TV’S SHAMELESS PORNOGRAPHERS
Graphic sex scenes. Drinking to oblivion. Young people revelling in lives of utter nihilism. BEL MOONEY watches the new breed of reality shows and says the real shame lies with the well-educated TV bosses cynically poisoning children’s minds
THE brightly decorated stage set is trying to look like a home. Young people crash in and dance about, pretending to be ‘family.’ One man yells, ‘Let’s get f ***** g mortal!’ (for those unfamiliar with the slang of the North-East, ‘mortal’ means ‘drunk’).
A guy vomits into a bucket. A girl with long dark hair tumbles down the stairs, pie-eyed and showing her G-string. The music gets louder. Cut to a night camera filming a couple having sex (under a sheet) in one of the communal bedrooms. Welcome to the world of Geordie Shore — the reality TV show which has blighted the nation’s airwaves since 2011.
That’s six years of bonking and booze, sending a clear message to the million-plus young people watching every episode of the MTV hit show. What message? Well, in the words of one of the lads: ‘You go out, get wasted, throw up and still manage to have sex — a perfect night!’
Every episode begins with a warning: ‘This programme contains strong language, sexual scenes and references from the outset and throughout.’ They’re not kidding. A girl in a hot tub fondles another girl, saying: ‘I’m f ***** g mortal. My t**s are out.’ The dialogue is far from Shakespeare — much as they try to ramp up the drama. A boy with bouffant hair scowls to the camera: ‘All’s fair in love and war — and this is
war.’ He’s no better than a cardboard cut-out, reading a script written by cynical programme makers.
If you’ve never watched Love Island or any other of the hugely popular reality TV shows, spending a couple of days in this brash and sleazy world of commercialised artifice is eyeopening. Knowing quite well that such shows aren’t for the likes of me, I found them cheap, mind-blowingly tedious and tawdry. But that’s not the whole story.
The truth is, they are shocking — in the clear message they deliver to young viewers. Because every Saturday night our cities are full of young women (and men) getting trashed, hammered, steaming, mortal, wasted . . . and any other word you care to use for being drunk and totally incapable.
They have sex with strangers, lose clothes, start fights, pass out on pavements, vomit in shop doorways and bring out our hard-pressed police, as well as over-worked medics to treat their ARIs (alcohol related injuries.)
In 2014, there were about 1.1million hospital admissions due to alcohol — including those incurred through drunkenness. Booze is estimated to cost the NHS around £3 billion each year. But forget the cost to society, for a moment — and forgive my bluntness.
The question that concerns me is this: Does it damage young women themselves to be so drunk they have no idea who they’re having sex with or why? And what effect does it have on teenagers to watch TV shows where stereotypically sexy young people appear to have just two aims in life: to get drunk and to get laid?
ACTRESS Dawn French got into trouble when she watched TV shows set in resorts such as Magaluf — where youthful Brits are an international byword for disgusting antics in the streets — and questioned the drunken, promiscuous behaviour of (especially) young women.
She was pilloried by hostile female columnists who accused her of ‘vilification’. They demanded to know why women should be criticised for behaving exactly as they want, even if that mimics drunk, promiscuous men. What’s wrong with having inebriated sex with a stranger in a bush, they asked?
It’s a familiar turnaround. Obnoxious, dangerous and socially unacceptable behaviour is defended for being ‘free’ — even though it leaves people out of control and vulnerable. To question the new normal gets you slammed for being ‘judgmental.’ French was attacked because it’s become uncool to dare to question accepted liberal attitudes. Anything goes . . . and if you deny that modern shibboleth, you’re a moralistic prude.
Yet French wasn’t sneering or vilifying, she was puzzled and showing real concern. And she was right to do so. Surely this is actually a duty of
care for the young people who are the future of this country?
I wondered how many of French’s critics had actually watched the programmes she mentioned and grasped their real nature.
Take the massively popular Love Island (ITV) for example. A group of young men and women are put up in a villa in Majorca under constant video surveillance. It’s a bit like Big Brother, but contestants have to be in a couple not to get voted off the show by viewers, so there’s pressure to have sex that will be filmed.
