David Barrie

Vulnerable Celebrities: Love em, Hate em, Knife em

Susan Boyle, the star of the U.K. edition of Britain's Got Talent is recovering from the ordeal of her appearance on the show.

The BBC has a flock of pop-psychologists interpreting her fate and TV executives have sought to pre-empt regulation by calling for more rigorous "psych testing" of participants in reality programmes.

This is all very interesting but misses the point, either by design, accident or willful ignorance.

The point is that the media features people like Susan Boyle because they are vulnerable. They're cast because they are extreme and unstable, because in their vulnerability and madness rests talent - and a compelling one at that.

Problem is that once the likes of Susan Boyle, Britney Spears, Kerry Kantona or Paul Gascoigne start to crack, their fate fast becomes, in the words of journalist Jenny McCartney  

a prolonged pageant of self-destruction that draws the crowds, like a potential suicide teetering on a balcony.

One way in which the media promotes and embellishes the narrative is by editorializing - giving an opinion that masquerades as objectivity.

But there's another, more posh, deceptive way via eyewitness-style, wannabe 'literary journalism', something that television - and especially British television - loves: voyeuristic journalism cast as high class art, rather than - in the words of Tom Wolfe

a motel you checked into overnight on the road to the final triumph of the novel.

In a recent edition of the London Sunday Times, "international interviewer" Daphne Barak reported on her experience of filming Amy Winehouse for an up-and-coming documentary. The article was republished in Grazia.

The four days Barak spent with Winehouse is cut-down in to a story of Dress Swap, illicit drinking and intimate scenes of Amy playing with children.

Winehouse plays with several young girls and, according to Barak,

it's obvious that Amy feels much more at home with these girls than she does with the grown-ups...She is childlike in her need for affection, constantly coming up to hug us.

Being told off by her father, Amy is said to look like a child who has just been sent to the naughty corner.

After Barak lends Winehouse a dress to go on stage, Amy switches into a little girl who needs approval. She is melting, hugging me over and over again and saying "You're so sweet. You're so nice..."

And the day after a performance, the femme fatale of last night is once again a little girl. She hugs me again and again. I notice at one point that she is sucking her thumb.

Now I am not guiltless in this space.

Over a decade ago, I made a mannered film with English TV presenter and writer Paula Yates that investigated the circumstances of the death of her lover, Michael Hutchence.

But the genius, ground-breaking work of the likes of Joan Didion or Norman Mailer in the 60s, 70s and 80s does seem today to have given way to a deluge of authored aperçus on human nature by journalists and filmmakers.

The prevailing influence of therapy in culture and of vulnerability as a defining feature of 'personhood' seems to allow more and more observers to become analysts.

And a will to typecast a human now turns fast in to the hot pursuit of jeopardy.

So it's a nice idea to introduce more rigorous "psych testing" of TV contestants.

And it's comforting to acknowledge that fame induces undue stress. 

But psychodrama is entertainment.

And poor souls like Susan Boyle are its medium.

Broadcasting as social innovation

Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kevin McCloud: these are the names of television presenters in the U.K. who are delivering us from evil.

Historically, the purpose of television has been to inform and entertain - and the medium's been a one-way street in which the viewer has had to sit up and listen to the wisdom - or not - of producers, served up as vaudeville or reportage.

But in recent years, TV in the U.K. has begun to deal in other forms of traffic and become a place for ideas with social goals that have sought to use the medium as a catalyst to change in the real world, not just a world of fictional reality.

Live Aid was a watershed moment.

The 400 million viewers who watched the event showed the power of broadcasting to scale, diffuse and connect public experience across the globe.

And the £150m the event raised for charity showed the ability of people to link broadcast media and social action.

Since then, several forces have affirmed the connection in the U.K.:

• an enduring tradition of broadcasting as public service

• producers fancying themselves as cultural patrons not scuzzy manipulators

• the need for media to become more relevant and personal to peoples' lives

• the popularity of ‘constructed reality’ programming and

• celebrities increasingly wanting to express themselves as social activists

What's more, the growth of satellite and online media has forced broadcasters to focus on competitive advantage and the scale and ambition of the cinema has led audiences to expect epic narrative.

So the pressure has been on for broadcasting to extend its impact and reach in new ways - and find new sources of cash to do it. 

One route has been to originate ‘tiny epics’: off-screen initiatives with on-screen lives that are structured as public-private partnerships, with the broadcaster acting as an early investor or entrepreneur.

Now it might be shocking to cultural snobs but this is social innovation - a role for the media beyond that set down in a recent (and brilliant) paper published by the Young Foundation. 

Take the work of Channel 4 Television, the advertiser-funded, U.K. public broadcaster:

In 2005, Channel 4 commissioned chef Jamie Oliver to team up with school dinner lady Nora Sands and take over the direction of the state school meals service in the London Borough of Greenwich.

This 'social experiment' was designed to show how children could be fed fresh, more nutritious meals. It became a national campaign for new standards for school meals and two series of prime time television programmes. It has been responsible for investment of £280m in school food and skills and the creation of a new Government agency to do the work.

 
Three years earlier, the Board of Channel 4 decided to donate £100,000 to the urban renewal of the former coal-mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire and help establish a project that emphasized citizen participation, grassroots innovation, co-design and networked public management.

The project became a £14m programme of capital investment in the town’s public spaces that has been credited with raising over £200m of additional new investment in the town; and it was broadcast as a series of four TV programmes.

Earlier this month, it was announced that over 20,000 people had registered on Landshare, a web platform run by Keo Films in partnership with Channel 4, that links people who want to grow their own fruit and vegetables - but don’t have a site - with people or institutions that have available land.

In social innovation-speak, this is an "enabling service" designed to foster a new network of local food production - and it was set up off the back of a series of TV programmes in which six families cultivated an acre of land provided by Bristol City Council.

All of these projects reveal broadcasting as a third-party agent of change - no accident at a time when our trust in institutions and the state is at an all-time low.   

But they also represent something more exciting – a wave that 4IP, Channel 4’s new media service seems out to capture.  

Media audiences are dispersed. Video production is now almost totally accessible. And people enjoy personalizing entertainment and information experiences on their iPods and computers, using playlists or RSS (‘Really Simple Syndication’).

In effect, the situation is now ripe for broadcasting to build on a first phase of work and evolve in to a distribution platform for dispersed innovation.

It's amazing really how long it's taken us to get here: a measure of the traditionalism, risk-aversion and dominance of an anti-hippy, post punk elite obsessed with literature, cinema and controlling the cultural agenda.  

But broadcasting as a medium for social innovation is still in its infancy - and we need to take care.

For there are certain conditions that need to be met if we're to progress to the next stage:

• the state has to be comfortable with self-organization

• the state has to be prepared to see broadcasting as a space for sharing information

• our idea of a sustainable society needs to include an effective, efficient flow of communications

• and media bunnies need to continue to believe - or continue to have reason to claim to believe - that “worthy” does not mean “dull”.

Farewell Jil Sander. Hello Snow + Rock. 

Image of TV set courtesy of craig1black. Other images sourced from Google Images.