops.’ The guards tend to treat those who are pushed into shoplifting by poverty with some sensitivity, as long as they don’t get lairy.

But Shoplifters: At War With The Law doesn’t want us to feel too sympathetic towards people who steal. Its voiceover makes the point that shoplifting ‘takes more than £2 million out of tills every day’, and that to make up for these losses shops have been ‘ramping up prices for millions of honest shoppers’. It’s easy to claim that theft raises prices, but this falsely implies that retailers would lower prices below the market rate if people stopped stealing, which of course no retailer would ever do, so it just scapegoats people who shoplift and provides an alibi for inflated prices. The costs of security measures and stolen items do impact on the profitability of goods to some extent, so the chain store owners will be keen to clamp down on shoplifting. But a few pinched bottles of perfume or boxes of chocolates are nothing compared to the billions of pounds creamed off by owners and shareholders.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Celebritherapy (2011)

The Proper Gander Column from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

When reality TV is used as “a radical solution to one of Britain’s most stubborn social problems”, the hyperbole almost drowns out the sighs of desperation. Home Is Where The Heart Is (ITV1) follows four homeless people as they move in with some minor celebrities for a fortnight. And the desperation comes less from the homeless people involved than the celebrities trying to increase their exposure.

The programme reveals some simplistic attitudes towards homelessness, even among the more well-meaning celebs. One prominent belief is that the most important thing missing from the lives of homeless people is a job. So chef Aldo Zilly and presenter Anneka Rice arrange for their lodgers to get some work experience. Anneka’s lodger, Bridget, describes herself as a “tired, washed-up, drained girl” after spending her childhood caring for other family members. But even when it seems that what she needs is a rest and someone to listen to her, she stoically goes to her new work placement.

Less well-meaning among the celebs is Alex James, who actually says “don’t send me a mental” and is disappointed when his lodger, Danny, doesn’t recognise him. He used to be in Britpop band Blur. Alex sets Danny to work as a farm labourer and calls him “a disgrace to homeless people” when he struggles to adjust to the heavy regime. Alex’s attitude is to ignore the reasons behind Danny’s homelessness and encourage Danny to do the same. As a result, Danny’s mental health deteriorates and Alex loudly accuses the programme-makers of contriving the situation for the sake of good telly.

Far more touching are the scenes with Jim, who moves in with interior designers Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan. Jim is used to sleeping rough, and when faced with a four-poster bed, feels more comfortable bedding down on the carpet. After their shock that Jim needs alcohol in order to function, Colin and Justin realise that what he also needs are some happy memories. Taken for a helicopter ride and asked where he would like to fly, Jim jokingly replies “the off licence”.

Whether Home Is Where The Heart Is really benefits those involved remains to be seen. The ethos behind the project seems to be that when existing support services fail, turn to television. In that way, the programme shares an aim with the repellent The Jeremy Kyle Show. Why not look for the fundamental causes of homelessness instead? Like many people, television tends to ignore the homeless. So, the programme may at least do us a service by highlighting the stories behind those most victimised by capitalist society. That, and showing us what a tosser Alex James is.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: The Stepford Geezers (2011)

The Proper Gander Column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The term ‘reality television’ has become even more of an oxymoron with the latest mutation of the genre. The Only Way is Essex (ITV2) lets us in to the lives of a bronzed breed of Essex geezers and girls. For these walking hairstyles, life is just a permanent loop of nightclubs, boobjobs, salons and boy/ girlfriend difficulties. Somehow they manage to spend more time talking about relationships than actually having them.

Whether or not the viewers can relate to this lifestyle is beside the point. Where the programme detaches from reality is in its staged set-ups. What the group of friends do is directed by the puppeteers at ITV2, who were no doubt cackling maniacally throughout. it’s not clear how much of the show is fake, though. The producers say that most of it is real, despite everything appearing structured, filmed and edited like a cheap soap opera. So, the participants perform as themselves in scenarios which have been guided to some extent. Usually, this pans out as something like ‘hunk x chucks blonde y then flirts with blonde y’s friend, brunette z’.

The Only Way is Essex’s bizarre mix of fact and fiction is less disorientating if you think of it as improvisational theatre. The difference, of course, is that this show is lived for real. Who would have such a flimsy grasp on their lives to hand them over to a film crew? Presumably, the participants enjoy the exposure, even if it means being portrayed with less depth than a puddle. For people so self-obsessed, they don’t seem to care how much they’re being manipulated.

