I hate to be the guy sitting on his high horse on top of the moral high ground, waving his finger at people, making highfalutin statements. But it’s true. Judgment seems to be an increasingly prevalent theme in British broadcasting.
Judgement is nasty. No one does it. But we all do it when we watch telly, on so many different levels. It’s complicated.
Take the X Factor for instance, a show primarily about judgment. When the X Factor’s on I scoff and criticise the show. Then I watch for a bit longer and I find myself criticising the judges and contestants. Then I think about it for a while and write a blog criticising how the show makes you criticise things.
Judgment: it’s everywhere. It comes in a whole bunch of different forms too.
Here’s a short list of shows which are quite overtly about judgment: the X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, Masterchef, Britain’s Best Dish, Come Dine With Me, May the Best House Win.
They all follow a simple formula: subject matter + judgment. Easy.
Masterchef is cooking + judgement.
Come Dine With Me is dinner hosting + judgement.
The X Factor is mediocrity + judgment.
You get the idea.
Then there’s reality shows which don’t necessarily contain an element of judgment, except that the enjoyment derived from such shows clearly comes from a sense of judgment on the part of the viewer. The Jeremy Kyle Show, Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, etc. These shows allow people (obnoxious ones, more times than not) to present their personalities for judgment. I watch Jeremy Kyle and think “Jesus, are there people like that actually out there?”. I watch the antics of desperate Big Brother wannabe celebrities and think the same thing.
We watch to judge. I’m not an expert on human behaviour but I imagine it’s something to do with making ourselves feel better about our personalities and social situations?
Shows like Jeremy Kyle deal with social problems in a chat show format, but the same kind of thing can be seen in the documentary format. The Scheme is a horrendous social documentary which follows the lives of a handful of families living in one of the most deprived and depraved areas of Scotland. The enjoyment is a gawping curiosity at the shocking lives of a particularly underclass community. You can’t help but stare at the drug addicts, dealers, thieves and criminals with judgmental eyes. If you watch The Scheme and think “that’s perfectly normal” then you either belong to one of the stereotypes I just listed, or you live in The Scheme. Or both.
Closely related to such social documentaries as The Scheme are shows like the Big Fat Gypsy series. These shows exist to uncover often secretive or little-known cultures and societies. They satisfy a voyeuristic curiosity in us as we’re allowed to see and, subsequently, scrutinize the ways in which people from different cultures live. Amish: World’s Squarest Teenagers and Bitches and Beauty Queens are further examples of this type of cultural curiosity documentary.
Lifestyle documentaries typically document the lives of people with unusual lifestyles, disorders or illnesses. Shows like Tourettes: I Swear I Can Sing, Obsessive Compulsive Hoarder and The Real Thumbelina tackle Tourettes, OCD and dwarfism respectively. It would be entirely wrong for me to generalise here and say that this sort of programming only exists to satisfy a judgmental impulse in the audience, but looking at the increasing trend of light entertainment programming and the recurring theme of judgment within contemporary mainstream culture, I think there’s more to these programmes than simply touching and insightful documentary. This might seem like a dark and disturbing observation, but it makes sense when you look at the context.
Channel 4 seems to have a particular penchant for these lifestyle documentaries. Judging by the nature of the rest of their output, I doubt their interests are entirely sympathetic to their subjects, either. Channel 4’s canon of zany game shows like Balls of Steel , Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker-brand satire and the paramount in soft-porn programming Eurotrash, make it clear their interests lie very much in satisfying the need for light entertainment (to say the least). How can documentaries about neurosis and behavioural disorder be taken seriously when they exist in relation to unashamedly provocative sensationalism such as Embarrassing Fat Bodies, and have badly-tasted titles like A Bipolar Expedition.
I don’t mean to demonise Channel 4, they just happen to be the clearest example of how cultural context (in our case one ridldled with judgment) influences our reading and understanding of other texts.
A strange new genre of show has emerged recently and is, I think, representative of 2011 TV and the culture of judgment I’ve been harping on about. I’m talking about the hybrid between reality TV and soap opera, the truly disturbing The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Shore and Desperate Scousewives. Horrendous displays of narcissism, egoism and vanity are displayed in dull plots with such hammy acting it leads you to contemplate whether it’s real or not. TOWIE is about as real as an Essex girl’s boobs. These shows are truly awful and the characters are so annoying, but people watch to judge their words, actions, tastes and appearances.
This kind of superficial judgment is where I think ‘light entertainment’ has taken us in 2011. It’s like a tacky tabloid culture on screen. Press standards and tabloids have been getting whipped into shape by Lord Leveson this year. However, the chances of the same happening for TV’s throwaway ‘light entertainent’ is sadly pretty thin, I think.
I wouldn’t say that everything on TV is about judgment. I’m not going to pretend that the vast majority of shows have, in some form, an aspect of judgment, either. But there is definitely a noticeable recurrence of the theme, enough for me to say I think it stands among one of the most defining features of British TV and culture in 2011.
Evil is in the eye of the beholder, as the saying goes, but I think there’s too much evidence for this to be merely a cynical view of my own. The theme of judgment spans genres and formats. At uni we were taught that commercial imperatives are increasingly taking over for broadcasters, which means populist imperatives take over for content producers, which then results in an increase in ‘light entertainment’ over more 'serious' programming. Whether you take that to mean the quality of broadcast programming is in decline is up to you. But there’s definitely a lot of judgment going on.
Here's to 2012.
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