conclusion
‘Reach for the stars’: celebrity, social mobility and the future of reality TV
Celebrity in the modern social realm
The commercial success of reality TV formats has coincided with a period in which formal politics has become increasingly media friendly and packaged for media consumption. In 1997, when New Labour finally defeated the long-established Conservative government to achieve power in the UK, arts and entertainment celebrities gained prominence as exemplars of a new meritocratic and essentially modern democratic social realm.1 The administration at 10 Downing Street actively sought the endorsement of musicians, actors and movie stars in its attempts to deploy a new, more inclusive and populist lexicon as part of its electoral address and managerial style. As a consequence, it was those who had succeeded in entertainment, rather than say industry or finance, who were often held up as exemplary figures ‘close to’ New Labour. Such entertainers and sports people, some originally from very disadvantaged social backgrounds, came to the fore as people of influence and social standing.
In the same cultural moment, the notable success of several of the new television forms discussed earlier in this book, docusoaps such as The Cruise, hybrid ‘reality’ shows such as Big Brother and later Pop Idol, transformed the terrain of media culture, showcasing ordinary people as potential media stars. The modern social realm was, it seems, further expanded to accommodate a new brand of celebrities, of ordinary people rendered remarkable through their encounter with new hybrid media forms and by their absorption into the complex processes of identification and voyeurism that made them household names and characters with the familiar feel of our own families. These new media stars appeared to be able to ‘make it big’, to not only become wealthy but, more importantly, to sustain a transformation into celebrity stardom without overtly drawing on education, entrepreneurial skills or even any obvious talent.
Reality TV’s development of new iconic personas and their projection into a media-driven social mobility was, of course, partly anticipated by longer-established media narratives of class mobility. Biographies and news coverage of celebrity British footballers, pop performers, comedians and film stars have been central to the mythologisation of working-class social mobility in media culture. So too, narratives of football pools wins, bullion heists and lottery jackpots have long provided fantasy avenues of escape that were independent of the cultural capital gained through education, birth, entry into the professions or even talent (aside from the talent, that is, to entertain).2
The successful launch of the television drama series Footballers’ Wives is a good example of a public fascination with the transformation of ordinary people into a new media-ocracy through fame, personal achievement and stunning affluence. The focus of the series, which has its roots in tabloid women’s magazines such as Hello! and OK, did not dwell on the skills of players but on the fame and fortune of the newly affluent and media savvy footballer and his wife as celebrities.3 The depiction of Victoria and David Beckham and their family life as ‘popular royals’ (resident in ‘Beckingham Palace’) was one clear influence on the programme. Their lives are exemplary too of a doubled agenda which famous working-class celebrities need to negotiate if they are to remain in favour. They must maintain the much-mythologised ‘down-to-earth’ values of working-class family culture and authenticity while fulfilling the expectations of glamour and overt consumption that sustain their public personas. They operate as an important counterpoint to those born into celebrity during a period when, for example, the public no longer feels obliged to look to the monarchy or other elite persons for role models of exemplary domesticity or overt consumption.4
The popular impact of these and other celebrities seems to reside precisely in their very disconnection from traditional structures of influence (inheritance, education and so forth) together with their intimate connection with the media and the consumer lifestyle which the media privileges and foregrounds. Although celebrities have been described by some media critics as a ‘powerless elite’ they wield a form of power formerly unrecognised as such (Alberoni 1972). Graeme Turner et al. (2000) have argued, for example, that:
the celebrity’s ultimate power is to sell the commodity that is themselves. This fact has been thoroughly integrated into contemporary popular culture and the marketing of celebrity-as-commodity has been deployed as a major strategy in the commercial construction of social identity.
