There can be precious little debate surrounding the fact that the more attractive you are, the healthier you will be, the longer you will live, the more successful a career you will have and so on. I can't see a counter-argument. This is why people aren't spread equally around; why you don't see fat people on South Beach and why you don't see a supermodel in Maryhill. Sadly, many of these factors are genetic. Good looking people, with good looking parents meet, fall in love and make good looking children. Since good looking people are more successful, healthier and live longer, their children will do likewise. At the other end of the scale, predictably, the opposite happens. So...what happens in the middle? And who's to blame for Gillian McKeith?
I'll get to that first question later, but first...who is to blame for Gillian McKeith? Let's get this straight: Gillian McKeith only exists in order to satisfy some obscure need that people have developed. I say developed, because there was no Gillian McKeith before, and now there are hundreds, if not thousands, of facsimiles. What is Gillian McKeith? What does it do? Well for a start it harasses fat people. It points at them and calls them fat. It finds out what they eat and forces them to acknowledge that they're fat because of it. It then forces them to change their diet, bullies them into exercise, makes them cry, vomit, shit into a Tupperware box, divulge intimate details of their elephantine sex lives and for what? The sorry individual who is the subject of this torment gains nothing. At the end they're still fat, they've just had to endure a week of torture and eating bird food at the bony hands of a woman who is not even remotely qualified to do this. So no, they don't benefit at all. What about our old friends the attractive people? Again, no. They're too busy having soirees on yachts and eating organically produced fresh food to be concerned with a 19 stone call centre operative from Crewe with a gastric band.
Well I'll tell you who's responsible... it's those people in the middle. They're not fat, or ugly or poor. But nor are they thin, beautiful or rich. They're solidly mediocre in every way, and while this is comfortable, it is also staggeringly tedious. They benefit from the long, relatively healthy life but are equally cursed by it, knowing that they have to spend the fittest, healthiest, best looking times of their lives planning for the shit times ahead. They will have no villa on the Riviera to which they can retire. No chateau in the Loire. No yacht. No cabana. This makes them...actually this makes us very fucking angry. We can't live our life in the moment like Fatty McPoverty because we're going to live to be eighty-fucking-five. We don't have the luxury of dying young. And we can't very well go around harassing rich people because they're smarter than us, better looking, and they have lawyers. So we go after Fatty. We torture Fatty for every year past retirement that we have to live in suburban misery. We torture them for every weekend we don't spend at someone's delightful little place outside of Nice. We torture them for the freedom that we are denied. And we enjoy it. Why Gillian McKeith? Because for this kind of job, she's perfect.
And it gets worse. Much worse. As if it wasn't enough to hunt down fat people and torture them in their own homes for our amusement, we hunt down unfortunate looking people who we then subject to public ridicule only to then subject them to extensive surgery so that they're less hideous. Television is pretty much an endless parade of society's rejects being expoited for entertainment. And for every variation of every format there is a Gillian McKeith. Do you wear crappy clothes? Well here's Gok Wan to cackle at you and then dress you up to look like an older, fatter version of himself. The list is endless. No stone is left unturned in our insatiable hunt for freaks to prod and poke and make fun of. And all because we're bored.
And it gets worse. Much worse. Nothing, it seems, delights us more than when someone who was once wealthy and attractive suffers some unspeakable personal tragedy and loses their money, fame and looks. They get their own channel (ITV2) where all their reality shows can run, uninterrupted, like a morphine drip into the arm of society. Reference Kerry Katona. I personally have no idea where this person came from, but without even having seen any show about her, just by existing in the same space as ITV2 and gossip magazines, I know that she's suffered cocaine addiction problems and has been in and out of rehab. What appears to me to be serious psychological problems have been mined by Heat magazine and ITV for all their pathos which is then chewed up and regurgitated, half putrefied in the process, into the gaping mouths of viewers and readers who chew it up like cud around their water coolers. It happens so often that these people blur into one amorphous blob of pseudo-celebrity gossip from which stories and hour-long Channel Five specials can be drawn at will.
And it gets worse. Much worse. It doesn't even stop when they're dead. Psychics exploit grieving family and friends and we lap that up too. Charlatans ply their sinister trade in prime-time. We love to laugh at the credulous. We might not be the brightest bunch but fuck me, at least we don't believe that John Edwards is talking to our dead mother. How shallow and insecure are we that we demand this? How insatiable is our appetite for human suffering that we need to have it televised and broadcast into our living rooms? Or, perhaps more worryingly, what are these shows protecting us from? Could it be that without Jeremy Kyle around to shout at junkies we'd all pick up a two-by-four and head out into the concrete jungle and beat one to death ourselves? If we didn't have Gillian McKeith to do our dirty work, would we resort to chasing fat people down the street with a chainsaw the second they look longingly at a McDonald's? If we didn't have '10 Years Younger' would we drag ugly people into our basements and perform the surgery ourselves? Have we lost our minds? If we didn't have John Edwards would we be forced to crash funerals and openly castigate mourners? Where does it end? Where is our sense of decency?
What have we become? How did things get so shitty? When did peeking through net curtains at our neighbours turn into butchering ugly people in the name of entertainment? When did a little curiosity turn into phone-hacking? When did our need to put a little money away for a rainy day turn into hedge-funds and sub-prime mortgage crises? How did we get here? And, more importantly, can we ever get back? Can we ever get back to a time when celebrities were either A-list or no-list? Can we get back to twitching net curtains and variety programmes? When I see clip shows of what television was like before Rupert Murdoch, before Sky, before 150 channels of base degredation, I think how innocent it looks. These people on gameshows from the 1970s look absolutely ridiculous, yet they're not being mocked or bullied or strapped into a dentist's chair to fix their overbite, they're just accepted as the way people are. Now, you end up on Deal Or No Deal being forced to perform every flickering emotion like a dancing bear (which for humanitarian reasons we banned) only for Noel Edmonds...Noel Fucking Edmonds...to sneer at you like some kind of geriatric Mephistophiles in a shirt made out of curtains. Really? Is this where we are now? And if it's not him then it's Simon Cowell who were it not for the existence of other more likely candidates (Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch, the Bush Administration, George Osborne, Sting, Glenn Beck among others) would be my bet for the current incarnation of the Devil himself. It's all our fault. We made a deal with them. We told Rebekah Brooks that hacking phones was fine as long as it was only our fake celebrities. We bought Rupert Murdoch's Sky packages, we read his newspapers, we absorb the media slurry of Fox News like it's going out of fashion. We elected Bush (once). We elected David Cameron (kinda). We allow Sting to fly about the world in a private jet hosting lavish 'fundraising events' and 'rock concerts' while at the same time permitting him to lecture us on the fucking environment. We gave Glenn Beck a platform from which to spout hate speeches against anyone who dares exercise the most basic of human freedom of expression. We created Sarah Palin for fuck's sake. And for what? Can we go back? No. We let the cat out of the bag. We opened Pandora's box. We made a deal with all of these latter day devils and they've collected our souls in return. Now we walk the Earth like zombies until we die, miserable, alone, knowing that John Edwards is pretending to contact us so he can milk our grieving relatives for all they're worth.
No comments:
Post a Comment