A casual Monday or so back I was happily fulfilling that nauseating north-west
And then little grey cogs started clunking. Clunk-clunk. 6 million people care! Clunk-clunk. But… why? Clunk-clunk. Surely this is just another enterprise (pun not really intended) in sensationalizing a part of the average person’s life so as to garner audience share from those not yet gormlessly addicted to the reality-TV tidal wave? Just another idiotic and desperate squeeze of a mouldy and almost dry kitchen sponge? Clunk-clunk.
What really renders me incredulous and speechless about this fusty fad is that it is, quite blatantly and flagrantly, a fallacy. It simply isn’t reality. As a couple of CEO’s attested, The Apprentice couldn’t possibly be further away from an entrepreneurial business model. We’ve managed to do something quite bizarrely post-modern, and entirely flip the coin. Our “reality-TV” is less real than most of the drama that comes out of HBO or BBC. My televisual viewing cache is currently filled with brilliant series like The Wire and Six Feet Under (on DVD of course… take THAT, ads), and, despite not being an expert on Baltimore crime or running a funeral home, I have a strong feeling both represent reality far more accurately and intelligently than Master Chef, Beauty and the Geek, or Holly & Fearne Go Dating.
It was inevitable, wasn’t it? We love ourselves. We love screens. We love to see ourselves on screen. We love to love ourselves. I just can’t help but feel it’s reached a point of immaturity. It isn’t us up there. It isn’t you. It’s some fame-hungry shill as desperate for a national embarrassment as I am tempted just to sweep the whole mess under the telly cabinet, and just pretend it never, ever happened at all.