In this context, the accoutrements and appearance of celebrity is paramount. Although the celebrity is a figure of consumption writ large they must also retain the individualism that sets them apart and renders them remarkable and commercially marketable. What might be called ‘classed cross-dressing’ becomes one overt and instantly recognisable expression of both their agency and their success. The sartorial and material signifiers of class transformation mark both working-class origins and the move away from them; the pleasurable and playful excess of financial escape from those origins and sometimes too a rebuke or an offence against respectable ‘taste’ (Tasker 1998: 40). This move up is also problematised because class mobility seems superficially to be dependent on consumption or the unstable transformation of stardom. The dual dynamics of transformation and submerged ‘real’ classed identities that appear in many media representations of the socially mobile ‘media-ocracy’ are crucial. Representations of social mobility and celebrity in reality TV foreground and reveal the complex interdependence between class and performance, the freedom of taking on new identities and a popular conviction that there is some hidden essence or ‘true’ working-class identity concealed beneath the ‘glitz’.
Critical responses: disgust, democratisation and desire
Reality TV is not the end of civilisation as we know it: it is civilisation as we know it. It is popular culture at its most popular, soap opera come to life. (Greer 2001)
As we have already signalled in chapter 1, current responses to reality TV coalesce around several themes. One common strand is that of derision. This response is encapsulated in Germaine Greer’s much cited quotation above. In her article on reality TV, Greer jeers at the mass audience of these shows and predictably situates them within a ‘dumbed down’ tabloid television arena in which, she claims, a mixture of banality, exhibitionism and character-play guarantee audience ratings and therefore their domination of the schedules.
In keeping with broader attacks on tabloid culture and of the ‘feminisation’ of factual programming, a number of cultural critics (often championing a lost cause which is implicitly ‘high culture’) decry those who produce, watch and perform for the cameras. The ethics of what is acceptable in mass media representation is linked to broader debates about the decline of more privileged objective factual reportage and programming. In Britain, this debate is specifically linked to the role of television in an arena in which the public service ethos has been diminished. Objectivity, fact and debate are bandied about as lost values of a formerly intellectually curious journalistic age.
The Reithian theme of self-improvement and a broadcasting service that strove to use television to take viewers outside their realm of immediate existence, to educate and inform, is lamented as a lost educative ideal in an increasingly commercially-pressured media environment. As noted in chapters 5 and 6, reality TV, it is claimed, replaces this intellectual adventure with the limited exhibitionist challenges of the game show or the emotional outpourings of confessional culture in which the biggest challenge is to get on with a small bunch of housemates/prisoners/competitors for a limited period. With reality TV the aim is not to take viewers outside of their own experience but to present them with a fully recognisable and familiar realm of the ordinary and the everyday. The ethic of self-improvement seems, for media sceptics, to be parodied; as those without the traditional markers of media role models are seen to succeed – if not in Reithian terms, then at least within the terms of the populist media.
The disdain for the entertainment-led audience is matched by distress about changes to televisual form and genre. Frequently, the documentary becomes the marker of quality filming based on rational investigation of historical or socio-cultural fact. The detached but committed observational gaze of the documentary maker of the past has, it is claimed, been replaced by a slow slide through the docu-soap of the 1990s to the current reality TV show. An anxiety about the decline of documentary proper is often articulated to an anxiety about reality TV’s dependence on spectacle linked to a manipulative misuse of the camera. Here, for example, the prominence of the ‘close-up’ is highlighted. This fear of the seductive image is captured in language that stresses the distraction of the viewer from rational viewing: ‘we cannot think straight … if our emotions are being jerked up and down by … zoom lenses’ (Broder in Glynn 2000:22). Underlying this anxiety about ‘easy’ pleasure is recognition of the destabilisation of the status of the distant and powerful documentary camera and the move towards televisual intimacy.
