Here is my latest in The Critic. I hope you enjoy it and please do comment if you have any thoughts!
The airwaves are filled with programmes which dangle money in front of the desperate. This is hardly new. When I was a child, we had shows like Supermarket Sweep, Blankety Blank, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, among others. Giving ordinary people the opportunity to win money, either through skill or via chance, is a time-honoured tradition of TV culture.
Perhaps there is something in all of us that enjoys the act of people competing for a chance at glory — no matter how small or big. The bigger the stakes, the more we like to watch — or at least the more entertaining people appear to find it.
It is not always money or politics that draws us in, but also the promise of personal success. Shows like Love is Blind or Married at First Sight toy with the most intimate and vital part of many people’s lives. Such shows incentivise people to play a role where we can cheer them on, ritually boo them, and play up to the cameras. These shows do not only bring the contestants to boiling point, but the audience too.
Today, such television shows seem more personal and competitive than ever — playing out as psychological melodramas. Television is no longer playing around the edges of our lives; today, some shows promise to help fix our lives in a substantial, personal, and meaningful way. Two examples are The Inheritance and The Traitors. These programmes feature individuals competing to win a cash prize, and involve physical tasks and a “debating” format, where participants must decide who should leave the show in the case of The Traitors, or who should claim the week’s cash endowment in the case of The Inheritance. At the end of The Inheritance, the victor can choose to split their winnings, but in the case of The Traitors, if there is a traitor amongst the finalists, then they take all the cash home with them.
These programmes are normalising and even celebrating a winner-takes-all mentality
In both shows, we witness the building of alliances, and devious schemes being formed amongst and between contestants. The cloak of progressive values is also employed to legitimise terrible behaviour. Hafsah, a contestant from The Inheritance, is perhaps the perfect example of this. Hafsah lied, schemed, and clawed her way to an inheritance as part of the game, while also shielding her behaviour under notions of fairness, competition, and girl power. Whenever questions came up about splitting the money, she talked about what she “deserved” and had “earned”. Fairness, according to this understanding, is not a more even distribution of resources, or even advantaging those who need the money most, but about taking as much as you can for what you believe you earned. She took pride in her game accomplishments — noting that being one of the final five women was a significant achievement. I somehow doubt that this is how Mary Wollstonecraft imagined female equality.
These programmes are normalising and even celebrating a winner-takes-all mentality. Indeed, when Hafsah was called out by a paramedic for her unscrupulousness, she questioned if they were a communist — as if asking for some basic decency was akin to seeking absolute equality. Thus, the modern-day gameshow brings out people’s very worst traits, and justifies them under the pretence of competition and entertainment. Selfishness becomes just, duplicitousness becomes clever tactics, and building alliances at the expense of others becomes “empowering the girls”. Yet, at the end of the day, it is all just a cover for personal greed. You can’t blame the contestants for this — they are just playing the game as it is designed for it to be played. But that does not mean we should applaud the behaviour.
Some would argue that all this is merely the result of human nature. People are hardwired to gain an advantage when it is presented, and no one stops us. This is in part what Hobbes feared about people themselves — that they were naturally drawn towards dominating the other, not just physically but also materially. They would then naturally show off their ability to dominate as people do. Television merely gives us an outlet to showcase human ugliness and spread it into every home in the country.
Yet, this is too simple an analysis. The world is not Lord of the Flies, and even if it were, we should reach for something higher than this. We must look to our cultural ethos, which we all marinade in, that causes us to absorb such behaviours. We should question our economic premises. Supposedly, pure self-interest underpins a stronger economy — one in which the guiding hand of the market identifies the winners and the losers. That is, until, like in 2008, the lack of values and standards overwhelm it, and a crash occurs.
A typical left-wing analysis likes to point at Thatcher and Blair for encouraging the dog-eat-dog culture which we are now left with. But this is too easy. Thatcher left office in 1990 and Blair in 2007 — they can hardly be expected to shoulder the blame for what we are today. Instead, we need to look at ourselves and the culture in which we all participate. Andrew Breitbart was not entirely correct when he argued that politics is downstream of culture, but nor was he entirely wrong. Politicians influence our cultural norms, but they are also influenced by them. Indeed, parliamentary politics perhaps more closely resembles a game show than we would like to admit.
Critics of modern culture may blame the media for incentivising such behaviour, and there is something to that, but the fact there is a market for such entertainment speaks to a deeper failure in our collective lives. Whether in search of love or fortune, these programmes highlight the depths to which increasing numbers of us will sink to satisfy our greed and narcissism.
Thatcher never did really say there was no such thing as society, but perhaps the collective bonds which once held us together have been shaken so loose that we struggle to see what we owe to one another. Perhaps we will look back with some shame, just as we do on programmes like Jerry Springer’s and Jeremy Kyle’s. Or what is more likely, is that we will march on, not quite recognising what has gone so wrong, whilst feeling lonely and dissatisfied with life and searching in vain for an answer to all our problems.