There are a few worried heads being scratched at ITV1. the problem when two baddies leave a pantomime is that the audience soon tires of the prince and princess mooning over each other. And so it is that the departures of John and Edward — Jedward — from the X Factor and of Katie Price from I’m a Celebrity . . . get me Out of Here! leave both shows without the grit in the pearl that propelled them on to the cover of the tabloids and, more importantly, guaranteed 15.9 million viewers for ITV1 on Sunday night (for Jedward’s departure) and 10 million for I’m a Celebrity . . . , which followed it.
This is pantomime underpinned by cold, hard economics. the viewers may have loved to hate Jedward and Price, but you can be sure that the advertisers that ITV1 relies on as never before in the multichannel universe loved us to hate them even more. the BBC is in no position to crow as the two ITV shows lose their lightning conductors: the latest series of Strictly Come Dancing is dying a genteel death. Dedicated fans will not desert it, but after a fizzing first few weeks of bitching (mostly about Alesha Dixon), the show has become a muted, tedious mess. Jade Johnson, the Olympic long-jumper, withdrew from the competition on Saturday after hurting her knee.
You may wonder whether these schlocky TV leviathans are done for. Has Z-list celebrity finally eaten itself? Why carry on with them, if the great motivations to watching them in the first place — the talentless, the controversial, the overtly outrageous — have departed? in fact, predictions of the deaths of all three shows are premature. Louis Walsh, Jedward’s excitable mentor, said that the “fun” had left the X Factor with the duo’s departure. he and ITV1 must be worried that without the drama attendant on their continued survival at the expense of contestants who can actually sing, the show will flounder. they needn’t. X Factor fans watch the show like Coronation Street, and as with any soap the producers now need to come up with other big storylines or character arcs to replace Jedward (watch out Lloyd Daniels, the booing hordes are coming for you).
Fans of these shows will keep watching, and happily so, because at their root they are escapist morality tales, and ones that hold a mirror up to ourselves. It’s why, despite all the brickbats and body blows, Big Brother will keep torturing its critics to the very end, with a celebrity special this winter and a final plebs’ version next summer. Over the past decade, the British have become happy slaves to hyper-reality. We can do without Jedward and Jordan, but not celebrity.
The first thing I said — out loud; I know, I know — when Dannii Minogue (X Factor heroine, outbrains and outshines all her colleagues) finally dashed Jedward’s hopes on Sunday night was: “Thank goodness, finally, they’re gone”. It was an involuntary reaction, but one said with relish; the kind of thing a second later you berate yourself for even thinking, let alone saying. (Internal conversation: “Do you really care that much?” “Yes, sadly and shamefully, I do.”)
But my shame is shared by 15 million other people. Reality television and reality entertainment shows have conquered not only television, but also public life. Headline-grabbing narratives in the news, in Westminster and on the global stage are conducted through the lingua franca of reality television, whether that be the “journey” of a person, or the victim who becomes the victor. the confessional and the personal has infected our discourse. Pop psychology and soap-opera dynamics prevail over intellectual debate; hell, even intellectuals feel the need to get down with the kids and opine about the X Factor.
The kind of accessible celebrity the X Factor and Big Brother have enshrined — it could be you — is now the kind of celebrity the public deifies and derides all at once. the X Factor takes a lumpen group of unknowns and in the first six weeks before the live studio shows humiliates them, serves their humiliation and rejection for our pleasure, then sifts for some glinting gold. Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity. . . start by humiliating celebrities; except, of course, these people aren’t “proper” celebrities or they wouldn’t be doing the show. They’re on the periphery and want more exposure; or they’re celebrities who have fallen from grace and want to rehabilitate their image.
The shows need heroes and villains, and judges who anoint and reject them, but they also need drama, calumnies and the ultimate elevation of the good. as in any soap opera, the noble must suffer, the bad or talentless prosper, until the final curtain — when the right person wins their crown. Agony is the dynamic of all the shows, and justice the payoff. It is classical drama, with the added benefit of Cheryl Cole’s hair and Craig Revel Horwood’s putdowns. (”I know a good Botox doctor, darling,” he told Chris Hollins, of BBC1’s Breakfast, on Saturday night — Hollins’s face remains tight and rigid through each performance.)
Rather like Dynasty and Dallas in the 1980s, these shows have become our escape valves, our motorways out of reality into fantasy. as BBC News 24 and the Skycopter excitedly train their cameras on the possibility of bridges collapsing like dominoes in Cumbria; as the death toll in Afghanistan rises; as political inertia leads us towards a hung Parliament after the next election, the X Factor, Strictly and I’m a Celebrity . . . allow us a way out. We can boo and hiss and let out our frustration through these shiny, blameless decoys. the X Factor is nothing more than the stocks with glitter guns. We can act on our visceral dislike with our finger on the red button, or with a text message. We have some control (or the illusion of control, as various phoning scandals have made clear). We can stop contestants dancing or singing, or make them eat crocodile poo. And beneath all the hullabaloo, the benign truth is that ultimately we want the best one to win.
Walsh is wrong. Viewers were not tuning into the X Factor every week just to watch Jedward. sure, we wanted to see what insane dance routine they were planning, having set the bar so high with that astonishing rendition of Britney Spears’s Oops! . . . I Did It again. but the X Factor is a ruthless machine. Now we can expect to focus on the four judges and their personal conflicts, whether hammily played up for the cameras or not, and more ramped-up feuds and frailities among the contestants.
Minogue could not wait to finish off Jedward on Sunday night, devastatingly posing the question: “Is this a singing competition?” to her fellow judges and the audience. It’s nothing of the sort of course; it’s a ridiculous personality and vanity contest. but the X Factor’s saving grace is that the right person, the one who sings best, usually wins. Whether they go on to have a successful career is another matter (many don’t), but that isn’t the point of the show itself. in Strictly, Ricky Whittle and Ali Bastian have always been the best dancers, but people being good at stuff does not make good reality television — hence the great Strictly switch-off. At their best the X Factor, I’m A Celebrity . . . and Strictly are self-contained soaps, sprinkled with a toxic, winning combination of bile and fairydust. for every column inch on Jordan, the fans of I’m A Celebrity . . . are really enjoying Sam Fox’s heroic transformation, or Colin and Justin’s witty commentary. the truth is that the Jedward juggernaut had run its course on the X Factor; our attention was flicking to the genuine talent of Joe McElderry.
Jedward knew that their time on the show was over, just as Price knew she had to get out of the jungle. “I can’t do another trial,” she is reported to have said. “There’s only so much crap one person can take. the way I’ve been treated on the show by the viewers, you’d think I was the most hated woman in Britain . . . It is getting beyond a joke. everyone seems to hate me so much more than I thought. I said at the start that I came on the show for a bit of peace and quiet, to try and get my head together after the divorce. but now I’m feeling uncomfortable.” Of course this is breathtakingly disingenuous. Price took part in a prime-time television show to get more publicity, not less; to bathe in more attention, not retreat from it. her cross-dressing, cage-fighting boyfriend Alex Reid is reportedly flying to Australia to propose to her . . . and so the whirligig continues.
The key — for Jedward and Price, and the shows that nourish them — is to keep the storylines moving, to maintain the drama. the viewers like it that way, just as they like to see flickers of real emotion to undercut the pretence. Jedward have expressed amazement that they are considered “celebrities”. Beyond taking part in the X Factor tour, they are considering their options. the whispers have started their next stop will be . . . yes, you’ve guessed it, I’m A Celebrity . . . get me Out of Here!
Recent Comments