As noted, in contrast to the above criticism, others have celebrated this cultural phenomenon as part of the contemporary expansion and democratisation of public culture. It is argued that reality TV’s popular expression of social concerns and everyday events, conflicts and traumas within a highly managed environment signal the opening up of the public sphere to ordinary concerns and ordinary people who, if they are popular enough and lucky enough, can become famous. Where celebrities are already a prerequisite of the show – for example in the recent adaptations of survival shows for celebrity participants – the authenticity of the show is marked by the supposed provision of insights into the hidden ‘real’ aspect of celebrity personality. Phil Edgar-Jones, the executive producer of Big Brother, described the second Celebrity Big Brother as a stripping away of celebrity personas: ‘With normal Big Brother we’re making ordinary people extraordinary. With this, we’re making famous people very, very ordinary’ (in Day 2002). In short, reality TV is celebrated as a democratisation of public culture and the deconstruction of the components of fame that partially constitute the celebrity media subject and the construction of social identity more broadly. It is this agenda, well accepted in Britain in particular, which potentially threatened the success of the David Blaine event discussed in the previous chapter. As a reality format Blaine the celebrity needed to connect with his audience and yet the nature of his enterprise could only fail to render him ordinary or accessible.
The process of constructing celebrity and stripping it away can be captured in John Langer’s notion of ‘the especially remarkable’ (1998: 45–73). In his analysis of tabloid culture, he highlights the prominence in current media culture of the ‘other news’: a form of cultural discourse intimately connected with gossip, storytelling and the scrutiny of the newly famous as well as those with a longer-held celebrity persona. Langer situates the celebrity within a co-dependent media context in which celebrity status is both ratified by media presence but also operates as a privileged authority in media culture. Celebrities increasingly have taken on the role as ‘primary definers’ of news. The very force of representation of the celebrity gives their actions and statements a kind of privileged authority in a world increasingly characterised as divided by those who have access to image making and the rest (1998: 50–1). This other news does not represent elite persons within the context of their institutional backdrop and does not primarily consider their role as power brokers or decision makers – but rather values their informal activities, public rituals of display and consumption and their private lives.
This ‘calculus of celebrity’ then is flexible and focuses not only on celebrities but upon those who have achieved possibly fleeting public attention through specific personal achievements.5 For example, the ‘ordinary’ stars of reality shows suddenly acquire massive media visibility but possess very little in the way of institutional power or control and, unless they obtain excellent PR management, can find it hard to deal with media spin. Reality TV both proves and extends the mythic belief that traditional versions of mobility and success, once closely associated with economic or social achievement, are increasingly implicated in and beholden to the mass media processes of publicity. Langer suggests:
On the one hand ordinary people are constructed as especially remarkable for what they do. How they breach expectations, their remarkableness is lodged in the extraordinary acts they perform. This separates them from us, makes them different and transcendent; they start where we are but move beyond. On the other hand … The implication is that, although these people are assigned especially remarkable qualities based on what they do, such qualities and performances could just as easily be within our grasp. If those seemingly mundane occupations and enthusiasms … can become the springboard from which those ordinary people ascend into the realms of the especially remarkable it could just as easily happen to us as well. (1998: 72)
The appeal of reality programming lies partly in how seemingly ordinary people are suddenly ‘especially remarkable’ and how that celebrity status is endorsed by the spectacle of their widespread public presence. For example, Pop Idol UK (2002) screened countless auditions of would-be pop celebrities. The show attracted over 30 million viewers who watched and voted for those singers who would remain until the final contest between Gareth Gates and the ultimate winner Will Young.6 These two contestants have both become chart-topping pop singers with massive media coverage.7
The 2002 spin-off American Idol warned potential contestants that their appearance on television may be ‘disparaging, defamatory, embarrassing or of an otherwise unfavourable nature which may expose you to public ridicule, humiliation or condemnation’.8 Nonetheless its popularity with would-be idols and audiences alike ensured a second series in 2003. American Idol 2 appeared on Fox TV and concurrently in the UK on ITV2 in March 2003. It followed the structure of the UK predecessor and the final twelve contestants were introduced to their audience through pre-recorded video cameos that emphasised their ‘ordinariness’, their smalltown American homes and the support of their local schools, military barracks, church or family. These to-camera testimonies by family and friends and shots of the contestants feeding the ducks, visiting their old workplace at a hair salon or supermarket, or training with ordinary soldiers located them as ‘no-one particularly special’, as ‘regular’ or ‘all American’ young men and women. But, at the same time, the ‘folks’ that spoke of them and their singing skills, as a child amateur performer, in the church choir, in a local bar, served to elevate their status. These subsidiary characters, like the live audience for whom the contestants then perform, function textually as a sign of public acclamation: ‘the especially remarkable are seen (by us) to be seen by others in the public domain’ (Langer 1998:63).