Previous reality TV shows have had the discretion to be set in their own little world, such as a mini-recreation of the past or Big Brother’s bunker. But The Only Way is Essex has been let loose in suburbia. So it’s more like The Truman Show, but where everyone’s in on it. Or maybe the final episode will reveal that it’s all been an extended remake of The Stepford Wives?

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Cash And The Castaways (2019)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

One familiar trope of reality TV is to plonk its participants somewhere remote and see how long they can live off the land. Gluttons for punishment not well-exposed enough for I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here could sign up for the likes of Survivor or The Island With Bear Grylls. The latter has for its sixth series morphed into Treasure Island With Bear Grylls (Channel 4), with an added twist which interestingly highlights how money shapes our relationships and outlook.

Twelve volunteers are left on a smallish Pacific island with some fishing equipment, enough to eat and drink for just a few days and, of course, cameras. They have to make their own shelter, find food and a fresh water supply and learn to survive without things they usually take for granted, like supermarkets, electricity and bathrooms. One important feature of everyday life, though, has been (literally) thrown into the mix, as also dropped off on the island are parcels containing bundles of cash. £100,000 in total is chucked out of a helicopter, with the parcels and their parachutes usually ending up hanging from trees out of reach. The contestants have to find the parcels, and when they do, decide whether to share the money with the rest of the group or keep it for themselves.

Those taking part are largely a likeable bunch, with the enviable enthusiasm to take themselves out of their comfort zones and put themselves to the test. There’s a property manager who unfortunately learns the hard way why you shouldn’t drink seawater, a plumber who gets into the kill-your-own-dinner mindset with gusto, and the star of the show is 75-year-old Irene, who helps knit the group together. The contestants have nothing else to rely on apart from themselves and what the island can provide. So, co-operation and practicalities should be at the front of their minds. How much does the push to get dosh get in the way of what should be more important?

The group set up a ramshackle camp, using branches for benches and making use of the rubbish washed up on the beach. When survival guru Bear Grylls sees their efforts at the end of their stay, he isn’t too impressed, and the group realise that they would have built a better home for themselves if they hadn’t been preoccupied with finding the prize money. For food, they get used to a diet of winkles, the occasional iguana and rare treats such as goat, stingray and pineapple. Expeditions for fresh water and anything edible turn into hunts for the money parcels, with the group usually returning empty-handed and with empty stomachs.

As well as the money distracting the group from its practical priorities, it sours how they get on with each other. Some of the group want to pool any money finds, while the two contestants with closest links to the Establishment turn out to be the most selfish. Lord Ivar Mountbatten and an ex-Royal Marine Commando called Marco establish their supposed ‘alpha male’ status early on, encouraged by the rest of the group, disappointingly. The others’ loyalty isn’t rewarded, though, when the duo finds a couple of parcels and keeps the dough inside to themselves. However, the ex-Marine soon loses his crown after getting the group lost in the jungle and, following his hoarded money finds being revealed, barely seems to interact with the others. Mountbatten is of the view that those who are less able deserve less, which is easy to say when you’re born into one of the wealthiest families on the planet.

Wondering who has found money and kept quiet about it makes the contestants become secretive and suspicious. Those who find and prepare the food resent sharing it with those who are hoarding money. Those who are hoarding money resent those who expect an equal share of it for providing the food. Some feel that they need the money more than others, and so should get more, while some feel that it should all be shared out equally. Being stuck on a desert island is a situation where co-operation and collaboration are even more important than in our everyday lives. So it’s a shame that the money ends up creating divisions and ill-feeling, but that’s what it inevitably does. Co-operation wins out, though, and as days turn into weeks, the group learns that it’s best to work together and share future finds. However, when the time comes to leave the island, Mountbatten and the ex-Marine have still pocketed the largest amounts.

So, how money affects the group on Treasure Island With Bear Grylls isn’t much different from how it affects us all in real life. We spend our time chasing after cash while it gets in the way of life’s practicalities. And we become distanced from those we have to compete with to get enough in the bank, with the most wealth usually ending up with those who are the most ruthless.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Point and Sneer (2012)

The Proper Gander Column from the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Did you see those tacky dresses worn by those gypsy girls? One had a big pineapple on it. The other was shaped like a palm tree. Ridiculous, they were, and they cost thousands. I bet they didn’t pay for them by hard work. That’s my taxes paying for their benefits, it is’.

This seems to be the reaction expected by the makers of Channel 4’s fly-on-the-wall docusoap Big Fat Gypsy Weddings. It’s one of those programmes churned out for bored office workers to talk about at the water cooler. It wants us to be voyeurs, pointing and sneering at the funny gypsies in their funny clothes.

