I was lying in bed, havering between the choice of home-made dreams, a few
pages of a book (The White War, an evocative study of the little-known
Italian/Austrian front, 1915-19) or 15 minutes of the telly. As usual, I
succumbed to the siren of the box. This, I suspect, is the most common of
night rituals in the western world: the search for something to bathe the
frontal lobes and send us to sleep. In America, they put on chat shows
specifically to waft viewers into the embrace of Morpheus. As many of us die
in our sleep, the last images of a bright glorious and complex world, the
staggering edifice of civilisation, the riveting tapestry of human emotion,
may well be David Letterman swapping pizza recipes with Richard Dreyfuss.
This is a sanguine and humbling reflection on our shared humanity.
So I was shuffling the images like a game of patience, searching for the
comforting narcotic of a multi-cadaver CSI or perhaps a virulently pustular
House, when I was arrested by a black-and-white image of a bed. It was a
tangle of sheets, under which a body, perchance asleep, perchance two
bodies, lay. It reminded me of the time when television broadcast really
good films in black and white. I thought perhaps I recognised this — it was
one of those middle-order Truffauts about the inexorable break-up of a
marriage. There was a French new-wave atmosphere, the ambient sound, the
fixed, incisive camera, the knowing nod to American cinema noir. The shot
lingered, with an auteur’s indulgence, and then cut precipitously to another
image of the bed. There was movement under the covers. This wasn’t French.
Too dark, too doom-laden — this was Scandinavian, one of those Bergmans when
he was between marriages, living on some blasted island and had producers
who cared only about art, truth and European film festivals, not Yankee box
offices. An arm appeared from under the sheet, a female hand, supplicant,
yearning. What was this film? I flicked to the index — Big Brother
Live.
Big Brother: I’d completely forgotten it was on. So had everyone else, it
seems. No surprise to hear that the show has only one more series to run. A
girl once told me of a dreadful female condition called la répulsion. It’s
that moment when you wake and look down at your sleeping partner of many
years and are suddenly overwhelmed with revulsion. The thought of touching
them, or being touched, is shudderingly repugnant. The repulsion is
irrevocable and irreconcilable, and it was what I felt about Big Brother.
Not that I was ever very lustful for it. I think we all share the same
feeling. We look at it and wonder, what on earth were we thinking of? How
could we have been taken in? How did it ever exert such a grip? The next
day, I watched some more: “Will the contestants please come to the garden
for more oil wrestling.” The children were doused in baby oil, wearing their
swimsuits, tattoos and grins of entitlement. They squirmed at each other
without purpose, effort or expectation. Back on the sofa, I squirmed with
them. It looked like the worst of a student YouTube download. It comes as a
surprise how instantly and completely the audience goes off programmes they
thought they’d love for ever.
Which brings us neatly to The X Factor, which began its long
vaudevillian parade of money boys, fat loud girls, last-chance widows and
duos with sob stories last weekend. The stipulation for a contestant on The
X Factor is an uncontrollable vibrato and a great deal of cancer in the
family. The show will drag its sugary slug trail of sentimentality from now
until the traditional Christmas single of an overproduced 1980s ballad
doused with a lachrymose orchestra. Not so much a wall of sound as a shroud
of sound, dedicated to some carcinogenically defunct auntie. As Oscar Wilde
so perceptively put it, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh out loud.
What struck me about this year’s incarnation is a truth about television: the
medium manipulates the manipulators. The judges are getting to be more and
more like the strange, emotionally inflated, vainly insecure, critically
tone-deaf contestants. They have gone from being warders to inmates. You
look at that line of faces, bereft of a natural expression, the body
language tortured into a physical Tourette’s by a thousand paparazzi, and
you have to think: these are very, very bizarre, truncated human beings.
Television is not a natural habitat. Those who stay on it too long or have
nowhere else to go are irreparably deformed by it.
No names, but three separate people have called me to ask my opinion about
buying ITV. One of them said: “I’ve got a bit of change — what do you
reckon? ITV, The Observer or a naughty weekend in Tallinn?” It’s not much of
a secret that ITV is for sale. And it is not much of a secret that whoever
owns it will be merely a figurehead, a puppet, because to all intents and
purposes it is already owned by Simon Cowell. The X Factor accounts for such
a large proportion of ITV’s revenue that Cowell can dictate his own terms,
probably.
Which raises all sorts of questions about regulation, transparency, artistic
licence and accountability. As it stands, ITV is just providing a location,
security, catering. I asked an executive why they didn’t just get rid of
Cowell and the other muppets and make the programme themselves. Call it
something like Opportunity Twitters, produce their own Christmas record and
stash the cash. “Fire Simon?” he said, with eyes like saucers, as if I had
suggested regicide. Look, he’s only a presenter. They come and, in the end,
they all go. Where’s Dickie Henderson, where’s Michael Miles? “Nobody is
bigger than the medium, the format or the audience, except Simon,” whispered
the executive, glancing nervously over his shoulder. ITV is losing revenue,
it is losing audience share, but that’s nothing compared to what it has
already lost — its self-confidence, its enthusiasm and its balls.
I watched The X Factor and thought about the marathon to come. The predictable
so-naive kids. The predictable exclamations of joy and despair. The
predictable tears, the predictable and cynical guest appearances to boost
plummeting record sales. The predictable scrabble for some corner of the
power ballad, the greatest hit that hasn’t already been plundered. And I was
filled with a yawning ennui. Already I can sense the first cold twinges of
falling out of love. When it happens, it will come with the suddenness of
the guillotine.
That man who does the Pimm’s ad has a new quiz show called Pointless.
Quiz shows are sunrise and sunset gigs for TV personalities. They are where
you end up, like Jasper Carrott and Noel Edmonds, or where you start off,
like Chris Evans. I am not sure whether this is lark rise or swan song for
the Pimm’s chap. He didn’t look happy, he looked ecstatic, in the
clinging-to-the-Autocue, spitting-gags manner of new comperes. The game
itself is about as fresh and exciting as a kipper down the back of a
radiator. Its unique selling point is that you have to score less than
everyone else. Ooh, what a scorchingly brilliant twist that is. You have to
come up with the least-known European capital, as ascertained by asking 100
people or two work-experiences in the office. One woman answered “Bulgaria”.
I thought she should have won, but they threw her off to be raped by a troop
of coke-maddened mandrills. I made that last bit up. This is a terrible
show. Nobody involved in it is remotely excited or proud of their
contribution.
But there was a little pleasure to be gleaned. It was seeing old-fashioned TV
contestants, the sort of people who inhabited your set before you had a
remote control, before everybody had a dream and a brother with cancer.
These are the couples who are defined by their jobs. “What do you do,
Trevor?” “I’m an accounts clerk with Bradford Corporation.” Or their
relationships. “How long have you been married, Gloria?” “A really big hand
for Gloria and Trevor and their 25 years together.” These are oddly
uncomfortable folk from another age in their bought-for-TV pullovers and
blouses.
I felt a nostalgic love for them, these eager-to-please shy creatures, only
too happy to finish a catch phrase. What do points mean, Gladys? Satisfied
just to be here. I’m afraid that’s not the right answer, Mike. But have you
had a good time? And, of course, they have had a wonderful time. “It’s been
wonderful,” they said with a shy wave and a smile as they walked off to
oblivion. They are folk who understand that television was grand but wasn’t
the same as being a clerk for the corporation or being married for 25 years.
Big Brother Live (Channel 4 and E4, nightly)
The X Factor (ITV1, Saturday)
Pointless (BBC2, Monday-Friday)
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