These short video narratives of personal triumph over ordinary obstacles and over obscurity itself anticipated their live stage performances held before music industry judges and the television audience. The appearance in front of cameras before a voting audience was constructed consequently as the tangible reward for their accomplishments per se despite the more obvious rewards and lure of winning the competition. In such competitions, the ordinary masses of viewers who follow the course of the contestant’s path to fame are crucial. They serve a similar role to the subsidiary characters present at the edges of the frame in television camera or paparazzi shots of the star persona, for their presence ‘watching, waiting, attending or serving’ the ordinary celebrity endorses his or her status (Langer 1998: 72). Furthermore, this identification with the ‘especially remarkable’ individual allows for the possibility of a sense of activity for the television spectator, of a hand in the elevation of the ordinary person to celebrity status.
Correspondingly, Peter Balzagette (2001) argued that reality TV is ‘diverse programming, and access to the airwaves for a more diverse spread of people’. He declared that this democratisation, also signalled by the audience’s ability to contribute to the elevation or elimination of the stars, goes hand in hand with a change in social attitudes about television and identification. As signalled earlier, he characterises this as a desire for ‘emotional investment’ latched onto the appeal of interactivity and audience participation. For Balzagette, audience figures clarify this desire to participate in and determine a programme’s conclusion; a motivation which ensured that over the first two series of Big Brother around 34 million phone votes were cast for who should stay and who should go in the Big Brother house.
This investment, articulated through constant media, especially tabloid press, coverage was prominent in the fourth production of Big Brother but was already crucial to the construction of the previous series as a media ‘event’. Big Brother 3, which ran in the summer of 2002, followed the standard formula of isolating twelve voluntary participants in a house without media contact with the outside world for 64 days. These were gradually eliminated and ejected by telephone poll until the winner remained. In the final week of the programme, 8.5 million votes were cast, signalling for some media commentators that the series epitomised ‘the model of participatory programming’.9 The press measured the extent of its success by competing for exclusive interviews as the final four to emerge from the house were deluged with cash offers; the figures offered often dwarfed the £70,000 prize collected by the eventual winner, 22-year-old Kate Lawler.
But the issues we have raised throughout about the seemingly unremarkable subject of reality TV and their entry into the celebrity matrix are best exemplified by Jade Goody. Goody, a 21-year-old dental nurse from South London, fourth from last to be expelled from the house, received wildly fluctuating media coverage from the press whilst in the house and was the subject, halfway through the series, of vitriolic attacks from the tabloids. Goody was undoubtedly ‘marked’ negatively as working-class by her body, her voice and her supposed intellectual ignorance. She was loud, apparently uneducated, bibulous, excessive, overweight and getting fatter as the series progressed. The press revelled in quoting ‘Jade-isms’, the stupid things said by Goody in the course of the series. She displayed the bodily excesses that marked Roseanne Barr as a blatantly working-class woman but without the wisecracking wit that shielded Barr from the worst misogynistic criticisms (see Rowe 1995). Dominic Mohon, editor of the Sun’s showbiz column ‘Bizarre’ urged readers to evict Jade with the deeply misogynistic and class-based slogan, ‘Vote out the pig.’ He informed readers that ‘Jade is one of the most hated women on British TV and life will be hard for her when she leaves the house.’ She seemed to exemplify Annette Kuhn’s observation that:
Class is something beneath your clothes, under your skin, in your psyche, at the very core of your being. In the all-encompassing English class system, if you know you are in the ‘wrong’ class, you know that therefore you are a valueless person. (1995: 98)
However, tabloid attacks were upturned by positive viewer support for Goody resulting in tabloid battles for exclusive rights to her story when she emerged from the house. Ironically, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun and News of the World outbid rival tabloids and paid £500,000 for exclusive interviews with her. Since then Goody has been re-branded as a ‘national treasure’.
