11/1/2007

I'm not a celebrity - get me out of here!

By Colin Todhunter

Celebrity Love Island, Celebrity Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here — these are just some of the wonderful delights served up by British TV in a bid to draw in the viewers without having to tax production budgets or brain cells too much. The “celebrities” who appear on these reality shows are usually “C” list people trying to revive their flagging careers. Many of them were once famous for something, but we can’t quite remember what for and others are famous for... well, just being famous.

Go into any high street shop and the shelves will be bending over with magazines that groan under the weight of the faces of these C-listers on their covers. What they had for breakfast, their latest sexploits, when they last went to the toilet: world-shattering news about nothing in particular. Of course the message is “you too could and should live like them”… if you had half a brain that is, a humungous ego and a desire to sell your soul to the media.

The public loves it. The magazines and tacky tabloids sell by the cartload and viewing figures for the programmes sometimes hit the roof. It has such an appeal that it has often become difficult to differentiate between this type of reality-show stuff and whatever else passes for news or entertainment in the media. Even some of the news programmes have now adopted the format of an upbeat breakfast-time TV chat show, with celebrity guests and uninformed opinion on topics. The next stage in this magnificent evolutionary process will of course involve some celebrity presenting the show, with a bit of stripping, singing and dancing thrown in. Too much gloom, doom and analysis is of course bad for the soul (and those all-important ratings).

A certain happy-hearted fizz to it all is a must and the commercials are part of the act. Indeed the commercials are seemingly dictating the act. What better fizz is there than Pepsi and Coke! They are the ultimate in emptiness with their Just-Do-It mentality. Their advertisements represent a triumph of blandness over meaning. About as much substance as the air bubbles in a can. Just do what? I don’t know. Who cares? Let’s have a cola and settle down for “chat show news”, “celebrity I-love-myself island”, or “I’m a celebrity but no one remembers why”. The viewers aren’t really sure why they like such shows (or those colas) but they do.

Mind numbing blandness and emptiness sell. And the media executives know it. So it’s goodbye to lofty ideals such as diversity of thought and informed analysis, it was nice knowing you. You were always under threat and in danger of being swept aside by those forces that appealed to our narrower and baser instincts. Such forces now sometimes seem almost irresistible.

In Britain, we don’t really need God anymore, but still yearn to believe in something and worship it through some TV programme or the sickly, sweet pages of a glossy magazine. I’ve seen the future and it’s not a pretty sight. Look out: coming to a satellite TV stations across the world soon — “I’m a has-been celebrity with half a brain cell trying to revive my flagging career on some low-budget, second-rate programme.” This will be followed the next day by countless seething journalists writing columns bemoaning the loss of a vibrant media and the narrowing of cultural concerns. Come to think of it, the articles will probably be very similar to this one.

A Jolie Good Time

By Colin Todhunter

Some time ago the Hollywood star Angelina Jolie finally had her first biological baby with Brad Pitt. Including two adopted children, they now have three. Their estimated wealth is currently $150 million and either of them can command easily over $10 million for one film. Mr Pitt reportedly got $20 million and Ms Jolie $10 million for their film Mr and Mrs Smith. Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt was born on May 27. “Brangelina” is set to inherit at least $50 million of the Pitt-Jolie fortune one day.

Mr Pitt and Ms Jolie are excellent actors. I admire their work. I also like the fact that they give hundreds of millions of dollars to their favourite charities. They don’t have to. The government of Namibia said that to celebrate the birth of their daughter there, Ms Jolie and Mr Pitt donated $300,000 to help other babies in the impoverished African country.

But come on, they are only actors and they are only acting! Do we live in a world where acting is considered more worthy than being a doctor, teacher or nurse? Indeed we do if we go by the financial rewards dished out. Brangelina has been born with a silver spoon in her mouth that her head would have to be the size of the Grand Canyon for it to fit in and her neck muscles with the strength of steel to hold it. I think you will agree that is some silver spoon.

But don’t be shocked. Most of us merely laugh in astonishment at the rewards doled out to superstars. Of course, few of us may think that their talent and ability merit the type of financial remunerations given (but many do), but hey that’s life! That’s the way the market works. That’s the way the cookie crumbles… and any other number of sayings to be said while holding one’s hands in the air in complete and utter resignation.

Little Brangelina will never want for anything. She will inherit $50 million that she never earned, will go to the best schools, and will be pampered from cradle to grave. In the weeks leading up to her birth, the couple retreated to Namibia for government-assisted privacy. Ms Jolie had the best bodyguards, nutritionists, gynaecologists and health care team that money can buy. And when Brangelina grows up she can, if she so wants, own a hundred pairs of shoes that if she lived to be one hundred, she would never be able to wear out (or even wear). But that’s no crime. In today’s world, where most people have a real struggle to get by, it is totally acceptable. Yet let some needy person in the US work all day long for a pittance and steal a single pair of shoes from a big corporate store and that is without doubt a crime.

Unfortunately both the underprivileged and the Jolie-Pitts are victims of an upside down world of warped values, albeit in different ways. Mr Pitt and Ms Jolie know it. In a joint statement released shortly after the birth of their daughter, they said that while they celebrated the joy of the birth, they recognised that two million babies born every year in the developing world die on the first day of their lives. They went on to say that these children can be saved, but only if governments around the world make it a priority. I admit to having a soft spot for the Jolie-Pitts.