The whiff of prejudice hanging around behind the cameras became more noticeable with the stink caused by the latest series’ advertising campaign. Billboard posters promised that the show would now be ‘Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier’. In a complaint made by the London Travellers Unit and two members of the London Assembly, it was rightly pointed out that Channel 4 probably wouldn’t promote a programme as ‘Jewisher’ or ‘blacker’.

Why do they feel they can get away with advertising this show in this way? The answer is that prejudice against gypsies and travellers is seen as acceptable by many people because of the misplaced  assumption that they are ‘spongers’. Gypsies continue to be scapegoats for several of society’s problems, much like Jewish and black people have also been. So they remain, almost by definition, marginalised in capitalist society. It seems that the gypsy communities’ younger members have overcompensated for this by lapping up society’s excessive demands to focus on image.

Those appearing on Big Fat Gypsy Weddings don’t do themselves any favours by dressing up young girls like Barbie dolls and instilling a fierce competitiveness to be the most ‘attractive’. But, of course, the programme makers are using their favourite tool for moulding the truth – selective editing. There are a few token mentions of those in the gypsy community who aren’t image obsessed, but the overwhelming emphasis is on false-tanned bling-addicts. Big Fat Gypsy Weddings brings together these misrepresented gypsies and cynical programme makers in what is best described as an unhappy marriage.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Undercover Under the Covers (2012)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

You’ve started to notice the tell-tale signs that your partner might be having an affair – their emotional distance from you, their ‘working late at the office’ excuses, their ruffled appearance when they finally return home. What do you do? Talk with them about your concerns? Question why we live in a society which makes people feel trapped in failing relationships? Or hire a camera crew to follow your partner and secretly film them cavorting with their lover, and then allow all this and the resulting messy confrontation to be broadcast worldwide? The last option seems to have been the most attractive to those appearing on Cheaters (UKTV Really, Sky 248, Freeview 20).

Slimy host Joey Greco guides us through each ‘case’. One half of a couple talks about their suspicions that their partner is being unfaithful, accompanied by twinkly keyboard music for extra poignancy. Then we cut to what Greco’s team of detectives has filmed: shaky undercover footage of the partner’s furtive meetings with their new lover. This is narrated with lines like “agents are on active duty waiting for movement from the target”. The spurned spouse is shown this footage at the same time that their partner has been spied gallivanting elsewhere. Fired up with anger, they are then taken by Greco and his camera crew straight to where their partner is canoodling. If it looks like the ensuing confrontation won’t be as violent as he’s hoping for, Greco stokes the fire with a few smug comments.

The producers of this vile show try to justify themselves by saying “this program is both dedicated to the faithful and presented to the false-hearted to encourage their renewal of temperance and virtue”. ‘Virtue’ isn’t the most obvious word to associate with this show, especially as it has been accused of staging some of its salacious set-ups. If anything, Cheaters would be less repellent if it was faked. At least then, its voyeuristic viewers would only be watching desperate actors rather than desperate people clinging on to whatever relationships they can find. Cheaters represents television sinking to a new low in presenting alienation as entertainment. Scrub your eyes clean after watching.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Giggly Walking CCTV Cameras (2012)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Making a hasty, ill-informed judgement about someone you don’t know is easy, thanks to the internet. You can post it on their forum thread or Facebook update, laugh, then hide behind your username and the ‘log off’ option. It’s not quite as straightforward as that in real life, as those taking part in The Audience (Channel 4) find out. In this show, a volunteer has opened up their life to the scrutiny of fifty strangers and a film crew. The volunteer has “a life-changing decision to make”, and will seek the advice of the others who literally follow him around for a week.

The first episode’s lamb-to-the-slaughter is Ian Wainwright who, being a farmer, has probably slaughtered a few lambs himself. Nice guy Ian slaves away on the farm owned by his two septuagenarian uncles, who can’t do much other than bark from their farmhouse chairs. Imposed guilt and family loyalty tie Ian to the long hours and little money. He knows he’s trapped, and that he’s not spending enough time with his girlfriend. So, should he find a new life with her, as this means leaving his uncles to an uncertain future?

The crowd of fifty start out like giggly walking CCTV cameras. They follow Ian to the milking shed, then the fields, then they meet the rest of his family, firing questions and discussing him along the way. Their initial snap judgements on his situation give way to a realisation that it involves conflicting viewpoints, and then there are tears as the decision looms. Obviously, the programme-makers milk all this for its emotional capital, much like Ian milks his cows. He takes the advice to leave the farm, and the producers must have been rubbing their hands with glee when he rounds off the programme by proposing to his girlfriend.