Goody’s success fits the pattern highlighted for the ‘especially remarkable’ in that when the ordinary celebrity is prone to setbacks, these setbacks are played out before the public gaze. She won through only after a dialectic of ill-fortune and effort had been played out. And crucially her success was attributed to powers beyond her grasp: she was subject to the inexplicable hand of fate, the power of the television audience and the manipulations of the television production crew. When she exited from the house she appeared dressed in a glamorous evening gown three sizes too small and was soon confronted by Big Brother host Davina McCall with a montage of clips revealing her excessive behaviour and her apparent stupidity. Talk show comedian Graham Norton, who reclaimed her as a camp icon, was also there to meet her and went on to depict her in his shows as the plump, giggly and dense dental nurse reminiscent of a 1950s Carry On film.
Subsequent media coverage focused on the re-education of Miss Goody. The television programme What Jade Did Next (Channel 4, October 2002) followed her as she worked with a personal trainer, learned how to deal with the media, learned how to drive and was schooled in the very demanding work of public appearances. Her background with her single mother on a working-class social housing estate was contrasted with the opportunities on offer to her since her appearance on the reality show. She was a stark signifier of the possibility of self-transformation and social mobility in spite of class origins and limited social skills. Jade’s narrative of desired transformation also revealed how class plays a central role in the production of femininity and the regulation of it. The escape which Jade articulates in What Jade Did Next reveals a knowledge on her part about the attainment of not just economic wealth but the cultural artefacts of taste and knowledge, of cultural capital. The possession of the ‘right’ car, of literacy, of designer clothes and private property are signifiers of social mobility hedged with the dangers of the disreputable: the trashy dress, the uninformed opinion, the too-loud laugh. In keeping with earlier fictional fantasies of achievement, reality TV offered Jade Goody a way to exhibit incipient talent for performance, ‘rough at the edges but with the potential for learning’ (McRobbie 1991:215).
Celebrity hybridity and packaged demotic culture
The address to the reality audience varies depending on the format of the show. But across the board there is a shared assumption that the audience possesses the media literate capabilities to assess the contestants/participants of the reality TV show – even though the criteria of judgement are often un-formulated and unspoken. These criteria are grounded in vague notions of identification, appreciation and also crucially of dislike and disdain. Participants of Big Brother or Pop Idol or The Club (ITV2, 2003) knowingly present themselves to a judgemental audience. Their task is one of interaction and the overt immersion in the competitive structure of the show. As noted in chapter 1 participants are selected on the basis of contradictory criteria and are often stereotypes of the diverse identities that populate contemporary media culture – lesbian or gay, black, heterosexual bachelor, twenty-thirty something white ‘Essex’ girl or boy, stud, tart, shy loner. These types share (are presented as sharing) two features: an everyday commonality and a hunger for celebrity status. The winning group formula for a reality TV show appears to be a combination of the typecast, the banal and the exceptional.
Frequently, the participants are presented as classed subjects. Whilst the boundary between working class and lower-middle class is now often blurred in contemporary British culture and the very formations of classed hierarchies have radically altered, the participants generally are presented as residing somewhere in this region: they are clerical workers, mechanics, bar keepers, service industry workers and so on. Where, as in the UK Big Brother 5, they include university graduates and entrepreneurs this aspect of their cultural context is heavily muted in the edited broadcasts of the show. They are also frequently aspirant media celebrities. In many reality shows there is a submerged narrative about escape across classed boundaries. Also the production and editing of the show reveals a level of unacknowledged cultural capital at play. The taste and disposition of the contestants is under scrutiny; their clothes, banal conversation, interactions with other contestants, ambitions, everyday activities as related to the audience are markers of their position within the class hierarchy. As noted in our earlier discussions of the group dynamics of the UK version of Survivor and Big Brother 1 it is important not to appear too wealthy, too cultured or too tasteful. Yet, as with Jade Goody, appearing too trashy, too sexual, too uncultured can also provoke media opprobrium and infamy. Contestants need to be distinctive but not too distinctive.
