Professional footballers up and down the country did what they are paid to do over the weekend. They tried to score goals, and when some of them succeeded their various team mates rushed to engulf them in euphoric tangles of arms, legs and kisses. Why such passion? They play twice a week. A goal isn’t that rare a phenomenon.
But then nor are prizes in acting for Kate Winslet who whinnied and hyperventilated in apparent astonishment when a couple of months ago she won yet another. Knowing that she’s brilliant, she must surely have stopped being surprised at her own success years ago. Everybody else did.
And why do we see the regular academic weep-athon when sixth form girls fall upon each other’s necks to sob with joy when they read their A-level results every August?
I’ll tell you why. We are all beginning to behave in the way we think we’re expected to behave. That is to say, the footballers, Kate and the sixth formers are over-reacting by way of tears, gasps and over-dramatic celebrations because that’s how they’ve seen characters over-react for years in melodramatically directed television soap operas.
“Life doesn’t imitate art,” Woody Allen declared some years ago, “it imitates bad television.” And that was in the days when bad television, at least in this country, was nowhere near as vapid as it is now.
So, welcome to our Phony World.
I’m not talking here about the way some of us make ourselves look – fake tans, fake bosoms, fake hair colour, fake teeth. Mankind has always tried to pretty or sexy itself up, whether it be by wearing cod pieces, make-up or bustles. That’s all part of the mating and status raising process. No. What I find odd is that absurd displays of cheesy exaggeration on television have been so absorbed by viewers they are now copied and considered normal behaviour.
They aren’t. There’s nothing normal about the ludicrous scowls of Alan Sugar in The Apprentice. What he presents is a laughable bogeyman in staged scenes of pretend tension. Yet you can be sure that little management Napoleons up and down the country are aping Sugar’s glares and rudeness in offices this very day.
Similarly the pantomime indignation of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight as he tries to get a politician to answer an impossibly complex question with a single word, “Yes or No”, isn’t real vexation. He’s just playing a part – that of the entertainer interrogator.
It’s cod exasperation and he does it very well, considerably better than all those copycat bullies who no doubt use similar eye-popping smirks in schools, colleges, police stations, courts and offices everywhere, in risible attempts to display their interrogatory skills.
Nothing, of course, is remotely as counterfeit as that found in the virus of reality pop music shows with which Simon Cowell has infected television. Here contestants are encouraged to break down as though their entire families are about to be wiped out at any moment, when actually the very worst that can happen is a quick elimination from the next round; while in front of them judges over-act bullying, falling out, surprise and wet-eyed empathy as they parrot lines of crass banality. “Tonight, you own that song!” they lie, as television manipulation and phoniness reaches its nadir.
And from such flim-flam fakery, and similar less insidious earlier shows, it’s but a small leap before the sobbing virus finds the tear ducts of the young and impressionable. Hence the squealing and sobbing when exam results come through, with older teachers almost certainly thinking: “What’s all the fuss about? I didn’t go into meltdown when I got my results”.
But that would have been before a couple of generations had been born, nurtured and finally brainwashed by camera phones, unreal reality TV, pop videos, online profiles and all things visual. It wouldn’t surprise me if many young people of today feel they are almost living in their own TV programme.
Actually some of them are. On YouTube and our mobile phones we find elaborately rehearsed and stage managed weddings, marriage proposals and all manner of other, usually private, performances. Everywhere we look we find ordinary people acting out parts – perhaps none more so, perhaps, than the Rambo lookalikes of the Libyan civil war.
The movie The Truman Show, in which a boy/young man spends his days unaware that he’s living in a fake world specially constructed so that TV cameras can follow his every move, carried this to a satirical extreme. But then came Big Brother, where participants begin acting up for the cameras by copying the overstated behaviour of soap characters?
With celebrity now an ambition in itself, almost everyone wants to be a star. But sometimes the magnet of instant celebrity is not so warming. Were all those pious pilgrimages to Amy Winehouse’s home by fans carrying roses wrapped in Cellophane really displays of deep and genuine grief? Or were some of those people just turning up because they quite liked her singing, she was famous and local, there were TV cameramen there, and the laying of flowers at a scene of tragedy is what happens on the telly?
In such ways loss for one family may be transmuted into momentary fame for another, as shots of the apparent mourners get their ten seconds on the TV news.
Ah yes, the television news. Obviously by the very nature of their job newsreaders have to frequently announce pretty upsetting events. But does Fiona Bruce have to emote quite so much? She’s sitting there as a messenger, not an actress.
Happily it’s become increasingly rare to hear music used as an accompaniment to news items. But what about those documentaries where it’s poured on to the soundtrack like gravy to heighten tension or stir sympathies…thus turning investigation into entertainment.
Not that phoniness is dispersed only through television. It’s all around us, with party political conferences excusing it as “presentation”.
Closer to home, there’s the false intimacy by which call centre employees so quickly wish to address us when they want to sell us something – overlooking the fact that we are total strangers to them. “Do you mind if I call you John?” they ask cosily. It seems priggish not to let them, even though only they and the tax man know me by that name.
Then there’s the internet where the average Facebook member has, apparently, 130 online “friends”, although he or she will never have met most of them, and couldn’t care less if someone called Dilly in San Diego has lost her cat and wonders if any of her “friends” has seen it!
Often the spurious friendship comes by email. While I’ve been writing this article I’ve had a message saying “We miss you…” from a company selling men’s toiletries, an organisation from which I’ve never bought anything. How can they miss someone they’ve never known?
It’s good to have pals and to know they “sort of” mean it when they say they’ve missed you. But everything else is bogus – not unlike the explosions of laughter which follow the weakest of jokes in those doleful Radio 4 comedy shows.
Not much on Radio 4 is very funny since Linda Smith died. But if you didn’t understand English and could only measure how amusing a line was by the decibels of appreciation that follow its delivery, you might reasonably assume that Radio 4 transmits the utterings of the funniest people in the world.
It doesn’t. Studio audiences are generous with their hearty guffaws because they understand that the very reason they are there is to laugh. But the level of their good humour, as picked up by those strategically placed microphones, invariably sounds exaggerated when heard on our radios. It’s a cheat.
You could argue that since the evolution of our species we’ve always been guilty of duplicity in our dealings with each other, and that the much admired British stiff upper lip was just as phoney in its way as any of the emotional conflagrations on The Only Way Is Essex.
But I don’t think so. British understatement and stoicism were cultural characteristics which took generations and hundreds of years to develop and be passed on. Tat television and the internet is changing us within a few decades.
There was a fashionable phrase some years ago that went “you are what you eat”. Now we’re in danger of becoming what we watch – a nation full of insincere phonies acting like the wallies on the wretched X-Factor.
