Everything about the show is nasty

At ten o’clock yesterday morning I went out to buy the Sunday newspapers. As I drove to the local shop (about two miles away) I switched on the radio, and Desert Island Discs was playing, featuring the musical choices of Sunday Times journalist A. A Gill. As the presenter, Sue Lawley, was praising the writing of A. A Gill so highly I decided to buy the Sunday Times and see what his column was like.

I am ALWAYS disappointed when I buy the Sunday Times. It is a physically huge publication that basically tells you nothing. Literally hundreds of articles that are empty of any real content or stylistic quality.

There was a so-called exposé of John Prescott’s son and his dubious property developments. However much Prescott senoir deserves a good kicking, to attack his children for no other reason than that they are his children seems very shabby. It left me feeling sorry for the old man.

There was a review of A. N. Wilson’s new biography of John Betjeman that entirely ignored the book and just blathered on about the reviewer’s opinions. Betjeman may well be shallow, suburban and of marginal importance, but that is missing the point. What I want to know is whether A. N. Wilson’s book is worth reading.

A. A. Gill’s writing (two articles, one of which was a restaurant review) was a great disappointment. He is a HORRIBLE writer, trite and self-obsessed. It doesn’t bode well for the A. A. Gill book I recently bought (A. A Gill is away) and which I had been looking forward to reading. On Desert Island Discs A. A. Gill said he had been choosing his selection of records for all of his life. Reading his column, it seemed very likely that this smug, narcissistic individual was quite capable of spending a lifetime refining his musical tastes with an eye to eventually airing them on Sue Lawley’s very middle-brow show. Sorry if this post seems a bit negative.

One of the (many) sweeping generalisations that A. A. Gill incorporated in his lazy journalistic efforts on Sunday was to say “everyone” was watching Big Brother (a reality show on Channel Four that has just finished a three-month run). However much you try to ignore this programme, it intrudes itself into your consciousness. Last night I got roped into watching highlight’s of the final day in the “house” (a studio where the performers are on stage twenty-four hours of the day).

Predictably, the only people willing to subject themselves to this scrutiny are gross extraverts and individuals with mental health problems. So abased has this format become, that it called to mind Hogarth’s “Bedlam” painting in The Rake’s Progress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:William_Hogarth_019.jpg - showing two well-dressed spectators come into an asylum to be entertained by the half-naked lunatics). Arguably the latest version of Big Brother, with its financial encouragements to ever more openly sexual behaviour, must come close to procurement of acts of public prostitution (with the tabloids accusing one of the participants of being a former “vice girl”).

There is also the recurring issue of racism, with the popular votes ejecting, at a very early stage, anyone who was black, asian or Turkish (the show even broadcast remarks by the contestants about the offensive smell that came from a black woman’s clothes).

One by one the contestants are ejected from the studio by public votes that seem to be based on nothing more substantial than how people look. The hierarchy of society revealed by these plebiscites is very depressing. The behaviour of the baying crowd as each evited person emerges from the studio is shocking (heaven help us if Endemol, inventors of the show format, ever gets the contract for the reintroduction of capital punishment - which must be on the cards given the huge numbers of Eastern Europeans coming to the country with their fundamentalist views on abortion, contraception and law-enforcement).

Worse, however, than the behaviour of the crowd are the performaces of the presenters who help mastermind the disgusting and abusive spectacle. They prance around exhibiting hideous knowing in-joke expressions, obviously contemptuous of the people they are exploiting. Everything about the show is nasty (it would be the perfect environment for A. A Gill to take centre stage).