There’s more talk than sex in this show and not much drunkenness. But the 2016 series broadcast footage of a teenager having full sex with a man of 28. Night vision cameras showed Emma-Jane Woodham, 19, and Terry Walsh having sex in the communal bedroom — in full view rather than under bed covers.
BECAuSE my own daughter and her friends became hooked on Love Island, defending it as ‘escapism’, I’ve watched some episodes — trying to be open-minded. After all, I’d read the respected and talented journalist and novelist Elizabeth Day writing on the subject in a broadsheet newspaper.
Day justified her addiction thus: ‘[It] is partly explained by the depressing and stressful nature of real life. We need escapism like never before. Being able to spend an hour watching good-looking people frolic in a sun-dappled holiday villa suddenly seems like bliss.’
Day gave as much thought to this mesmerizingly trashy programme as she might have done to a work of Jane Austen — analysing it in highflown romantic terms.
She called it ‘the best thing on television’ — a classic example, surely, of the highly educated (she’s a Cambridge graduate) deliberately dumbing down.
But when I watched the participants pairing off on their idyllic island I saw nothing but crude stereotyping, rampant sexism and the casual brutality of a cattle market.
The camera panned lasciviously over almost identical buff bodies, the conversation was inane and when the Barbie-like girls lined up hoping to be chosen (from the back) it reminded me of picking school teams — with somebody left sad and unwanted at the end. Horrible.
A girl with the ubiquitous trout-pout letches over ‘the animalistic sexual magic’ of one of the men — who in turn discuss the assets of the women. As the writer Ariel Levy says in her excellent book about the normalisation of pornography: ‘If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about... big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, thongs . . . then you can sell it.’
My daughter assures me Love Island is about relationships, not sex. But the point is that TV executives have to pull in advertising and naturally the highly sexed nature of Love Island delivered.
The finale in July drew an audience of nearly three million and accounted for more than half of 16 to 24-year-old
viewers. What effect did the primped and buffed participants have on their self-image? Did they feel any twinges of depression to know that life will never be like that addictive, sexy fantasy?
Still, many intelligent people adored Love Island, booze is not given a starring role in the story and compared with Geordie Shore and Ex On The Beach it’s Romeo And Juliet.
Reality shows such as I’m A Celebrity, Big Brother and Love Island at least have a competitive framework. But popular MTV series Geordie Shore and Ex On The Beach epitomise moronic pointlessness: the lowest common denominator of television.
Like Love Island, they put a group of young people into shared accommodation in Newcastle or somewhere like Magaluf or Ibiza — with the aims of partying hard, getting blind drunk and having sex. To watch such shows is to be a seedy voyeur. The worst behaviour (for example, wetting the bed because you’re so drunk) is a source of pride, not embarrassment.
A girl performs a naked (under her tiny dress) lap-dance in the face of one of her friends — out in public in a club. Those antics earn her the accolade of ‘legend’ from a friend. Another is so drunk she has to be carried out of a minibus.
They think the only way to enjoy yourself is to get blind drunk. One girl shouts: ‘I’m mortal, naked and I don’t even know my own name! This is the best night ever!’ There’s a naked food fight in the kitchen. A couple shouts abuse at each other. Somebody throws up into a bucket, again. A guy tells the camera, ‘I wanna f*** her all night.’
Ex On The Beach is just as bad — with some participants appearing in both series. After a night of sex, a young woman quips: ‘I woke up this morning and felt like I needed a f ***** g wheelchair.’
Another says: ‘I’ve banged one of my exes three times!’ They shriek, shout, quarrel, drink, have sex. And here is the verdict of one enthusiastic guy, asked the best thing about the show: ‘You get put in a villa full of t***s like yourself.’
Hard to think of a better way of putting it.
Off camera, some cast members of both these sleazy shows have, on occasion, been arrested for assault and for offensive behaviour. But whether or not they see themselves as role models, through the power of the small screen, that’s what they become.
