Messy, depressing and unnecessary

Michele A’Court

We have begun to grasp over the years that reality television is not at all like ‘‘real life’’. Moments are edited, strings are pulled, players are manipulated to satisfy our thirst for drama. A director keeps their eye on the dramatic arc – tension is established and relieved, moods are lightened, resolutions are found.

As much as reality TV pretends to be an ‘‘unscripted drama’’, we know somebody is holding a script. Someone calls ‘‘cut’’ at the end of each day and the lights are switched off. Everyone goes home to get some rest, hug their kids, pat the cat. If you’re lucky, you’re voted off, no harm done, to settle back into your old life with the people who always liked you anyway.

One of the things we might begin to grasp from the Jami-Lee Ross saga is that, as daft as it is to think that reality TV is like real life, it is also dangerous to think of someone’s real life as reality TV. It is nowhere near as carefully curated.

Many – myself included – were guilty of waking up each day to catch up on the latest JLR episode in which the central characters moved swiftly from victim to villain and back again. The plot was woven so thickly, and with so many twists and turns, it was impossible to follow each individual thread.

Goodness knows what it has been like to be the man at the centre of this – exhilarating at times, I guess (that first stand-up on the black and white tiles), devastating at others. But the eye of the storm is not the only bad place to be. The maelstrom rages outwards from there.

I have concern and sympathy for Ross – and wish his political colleagues and party leadership had shown more of that sooner than it would appear they did – but he’s not the only person whose world has been shifted off its axis.

There are many other players whose stories we have begun to hear but whose names we don’t yet know. They tell us their lives have been made smaller, less hopeful, more painful by all of this, going back at least two years.

I am pleased he is getting help now, but it would be wrong to keep seeing this as a tragedy about one person. This is not a TV show with one star player and a cast of others whose lives don’t count.

I have a lot of anger, and more than a little contempt, for the people who allowed this to play out in our political system – who failed to provide direction, who kept him centrestage and under the spotlight, who failed to call ‘‘cut’’ when they should have known better. Because that was

their job.

Jeremy Elwood

I’ve been fascinated by politics for a long time, but recently that fascination has been tinged with a sense of horror at the inhumanity of far too much of it. Without downplaying Jami-Lee Ross’s behaviour, when it comes to a person’s mental health, this whole thing stopped being ‘‘in the public interest’’ quite some time ago.

It started with a piece of leaked information that would have become public anyway, progressed to a bout of slightly amusing namecalling, then became a public flogging and round of character assassination that none of us ever needed to witness.

And it did so at such a pace that it left many an onlooker, including this one, dizzy.

These are the times we live in, though. Where every comment can be taken in at light speed, chewed over and spat out before you’ve had time to catch your breath. When a person at the centre of the maelstrom can spend their every waking second digesting their situation through other people’s responses to it, and bathing in whichever poison they choose to ingest.

I admire those who choose to go into politics, but I do not always understand what drives them. And when it all comes crashing down, I cannot fathom the personal impact it must have.

What they don’t tell you about power is that, too often, those who wield it are not powerful. They’re as frail and prone to damage as the rest of us, and it’s only when they fail that we remember that.

There have been some who have laughed at our Prime Minister’s ongoing calls for more kindness in the political sphere, and when you look overseas at people winning elections by nurturing the impression of brute strength over any sense of playing nice, you can see how idealistic, at best (or naive, at worst), those calls may seem.

But I believe that the events of the past fortnight show exactly why it’s time we step back and reassess what we want from our leaders. Do we want to live in a society where someone can pour so much into their political ambitions that it costs them their sanity? Is any of it that important?

There are no winners in any of this. Nothing is being achieved, and no one is being helped. This is purely ugly, for the people involved, for those they have hurt, and for all of us who wish we lived in a world that was, quite frankly, better than this.