A strategy of ‘violence’ then is encouraged in the reality TV community. The judgement on which contestants should stay and which should go is structured as a demotic decision but it is a decision formed through division and exclusion. This is a system of judgement and classification. A vote determines who is unworthy of respect or esteem – for the contestant the outcome of the vote makes overt the fact that one’s performance on the show is readable for others: the people watch you, observe you and decide upon your fate. Here, we would argue the seemingly more fluid opportunities of celebrity identity fuse with the traces of a class-based system. There is both a celebration of aspiration (and the desire for escape from the limitations of ordinary life) and a judgemental scrutiny of the participants’ behaviour – to appear too ambitious, too outrageous, too performative is to invite audience disdain. Yet to appear too dull, too isolated, too introverted is to also invite banishment. Of course, the conventional markers of class identity alone are inadequate to predict who will survive and thrive in this media environment. Yet the reality competition often takes place around two axes rooted in economic and social capital – that of material goods (prize money, media contracts) and that of less tangible phenomena such as popularity.
Crucial to the possession of the celebrity status that comes with popularity is a particular form of distinction in which the contestant, as he or she appears before the media audience, can be outrageous, bold, greedy, bitchy or ruthless but they cannot appear pretentious. Pretentiousness is primarily a classed charge which calls aspirant working- or lower-middle-class identities to order: ‘who does she think she is kidding?’ or ‘we can see right through him’. As Steph Lawler notes, ’pretentiousness is a charge levelled at people in whom what they seem to be is not (considered to be) what they are: in whom there is a gap between being and seeming’ (2001:121). One of the pleasures of reality TV for the audience then is trying to spot the gap, to see through the contestants’ inauthenticity. Yet inauthenticity, the ability to put on a show, is at the same time part of the skill of the celebrity persona.
In this context ‘classed cross-dressing’ carries with it pleasures for both the aspirant celebrity subject and the media audience but also dangers. Arrogance, outrageous or overtly ruthless behaviour can be construed as part of older established narratives of transformation in which the working-class boy or girl who wants it badly enough eventually has it all. Consequently, such behaviour signifies a desire to escape limits, to ‘be someone’, to grab a status and power normally denied. Attendant on this performance is an inevitable lack of nuance or sophistication within the terms of class by which the contestants are constrained. To successfully adopt markers of ‘cultured’ identity in their entirety would be to underline too clearly that class and power can be vestments or trappings rather than some integral part of one’s essential identity. Classed cross-dressing then involves always the danger of discovery, of passing as one of a ‘higher order’ and the attendant pleasure for the audience of unmasking someone’s hubris.
Reality TV – the future?
The institutionalised cultural management that is at the core of celebrity culture was wedded to a new development of the reality show in the form of new series such as The Club and The Salon. In these, the distinction between the authentic celebrity and the would-be celebrity and between the reality of the game and of the game as a packaged show have been further muddied. In the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ series The Salon (C4) workers from a real salon are re-located with new recruits to run a salon undertaking hair and beauty treatments for both the ordinary public and for celebrities. Viewers can win the chance for an appointment. In a postmodern turn, both amusing and bizarre, the first series witnessed a visit from disgraced family variety-show presenter Michael Barrymore for a hair cut and the new series saw staff welcoming Brendan, a spectacularly bad candidate from Pop Idol, for a pedicure. In both cases the reality TV workers of The Salon were overheard indulging in celebrity gossip about their clients. The show pointed towards future forms that create a new social/media space in which ‘real’ people and celebrities co-exist side-by-side.
In early 2003 Carlton broadcast a new show called The Club which also provided this new social/media space. The show was staged in a real location, a retro-themed, two-floored bar called Nylon, in London’s square mile. Each week for the duration of the six-week show, three celebrities took control of one of the bars at Nylon and their team of bartenders would battle it out to make theirs the coolest one. Each week the celebrity nominated a member of his or her team to get the sack; viewers were witnesses to the nomination and to the celebrity’s frank appraisal of their staff. Television viewers were also asked to vote for the team member that they wanted to lose their job and the sacking took place live on TV. Open auditions were then held and those who voted or who attended the club could, if they chose, ask to be nominated to replace the sacked employee.