With good looks their only advantage, they become mini celebrities — and celebrities have always been copied. The social commentator Mal Fletcher runs a thinktank called 2020Plus, which analyses social issues.
HE says: ‘Some young people will watch these programmes and think, “That’s not for me” and react in a positive way. On the other side, you have young people who are vulnerable to image and culture and are quite impressionable.
‘When you get a peer group who buy into that behaviour, the TV programme will have an impact on the way they behave.’
Asked why there are so many of these sorts of shows, he said: ‘There’s only one reason — because they sell. They have done enough research to suggest that young people are watching so they are able to sell advertising. We are asking internet companies to take responsibility and it’s time we asked the old-style broadcasters, the TV stations, to do the same.’
Experienced psychotherapist Selena Doggett-Jones is a specialist in sexual health as well as psychological problems concerning intimacy. Asked if watching these shows makes young women behave like the participants, she said: ‘Peer pressure and social media do seem to put pressure on women to have frequent sex — and usually sex that’s regrettable.’
Referring to the phenomenon of girls drinking heavily before they go out (known as ‘pre-loading’), she asks: ‘Why do they need to be so pre-loaded to carry it through?
‘The main thing is, if they’re drunk out of their brains they cannot consent to sex.’
If any judge, lawyer, MP or commentator ever makes that very point, they are usually howled down by feminists for dictating to women — because (they say) the onus of establishing ‘consent’ should always be on the (equally drunk) men.
In the reality shows the women always consent, because they are willing cast members. Yet in real life a young woman getting ‘mortal’ like the girls they’ve watched (and admired) on TV doesn’t usually know the men picked up in clubs, pubs or on the street. So the dangers are all too real.
I sometimes wonder if ‘pre-loading’ is in fact a way of anaesthetising the sensibilities of young
women who secretly dream of love in a romantic location (like Love Island), but know that they’re going to submit to a quick fumble in a back street in Birmingham.
Because that’s what their mates do. It’s all very well to say they have every right to behave like men, but not if it damages their self-esteem and leaves them ‘slut-shamed’ the next day.
A report commissioned by skincare manufacturer Dove found that men tend to describe women as ‘cool’ when they display ‘male-like characteristics’ — for example, not viewing sex as romantic or a commitment and not showing jealousy when men are sexual with other women.
The same survey found that 38 per cent of reality TV viewers believed that a girl’s value is based on her appearance. This is thoroughly depressing.
And the outcomes can be damaging, the price paid for ruthless image creation truly terrible.
For example, on the internet you can see popular MTV starlet Chloe Ferry (Geordie Shore, Celebrity Big Brother and Ex On The Beach) sobbing: ‘I became really insecure about my boobs because this horrible person said I was saggy. And now I’ve got horrible scars on them…’
But never mind, she’s now got a cosmetics range — and because of reality TV those products will sell.
The companies who make these programmes have much to answer for. There are moments when you glimpse unease among the participants — even shame. So a girl says: ‘There’s something I did in this series I’m gonna regret.’
A guy confesses: ‘When the cameras are rolling people talk a lot of s***.’ Another admits: ‘The villa definitely brought out the worst in me.’
A revealing moment shows two Geordie Shore cast members, Marnie and Aaron, soberly watching footage of themselves having sex. The screen cuts to others watching, too — and laughing. Mocking.
Back to the couple, who look rueful, hiding their faces. She says she’s ‘embarrassed’ and he grimaces as if in pain.
‘My mam’s gonna watch this,’ she says. ‘My mam’s gonna see it,’ he counters.
‘Will she hate me?’ she asks, turning to him in genuine horror.
This is the true reality. For even though opinion-formers deny it, people do still feel shame. Drunken sex never made anybody happy.
But the real shame lies with the companies that take television — for example, the Channel 4 show, Naked Attraction — to depths never seen and don’t a damn about the effects.
The well-educated, highly paid men and women who commission this trash, as well as the useless regulator Ofcom, have colluded in a catastrophic lowering of standards.
And the results are seen on our streets, in our hospitals — and in the mental health of young people who deserve so much better.