I really can’t manage that much irony. I can’t swallow enough sugary cynicism.
I can’t go intellectually, ethically, aesthetically, culturally and
squeamishly naked into that box. I can’t set aside pretension, aspiration,
age and embarrassment. In short, I really can’t watch I’m a
Celebrity . . . Get Me out of Here! with anything but the deepest
contempt. Everything I love about television is everything it isn’t. I want
my contemporary culture to do all the things it doesn’t. After five minutes,
I’m shouting: "I'm a human being, get me out of here!”
I watched a whole evening of it last week, and it was as miserable a time as
I’ve had in front of the television. As is the way with competitive reality
formats, it has both sharpened and dulled its operation. The humiliation is
sharper, the sensibility duller. The setup uses all the dark, rat-like
cunning and methods of psychological manipulation to extract the maximum
anguish, disaffection and confrontation. The dummies are overcrowded and
hungry, lacking sleep and kept wet, cold and frightened; and there are
apparently arbitrary and unfair changes of routine and rules. It’s
Guantanamo TV.
Pundits like me often complain about the exploitation of gullible,
fame-struck, not-so-bright kids in television contests, but we rarely
mention the exploitation of those who already appear there. We assume that,
having been inside the great green room of fame, this is their pitch and
they understand the game. But anybody who’s ever been around old, sidelined
presenters, ageing singers, arthritic guitarists, sagging sex symbols and
chat-show hosts who’ve run out of chat knows they are touched with sadness;
they’re misanthropic, resentful and vain, filled with regret and self-pity.
They are more delicate than the rest of us, and more addicted to the camera
and public exposure.
Just because someone connives in their own exploitation, that doesn’t make it
morally excusable. What I particularly loathe about I’m a Celebrity is that
nobody’s motives are good. Not the producers’, the contestants’, the
devisors’ or presenters’. And not the audience’s. The Hammer-horror games
and tests, the xenophobic and ignorant eating contests, are silly; and what
really turns the stomach, what’s most disgusting, is the permission the
format gives the rest of us to set aside our natural civility or pity and
manners and encourage bullying, mockery and belittling.
Ant and Dec, the perennially infantile scallywags who now look spookily like a
pair of zombie ventriloquist’s dummies, can barely keep the playground
sadism out of their presenters’ banter. There is not one redeeming,
enhancing or admirable feature to this show. And every programme, however
nebulous or silly, must contain at least a spark of honest intent. I’m a
Celebrity only has the ratings and cash and advertising and the darkness of
nonentity to justify it — and they’re no justification at all.
Survivors is not unlike I’m a Celebrity: a small band of humans survive
a cataclysmic pandemic and have to start civilisation all over again from,
if not scratch, then memory, and eating some rather nasty things along the
way. They are a mixed bunch who will no doubt fight, scheme, tell lies, have
affairs and be extraordinarily brave while trying to build a little organic
utopia. This is a remake of a series I particularly adored in the 1970s. You
know how sometimes a bit of television just grabs your imagination and won’t
let go? That was Survivors for me. It isn’t a new idea, of course: it’s The
Tempest and, by extension, Lost in Space; it's The Seventh Seal. And, most
recently, it’s Lost.
The first episode set the scene. And it was a lot more like Emmerdale than
Lost. The plague was introduced as a rather benign flu, and the overriding
atmosphere was one of antiseptic political correctness; the mixing and
matching of all possible colours,races, religions and sexes was scrupulous.
Normally, I’m in favour of social management and good manners in
broadcasting, but here the boxes you tick seem to come ahead of
characterisation. Even the corpses had to have a broad and inclusive ethnic
mix. It made the casting look like a collection of prospective Labour
candidates for unwinnable seats. The survivors were a dull and bland group,
except for a rather good and malevolent secret baddie (white working-class
male, of course).
The biblical extinction of 99% of the human race happened surprisingly neatly,
without so much as a wail or a gnash. Then, having died, humanity apparently
tidied up after itself. The roads were left neatly empty, everyone having
parked their cars in the garage before snuffing it. The animals had all been
sent to kennels, because we know that, dramatically speaking, the day after
people disappear there will be packs of wild dogs, and tigers will have
escaped from the zoo. But I don’t expect the budget ran to giraffes on the
central reservation of the M6. It was a dispiritingly wimpish end to the
world and a rather meek beginning to the next one.
Of all the arts on television, the visual arts have by far and away the best
time of it. They also have the most compelling spokesmen. Andrew
Graham-Dixon is perhaps the dean of critics, the smoothest and most
plausible. There’s nothing frightening or confrontational about him. He
isn’t in your face, just confidentially in your ear. He shows you round the
grand cathedral of art always standing back, letting the majesty and the
grandeur work its magic. He is orthodox and established, but none the worse
for that. His latest series, Travels with Vasari, attempts a
difficult manoeuvre: to bring to light the first art critic and one of the
first biographers. Vasari’s Lives of the Artists is a terrific read:
gossipy, opinionated, partisan, inventive, enthusiastic and, above all, very
Italian. It is from him we learn almost all the detail we know about the
personality of the Renaissance.
There is a fundamental design fault in trying to write about art. It’s similar
to the difficulty in trying to write about music: you are translating one
medium into another, and a lot gets lost in translation. An awful lot more
sounds hopelessly opaque and pretentious. Art critics get lost in simile and
metaphor; they can sound like wine waiters or airy-fairy vicars. Just try to
describe a picture in a way that isn’t simply topographical. It’s very, very
difficult. So most critics stick to art history and tentative speculative
psychology. Through Vasari, Graham-Dixon has introduced a third element into
this discussion. So it is a translation of a translation of a translation;
and it all becomes a bit muddy and confused. Nobody comes out of this with
clarity — not Vasari, not Giotto, not Graham-Dixon, and not me. I would
never normally suggest you jump mediums, but if you’re interested in
painting and the Renaissance and art criticism, then get a well-annotated
Vasari and a ticket to Florence and read it there. And I hope Graham-Dixon
will go back to polishing the canon of haute art.
Jimmy Nail hasn’t been on our screens for a good many years, and the fact that
he’s avoided all those I’m a Celebrity opportunities says something about
the intrinsic pride and self-respect of the northeast. But he’s back, in Parents
of the Band, a comedy that is a good idea, involving the one-upmanship
of the parents of a schoolboy pop group. The mums and dads are deadly
ambitious, the kids are embarrassed and only want to pick up girls. It’s a
sweetly predictable, English idea that could, with the right sort of
character acting, have been a sort of The Rolling Stones of Dibley. Except
that the kids are terrible. Really awful. It’s an unwritten critic’s
convention that we don’t crush the nascent careers of those who are yet to
reap the rewards of puberty. But I’m going to make an exception before these
lads waste any more of their — or, more importantly, my — time. Take up
football, go into advertising, breed guinea pigs, anything, just don’t act.
The band left a hole at the heart of this project, which means it’s going to
sink. Nail, though, has improved almost beyond recognition; although it
would be hard not to recognise him. He seems to have grown into his
lugubrious face, which, when you think about it, must have taken some doing.
And he has found a touching and believable range of emotion that used to be
covered up by making his characters headbutt people. So they can either get
a new band or give Nail another sitcom. Mind you, I’d have liked to have
seen old Jimmy in the jungle. Kilroy would have ended up sucking his
kangaroo gonads through a straw.
I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! (ITV1, daily)
Survivors (BBC1, Sunday, Tuesday)
Travels with Vasari (BBC4, Wednesday)
Parents of the Band (BBC1, Friday)