Maybe some choices benefit from having other people patiently look into all the pros and cons to come up with some reasoned advice. But it’s less likely that a situation will be improved by the manipulation and selective editing of a film crew. The Audience feeds on the fashionably alienated belief that if you have a problem, then the best way to get help is through a TV show.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: ‘An Urgent Referral Still Takes Quite a Long Time’ (2019)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you have a medical problem and don’t mind your trip to the doctor being broadcast on the gogglebox, you’ve got a choice of where to go. If you’ve caught something gruesome or unusual, then the doctors on Embarrassing Bodies (Channel 4) will share your diagnosis with any voyeuristic viewers. Or you could register at one of the surgeries featured on Channel 5’s fly-on-the-consulting-room-wall documentary GPs Behind Closed Doors. The series isn’t cluttered up by narration or backstories (i.e. it’s fairly cheap to make), and instead just lets us watch what happens when people see their GP.

General Practitioners learn a lot about what makes us tick in their five years of training after spending up to six years in medical school. Those filmed for GPs Behind Closed Doors are all impressively knowledgeable and need to be, given the range of ailments people come in with. Patients are introduced with on-screen captions like ‘Pauline: Blistered Lips’ and ‘Regan: Nail Biting’. Other issues discussed include abdominal pains, memory loss, backache, weight gain and skin complaints. Some patients in the waiting room have completely fuzzed out faces, a presumably serious condition which we sadly don’t see the doctors address.

The GPs deal with their patients calmly and professionally, with empathy and kindness. But what’s really going on behind closed doors in NHS surgeries is a system in crisis. The UK’s population has grown by over two million in the last five years, with an increasing proportion of older people with complex health issues. The number of GPs and the resources of the health service as a whole haven’t grown to match, leading to ever-rising pressures on primary care services.

Many GPs have working weeks of around 50 hours, longer than is reasonable for anyone, but still not long enough to see every patient or get all their admin done. More than eight out of ten GPs believe their current workload is excessive or unmanageable, meaning they can’t be as thorough as they should (BMA Survey of GPs in England, November 2016). The constant slog to keep up means that 39 per cent of doctors report their morale as being low or very low (BMA Quarterly survey, quarter1, 2019).

GPs work long, stressful hours because there aren’t enough of them to meet demand. And there aren’t enough of them because the long, stressful hours put people off joining the profession. In 2017, over a quarter of Scotland’s GP practices had at least one vacancy, most of which had been unfilled for at least six months (BMA, June 2017). The number of GPs per 100,000 people has fallen from almost 65 in 2014 to 60 in 2018, according to a May 2019 study by the Nuffield Trust. The chair of the Royal College of General Practice, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, describes the situation as ‘gravely concerning’, adding ‘All GPs are overworked, many are stressed, and some are making themselves seriously ill working hours that are simply unsafe, for both themselves and their patients – it is making them want to leave the profession… This is having a serious impact on many of our patients, who are waiting longer and longer to secure a GP appointment. But it also means we don’t have the time we need with patients’.

Changes in demand should logically be met by increasing or reallocating resources to meet that demand. In capitalism, though, people’s needs are only met to the extent that it is affordable to do so. GPs are expensive: starting wages are over £57,000 a year, and the overall cost to the NHS for General Practice service providers was over £9,050 million in 2017/18. General practice accounts for just over 7 percent of NHS funding, with the proportion declining over recent years (www.pulsetoday.co.uk, Feb 2018). The lack of sufficient funding is largely down to how GP services don’t directly make a profit. General Practice is one of those institutions, like council housing, which the capitalist class would see as a financial burden, even though it helps knit society together. It benefits capitalism because it helps workers stay fit and healthy enough to be productive elsewhere, but as with everything else, costs have to be kept as low as possible so more money can end up with the elite.

Of particular interest to the capitalist class is how there is a lot of money to be made by producing the pills and potions we are prescribed. GlaxoSmithKline, Britain’s largest pharmaceutical company, makes profits of around £25 billion each year. Ill health can be lucrative, and one growth industry is mental health problems, which are discussed in around 40 percent of GP appointments. The number of prescriptions for antidepressants in England almost doubled over the past decade, from 36 million in 2008 to 70.9 million in 2018, according to NHS Digital. When a GP only has a few minutes with each patient, there may not be time to do much else than write out a prescription.

The pressures on General Practice, along with the rest of the NHS, mean that doctors just have to manage the best they can. It’s a credit to those we see on GPs Behind Closed Doors that they cope as well as they do.

Mike Foster