be stronger, even if one ITC report opined that popular factual programming was pandering to ‘the worst of human behaviour’.
As docu-soap and conflict television both scored impressive ratings, the fusion of the two forms has come to revolutionize the programming schedules: one Friday evening’s viewing on ITV in April 1999 ran as follows: ‘Parking Wars’, ‘Motorway Life’, ‘Family Feud’ and ‘Neighbours from Hell’. Even the BBC’s Business Unit got sexy with a docu-soap drama about company merge, ‘Blood on the Carpet’. On cable, Sky TV has given us the hugely successful ‘Ibiza Uncovered’ and myriad half-hour shows – ‘Tango Tango’, ‘Police, Action, Camera’ and ‘America’s Dumbest Criminals’ – which edits chunks of CCTV and surveillance video into a kind of ‘You’ve been Framed’ (or ‘You’ve been Arrested’) by the emergency services.
As a format, popular factual programming can be seen as a reinvention of social realism, but one that replaces the heightened objectivity of the naturalistic style with a heavily coerced core of subjective values. Other than being cheap, the key to PFP’s success is its manipulation of public curiosity, placing viewers in the centre of a situation which is bound to test their tolerance and arouse their sense of vulnerability. In this way, the reality which such programmes mediate is being massaged by various formal devices to appear more real than real: the surface of the images is lacklustre and flattened, drawing attention to the immediate prompts of the situation – litter, clutter or any evidence of the subject being unprepared for being famous for being ordinary; long, unedited shots (sometimes running for minutes) that create a sense of portentous tension, while the new technology of small, digital cameras can convey a sense of immediacy or claustrophobia.
Thus the medium is so stretched that the slightest word or gesture becomes amplified. The traditional role of voice-over narration – to suggest authority, time line or commentary – has been either removed or replaced by a kind of disembodied Chorus, which hints at off-camera action, the consequences of which we are about to see. On programmes that deal with such volatile areas as, for instance, debt collection, environmental health and the RSPCA, there is the sense of being suddenly dragged back to safety at the ultimate moment of conflict – when someone throws a punch – or allowed to linger for as long as possible – when someone bursts into tears.
In most cases, the ‘authenticity’ of popular factual programming has been used to promote its treatment of the subject matter as being, to some degree, in the public interest. But in many ways such a claim for the genre is nothing more than the old device of positing pornography as sociology – ‘Look at these photographs, aren’t they disgusting?’ This also puts any critique of authenticity into the kind of moral headlock common in debates over contemporary art: to condemn contested material as sensationalist or prurient is construed as merely reactionary or elitist. What remains, beyond an unwinnable contest of value judgements, is the seismic shifts of audience share and ratings that will dictate the direction of the programme-making.
From the point of view of the programme-makers, the genre is an inexhaustible as the collective index of social situations and professions. But such a position is endemic within the genre of social realism. Robert Baldick, describing the cultural circumstances in which J. K. Huysmans came to write against Against Nature (1884) refers to the disillusionment of social realist writers in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century: ‘the novel of adultery had been worked to death by writers great and small; and as for the social documentary, they saw little point in plodding through every trade and profession, one by one, from rat-catcher to stockbroker …’
Television’s answer to such a cyclical problem has been both to up the sensationalism in its wares and spread the techniques of PFP – the span of social realism – into other strands of the medium: celebrities such as Geri Halliwell and Martine McCutcheon are presented in a carefully edited form of stylized ‘docudrama’ – thus satisfying the public’s need to be shown behind the scenes of fame and offered a sniff of intimacy with the stars. Similarly the fact that traditional situation comedies were based on the very professions and areas of human interest that now comprise docu-drama – corner shops, department stores, hospitals, police stations, holiday camps – has prompted, for instance, Carlton to commission a situation comedy – ‘Pay and Display’ – which replicates the look of a docu-soap.
And herein lies the notion that veracity has become synonymous with confusion and dysfunctionalism – through our depictions of ourselves as vulnerable, damaged, volatile, matched by our fetishizing of realism. And this, perhaps, is an accurate reflection of contemporary society, revealing a truth about the way in which we live through our very attempts to come to terms with authenticity.
Or was it just that the networks were looking for ways of keeping vast, profitable ratings by teasing their audience with the suggestion that they might get to see people being beaten up, losing control or fucking? Or maybe it was all just a bit of fun. One argument about Reality TV was that it taught people how to empathize with one another; that as the age was ruled by territorial hostility and depersonalizing information technology systems, watching people interact with one another on TV (‘Look at those dinosaurs ripping one another apart!!!’) could somehow be edifying.
Championed by its creators as either a) an important breakthrough in television as a social medium, or b) honest-to-goodness, forward-with-the People soap ’n’ tabloid populism (which could also, in certain circles, mean a High Camp, how-deliciously-vulgar, semi-ironic exercise in slumming it in populism), the drift of such cloning in television would seem by the end of the decade to have reached critical mass. The walls of Jurassic Park were beginning to show cracks – the dinosaurs were head-butting the concrete as the viewers voted on who gets eaten next.
In other areas of cultural practice, the cult of the personal and the autobiographical had replaced Style Watching as the mainspring of self-expression and self-promotion. Never had there been a better time to declare yourself a one-person Bloomsbury Group. But where had this obsession with the personal, the confessional and a kind of omni-vision voyeurism actually come from? One answer might be that this was a generational neurasthenia, picking up on the Flaubertian notion (as picked up by his posthumous analyst-biographer Sartre) of art and creativity being the result of ‘the ever hidden wound’. So did we all feel wounded in some way?
Another answer to the question, though, might be boredom and a craving for one-shot celebrity, prompting a culture of ‘to the max’, which was spun to keep raising the pitch of its own superlatives. (‘Ultimate Terror! Ultimate Destruction! Look-at-those-dinosaurs!’)
From the early to late 1990s, across the temper of the times, the ‘ever hidden wound’ was being exposed, and made public. Could this disarm its artistic effect? For rather than undergoing the translation into a (Flaubertian – or even Warholian) model of art and creativity, in which the presence of the artist was converted wholly into art itself, the wound was being offered up, raw and direct, as a kind of celebration or cult of actuality in relation to the personal. Just what would people be prepared to do to get their little nugget of celebrity – to do their circuit of the dinosaur park? Throughout the second half of the 1990s, the answer to this – not surprisingly, perhaps – would be ‘absolutely anything’.
From the mutation and conflation of confessional culture and mediated ‘real life’ had emerged the broader trend of the barbarism of the self-reflecting sign – every bit as threatening, in its own way, as the gradually mutating dinosaurs unleashed by the founder of Jurassic Park’s blasphemous fiddling about with natural evolution. Shame on such grandiosity! We should have remembered the testament of Pee Wee Herman, returning from Texas with his beloved bicycle: ‘I’ve learned something on the road, you know – Humility!’
Tracey Emin
Sitting with the posture of an obedient child, Tracey Emin lights another Marlboro, inhales deeply, ponders for a few more seconds, and then pronounces:
