Channel 4 has seen the production of myriad reality television programmes under its aegis, ranging from the British incarnation of Big Brother, which requires no elaboration, to Come Dine with Me, in which contestants hold dinner parties for strangers who judge and score their efforts and compete with each other for a cash prize. This programme satisfies a British lust to peer into the houses of others and to judge our compatriots’ attempt to cook with invariable contempt.
Clearly, and unsurprisingly, Channel 4 casts a wide net.
Two other programmes which you can watch on Channel 4 are 10 Years Younger and Beauty & the Beast: Ugly Face of Prejudice.
The former takes unsuspecting and so-called “dowdy” members of the public who are, for all we know, living perfectly happy lives, and subjects them to cosmetic surgery, dental reconstruction, make-up application, and fashion re-coordination. 10 Years Younger recently attracted the scathing comment of Charlie Brooker in his BBC programme How TV Ruined Your Life. Brooker criticised the voyeuristic mutilation not only of perfectly acceptable female forms for entertainment but the mutilation of the broader cultural consciousness into accepting such behaviour. (Presumably Brooker himself was not blind to the irony that the most effective way of breaking the spell television has on its captivated audience was to use that very medium to show its degrading influence.)
Beauty & the Beast: Ugly Face of Prejudice takes the image-obsessed and forces them to live for a period of time with someone physically disabled; the image-obsessed candidate has often had, or is seriously contemplating, cosmetic surgery, and almost looks like the end results of 10 Years Younger.
There seems to be something of a missed opportunity here: contestants of 10 Years Younger, once transformed, seem perfect candidates also for Beauty & the Beast. Factor into this equation the BBC’s Snog Marry Avoid? in which (mostly) women with fake tan, fake eyelashes and hair extensions are “transformed” into “natural beauties” by a hideously obnoxious artificial life-form called P.O.D. (the so-called ‘Personal Overhaul Device’), and what we get is an obviously conflicted view of what the British public consider to be appropriate, at least in terms of personal grooming.
I’m not here to wade into the vexed question of what constitutes personal beauty. Instead I’m interested in the fact that one television channel can successfully have programmes with completely diametric intentions. The obvious explanation is that Channel 4 and the BBC, and all the others, exist primarily to make money, so that they can fulfil their secondary aim: to entertain, or to “teach”, or whatever their aim actually is. So in order to maximise viewership they, totally understandably, attempt to appeal to “everyone”.
The problem is that whatever consisted the pre-existing opinions of the general public, a sense of common cultural consciousness, is determined or at least influenced by the information we get from television, and especially by the way in which we get that information. (It is, of course, impossible to tell where the homogenising force of external influences on cultural consciousness begins and the “true” cultural consciousness ends; an unadulterated common cultural understanding is by definition a paradox. And no one agrees 100% with the common cultural experience – but in general I operate by Jung’s premise that “man, as a member of a species, can and must be described as a statistical unit; otherwise nothing general could ever be said about him.”, The Undiscovered Self)
So three programmes which have the concept of personal beauty at their core show, and therefore to a certain extent endorse, different attitudes to it: one cannot tolerate the signs of ageing; another condemns the image-consciousness of certain members of humanity; and yet another uses the misguidedly orange as an opportunity for muted comedy.
Humanity has been affected by the presentation of information by skilful manipulators of that information for thousands of years: the speeches of Cicero, the master orator of Late Republican Rome, show how one man can turn a simple enough concept on its head; Thucydides’ Kleon complains that the 5th century Athenian assembly members are too susceptible to the rhetoric of a good orator, that they are too much like an audience at the theatre. This last example is a particularly useful parallel for our present-day situation. If television is at least a peripheral part of your life, the way it presents the world will inevitably affect how you also see the world to some, admittedly unknown, extent.
For reasons of pride many of you who are reading this will now be thinking, “I know that the world TV shows me is not the ‘real’ world.” But this thought presupposes that you have seen what television shows you and reacted against it – this reactionary relationship between yourself and television at the very minimum implies that it has affected you. But if you lived in the middle of nowhere and had books as your only company, it may reasonably be argued, it would be the worlds of these books that affected your ideas about the wider universe. Ultimately, then, how is television any worse than any other cultural experience, whether it’s a book or a film or a play? The answer to that is that any one individual’s idea about how the world “actually” is is affected both by these cultural artefacts and by lots of other things. But the way in which television might be considered “worse” is that it is, at least in Britain, one of the most attention consuming devices we have, rivalled now only by the fact that most people also have unlimited access to a personal computer and the gateway to unlimited knowledge that the internet potentially supplies. The internet, now more than ever, leads back to television.
But this is not a vitriolic attack on the “evils” of television, rather a brief analysis of a powerful cultural influence. The existence of contemporary conflicting television programmes shown by the same channel points to a potential schizophrenic cultural existence, and more broadly a potentially schizophrenic self-conceptualisation. Reality TV showing the unhealthy initiated into healthy lifestyles co-exists alongside dramas in which dysfunctional characters engage in destructive habits, with no hint of later initiation and salvation by the “reality TV” culture. We get into the position where television seeks out the cracks and flaws of its viewership in order to attract its attention, and as a result these viewers become more sensitive to these issues, more susceptible to their potential solutions. Which presumably spawns more television programmes. Some people feel differently, which spawns a modulation of the original theme, presented differently, with different answers. What do we now think of ourselves – are we overly vain, overly orange victims of our own insecurities, or are we ageing, over-the-hill relics who have failed to cling on successfully to our fading youth?
Admittedly not all programming is equal, and often there are real gems which make the whole idea of a public broadcast system worthwhile. This article has omitted one of the greatest powers in affecting the malleable self-identity of wider humanity: The News. Whoever controls what information the wider public consumes also controls our ability to judge “reality”, and that much is pretty self-evident. This situation is changing rapidly because of the power of the internet. Twitter, for example, enables individual users to report on their own experiences, and this in itself combines into a larger conglomerate of opinion that can combat what The News chooses to say. But anyone who has used Twitter for even the shortest amount of time can see that a lot of what is generated is useless garbage, no more helpful to our edification as a species than 10 Years Younger, or Beauty & the Beast, or Snog Marry Avoid?, yet potentially, at least, just as capable of making its mark upon the indelible putty of our common cultural consciousness.
This article began with television, but the influences on our cultural consciousness and ability to create self-identity come in many different guises. Television is an obvious homogeniser, influencer, asserter, and creator of popular ideas. The concept that ideas can be repackaged and are infinitely malleable to any kind of audience necessary is an ancient one.
I recently attended a Google recruitment presentation at an International Careers Day, and their representative told the completely packed room that it was Google’s aim to “organise the world’s information.” My initial reaction was, “Who asked you to?”
The bottom line is that everyone is packaging their information somehow with some kind of agenda, including me.
