Natasha Devon
A guest post by Body Gossip’s Natasha Devon who argues that trash TV is creating a generation of young people who think it’s your circumstances that defines you…
Remember when mainstream entertainment used to challenge you, intellectually? No, neither can I. But I’m fairly certain that’s purely because my memory has been slowly eroded by the great swaths of vacuous nonsense masquerading as ‘documentaries’ beamed into my poor unsuspecting brain, recently.
Accused: The 74 Stone Babysitter, Cherry Healey: Like a Virgin and the pinnacle of clichéd awfulness that was ITV1’s Dying to be Thin – Juicy looking advertisements promising to shock, educate and enlighten us followed by a programme as wafer thin as a partially nibbled kitkat.
William Shakespeare who, lest we forget, enthralled audiences representing a spectrum of vastly different social classes, a multitude of professions and both genders, wrote plays about fairly ordinary people, who did extraordinary things. Ok, so they might have been Kings and Queens who did extraordinary things on occasion, but they were characters we could all relate to, full of common-or-garden human emotions like jealousy, love, betrayal, passion, humour, humility, strength and weakness. They were complex characters, designed to appeal to complex human beings.
Somewhere in the ensuing 396 years, entertainment was turned on its head. Now, we’re a nation obsessed by glimpsing into the lives of people completely defined by their genetics, social circumstances or eccentricities, going about lives which are totally mundane. Oh look, the woman with the world’s largest natural breasts is doing her weekly supermarket shop! How utterly riveting!
We’ve succeeded in engineering a generation of young people who believe to their very core that it’s your circumstances which define you, rather than your actions. We’re building a nation devoid of ambition, as the pinnacle of perceived achievement becomes sitting on one’s backside, doing absolutely nothing of value, surrounded by cameras.
For most people, this is moderately annoying. For the gay community, it’s a catastrophic disaster. In a climate where everyone must be labelled, and it is what you are, not who you are that counts, gay people are just ‘gay’ and nothing more. Regardless of their achievements, their actions or their real personalities. A gay man could become President of the Known Universe, single handedly fight off an alien invasion and engineer World Peace and the public would still whisper ‘I bet he goes home, strips naked but for a pair of heels and a feather boa and cranks up the Shirley Bassey’.
You only have to look at the way gay men are portrayed in daft-pseudo-real-life-docco-drama-thingies The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea and Geordie Shores for confirmation of this. It’s as though the mythical unscripted-script has been compiled from a book called ‘how to be a stereotypical homo’. I would mention gay women, at this juncture, but apparently, in Essex, West London and Newcastle, they don’t exist.
Of course you are perfectly within your rights to argue that we could all simply switch from our trashy, sensationalist TV channel of choice, turn on BBC2 and pretend the whole undignified situation isn’t happening. But whilst we’re revelling in the genius of Stephen Fry et al, myths are being perpetuated, stereotypes reinforced and prejudice endorsed.
So please tune in at midnight tonight, as I rant my way through a debate on BBC 5 Live about the effect of sensationalist television programmes. You can listen live at http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/
Featured image: Fernsehmuell by Eis Frei, Flickr
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