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!
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