Mr Pitt and Ms Jolie own all they will ever need. They and their children may vacation wherever they want and can live in any number of mansions of their choice. It’s not a crime is it? Perhaps not. The massive rewards and huge privileges received are totally acceptable within the framework of today’s standards. It’s just the standards that are absolutely criminal.

Fool Britannia

By Colin Todhunter

Over the past seven or eight years, I have spent more time in India than I have in Britain. There are times when in India that I get homesick. I have come to realise, however, that it is not England that I miss but the idea of the place. The reality is somewhat different.

Whatever happened to Britain? The place where a pub existed on every street corner and a church on every other one. Indeed, whatever happened to the British pub? Its plight mirrors that of hollowed out British society. Many of the churches are now empty shells, but the pub — it has been transformed into the modern theme bar, the ‘‘theme’’ being a notion of the very tradition that was destroyed under the banner of ‘‘progress’’. Now that traditional communities have been swept away and lost, there is a media-induced thirst for what once was. Or, more precisely, to a fairytale, misty-eyed view of the past, bogusly reproduced and resold for profit.

The modern pub: mass-produced ‘‘real ale’’, wooden floorboards and old-world mythology. There is a huge profit in nostalgia, even if the whole thing is a massive con trick. People now sip at the trough of make-belief sentimentality — of how they think things used to be. But it is not how it really used to be; it is how it is now — a theme world dreamt up by advertising executives and consumer trend analysts. It is a cynically manufactured reality, which quenches the thirst for ‘‘community lost’’.

Britain is now a place of quick-fix divorces and immediate gratification, where the notion of community has been bulldozed away by a society that worships at the altar of the individual. I just have to look at the various web sites of UK newspapers to cringe at the result. A black boy gets an axe embedded in his skull just for being black: he dies. In a case of ‘‘road rage’’, a man gets out of his car and attacks another with a crowbar for beeping his horn at him. Women’s health is in danger because so many now indulge in binge drinking on a regular basis. You only have to walk down the vomit-soaked streets on any Friday night in any city centre to see the grip that alcohol has.

The last time I was in the UK, I was in my local post office when a man ran in, attacked the cash delivery man with a cosh, and made off with the takings. It must have been the third time that something like this happened at that office in the last 18 months. As the thief absconded, I thought to myself: ‘‘Welcome home!’’

When I am back in Britain, I will only realise that I am there for sure when I see shopkeepers and cashiers caged in behind reinforced glass, and when I walk down the road, or enter a shop or a railway station, only to see CCTV cameras pointed at me. The almost ubiquitous arm of ‘‘law and order’’ has found its way into every nook and cranny of public life in the UK.

CCTV came into its own when certain people’s livelihoods were being stripped away in the name of producing a ‘‘flexible’’ and ‘‘cost-effective’’ workforce, again in the name of “progress”. They couldn’t become fully paid-up members of the consumer society, so they were sacrificed on its altar.

The legacy has been a permanent underclass of people who cannot ‘‘pay their way’’. They are now surplus to requirements: a drain on welfare resources at best and a threat to society at worst. It was impossible to wall them in on their housing estates, so CCTV became the next best option. In order to root out the ‘‘unsavoury’’ elements everyone is now on screen. Paranoia at its finest.

And entertainment on TV is not much better. It is part of the same act. The advertisements and the game-shows that interrupt the commercial breaks are exponents of the kind of self-seeking materialism that now all too often passes for entertainment. Why be aware of the world’s ills and challenge anything when you can live in the dark, drink Pepsi, wear Reebok and shop till you drop? It is a consumer paradise where unfettered desire is a virtue and obsession is the faith.

The poor old Brits can see no way out. For instance, they are disengaging from party politics, and who can blame them? There’s little to choose from. In recent times, the shaping and controlling of agendas has meant that the threshold of opinions considered ‘‘subversive’’ has grown: forms of political ‘‘involvement’’ are encouraged which seek to guarantee integration and ‘‘participation’’, rather than forms of action that may lead to a direct questioning of or a challenge to prevailing forms of institutionalised power.

‘‘Consensus’’ is manufactured both in cultural and political terms. Political discourse and much of the popular mass media is void of analytical debate, and even the news has become public theatre, often presented in emotive, one-dimensional, ‘‘human-interest’’ terms.

Harold Macmillan, the Tory Prime Minister in the 1950s, once told the Brits that they’d never had it so good, as a result of rising post-war affluence. Times have changed since then, from a period of factory labour trade unionism to an era of consumerism and gleaming shopping malls bathed in designer lifestyle propaganda. Maybe now it’s a case of ‘‘you’ve never had it so bad’’ as people drown in their Friday night vomit, shop till they drop for things they don’t really need or indeed want, arrange the next credit loan from their banks, and bask in their emptiness by watching TV with eyes wide shut. Yes, it’s the idea of England that I miss, not the reality.

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Sorry Comments Closed

Comment left by Balthasar on 15th August, 2007 at 23:37
Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Comment left by Stanislava on 15th August, 2007 at 23:40
Very doll!

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