Chrysalis-owned Galaxy radio network teamed up with Carlton to promote the show and when it started, its presenters, celebrity bar managers and team members were featured on dance music stations; Galaxy DJ’s even managed the decks at Nylon. The club had the capacity to pack in over 500 revellers (Day 2003). It was promoted using the now-common media practice of ‘emotional branding’ (Lull 2000: 170). In this case, the commodity was associated with the subjectivities of everyday working-class life. The three celebrities selected to run the bar were emblems of working-class culture made good. Samantha Fox, the former Sun ‘page three girl’ of the 1980s, who, as the official website profile stresses, started work on the Sun at sixteen years of age and has gone on to make a wide-ranging showbusiness career for herself. Fox had accrued an iconic status as a former tabloid star and still signifies a brash hedonism and visual excitement combined with a determined desire for celebrity success. She was presented throughout the programme as a tough achiever who combined glamour with tabloid’s populist appeal. Her climb to success is marked by a significant gender and class realignment in which working-class women resist ‘discourses of sobriety’ through the unashamed use of their sexuality in the accrual of celebrity status; a positioning which sits easily with the personas and self-professed ambitions of reality TV’s contestants.
The second bar manager was Dean Gaffney, who started work on the long running British TV soap opera Eastenders, again at the early age of fifteen. Gaffney is presented as a working-class success story, which melds real-life with his soap persona. The website states that he is ‘no stranger to hard and unglamorous work, and he vividly remembers pounding the pavements on his paper round as a boy’. This is immediately juxtaposed with tales of his current penchant for fast cars and drinking sessions at Stringfellows night-club: ‘the trials of celebrity lifestyle!’ Gaffney’s bar eventually won the £15,000 prize money. The third bar manager was Richard Blackwood, a former MTV presenter turned Channel 4 presenter then pop star. The web profile again presents Blackwood as a person who wants to be remembered as ‘a real personality that came from nothing’. All three managers work extremely hard and there is a strange juxtaposition of discourses as ‘celebrities’ labour intensively in the maintenance of the celebrity status. The best thing about the series is that it reveals the ‘hard work‘ behind the superficially effortless image of entertainers.
But of course, in this context the revelation of the real work of stardom is also part and parcel of the unique selling point of the show. All three bar managers reveal the use of celebrity to represent the emotion of the cultural product: they signify the importance of ambition, exceptional personality and a drive to achieve success even with a poor start in life. What is interesting is the elision between their celebrity personas and their real-life status. All three are presented as working-class without specific reference to these terms. Gaffney’s soap persona is melded with his personal media achievement whilst Fox exemplifies how being a working celebrity means interpreting economics in sexual as well as financial terms.
There are a number of points to be made about the innovation and self-referential and often hybrid status of The Club. The contestants too are mainly from fairly mundane jobs as clerical workers, bar men or women, supermarket workers and so on. They share the common desire to succeed in media terms. The Club breaks down the division between would-be and successful celebrity that had heretofore been maintained in, for example, the Big Brother and Survivor shows. Celebrities work alongside ordinary contestants in the bar and are overtly constructed as cultural workers with shared ambitions. Whilst the division in power is maintained – through the hierarchy of the bar managed by the established celebrity – there are moments when this breaks down. At one point, Fox’s crew chastises her in the appraisal session for drinking too much and jeopardising their chances – a scene in which Sam walks off camera twice and later apologises to her team. The contestants and celebrities challenge any easy notion of classed identity. Both groups in a sense occupy ersatz class positions – drawing too easily on narratives of gritty success that, in the case of the celebrities, obliterate the distinctions between their public and private personas. Both perform for camera whilst also baring their more ‘authentic’ anxieties about other team members in by-now well rehearsed confessional to-camera moments that supposedly characterise reality TV’s glimpse of the authentic person.
But finally then, both The Salon and The Club are worthy of attention because their formats erode the divisions and distinctions between the audience and the performers in ways which point towards the future development of factual entertainment programming. Shows such as the USA-based Survivor have operated a no-fly zone over their island-competition space to exclude the danger/chaos of outsiders breaking into the reality of the mediated event. Big Brother shuts contestants away from the physical presence of ordinary others and opens them up only to the televisual/computer gaze. In contrast, The Salon allowed anyone to make an appointment and The Club was open to the public who could visit every night of the week including the televised nights. For a minimal fee they could join in the media event, buying drinks at the bar, talking with and assessing the contestants and celebrities and, if they were lucky, appear on the small screen itself. The Club especially was a provocative re-inscription of the local and particular experience of the neighbourhood bar into the global distanced voyeurism of television land. If you were young enough, had disposable income, dressed smartly and lived in London you too could inhabit a reality TV space. This constituted a marked extension of the viewers’ exercise of their discrimination in voting and offered a fleeting few-seconds of media fame as the camera caught them at the bar or nearby amidst Nylon’s customers. Even Blaine’s ‘Above the Below’ took place in a public space and many visitors noted that it was the experience of seeing him in the flesh and the sensation of being part of the crowd on the ground – that is, being part of the event – that won them round as fans. These new hybrid forms are reality TV writ large, allowing people to routinely select and weave mediated, publicly available symbolic representations and discourses into their everyday lives and starkly revealing how their participation can be packaged, commodified and sold back to them as audiences.
Concluding comments
As this book draws to a conclusion we have returned to the terrain where we began with a discussion of reality TV as a changing vehicle for the representation of ordinary (that is, non-elite) people and a platform for the projection of ordinary voices. We have charted quite extensively the ways in which realist genres, especially documentaries, broke new ground in the representation of ordinary people and everyday life and how they increasingly sought to provide a forum for the articulation of working-class experience. Our introduction also noted how ordinary people and the ‘working classes’ in particular have been deployed by filmmakers and read by audiences as being in themselves signs of the real and of the authentic. The presence of ordinary people and the provision of access for demotic voices are often taken to be markers of the realist credentials of factual and fact-based programming. And many films and programmes that preceded popular observational documentary and reality TV (and some of those that continue to be made today) were also motivated by explicitly radical political agendas rooted in a celebration of the contribution of ordinary people to the life of the nation and in demands for political action, social justice or a change in social attitudes.
As has been demonstrated, the ‘politics’ of the more popular factual programming and reality TV in particular is quite differently articulated. It can be overwhelmingly conservative, producing knowledges (‘revelations’) disguised as truths (‘reality’) about the criminal subject, the sexualised subject, the confessing subject, the consuming subject, the traumatised subject and so on that close down any collective impetus to effect change or to challenge the status quo. Although reality TV frequently dwells on issues of social difference and hierarchies of classed or cultural distinction and it is predicated on the importance of depicting ordinary people’s experience (and arguably practising cultural politics in doing so) its trajectory is nonetheless quite different from its more overtly politicised generic antecedents. It is attentive to individual aspiration and competitive individualism within frequently fake or highly proscribed micro-communities and attends to social mobility within an increasingly mediated social/public realm. This emphasis on the individual, their ambitions, fears and interpersonal relations with fellow contestants, neighbours, family or workmates brings pressure to bear on the filmic subject to reveal all on television. The increasingly destabilised and permeable borders between the media and the social realm facilitates this and, in doing so, radically alters the cultural landscape within which we all have to abide. Moreover, as noted throughout, the increasing presence of cameras in our lives, their incursion into public spaces and their apparent widespread acceptability is in itself altering the ground of our self-presentation and self-fashioning. To borrow an observation from Jon Dovey, ‘We are all learning to live in the freakshow, it is our new public space’ (2000:4). The question which should perhaps preoccupy us now is how we choose to navigate this space and make it our own.