Aidan Smith: Oh no, it’s Mcbinky … reality TV comes north
We’re to get our own version of Made in Chelsea. Aidan Smith wants to know how he can de-programme his TV
Some years ago now, Martin Amis reckoned Andy Warhol’s most-quoted line needed updating. “In the future,” Warhol had declared way back in 1968, “everyone will be worldfamous for 15 minutes.” Amis considered our attitudes to fame, our desire for it, and how real it would be. “In the future,” he told me, “everyone will be famous for ever, but only inside their own heads.”
If I’m honest, I probably wasn’t entirely sure what he meant.
Maybe he didn’t altogether know himself. Could he, for instance, have predicted the phenomenon of the selfie? Or, while Big Brother was in existence along with some of the early spin-off programmes, could he have anticipated the television tsunami of real people’s lives, jobs, relationships and belly button fluff which would quickly follow?
The next time we met he used a French word which I definitely didn’t understand. He complained about a lack of “pudeur”. There was too much flesh on show, there were too many feelings on show. And this was before the emergence of Binky, Proudlock and Toff.
Do you know these people? If you watch Made in Chelsea you will. This is an example of “constructed reality” whereby the participants – almost always good-looking twentysomethings – sit around discussing Brexit. Or try to get off with each other’s boyfriend/ girlfriend. It’s one or the other, I forget which.
For a while now, we in Scotland have been able to content ourselves with the fact we didn’t have a Binky or a Proudlock or indeed a Toff. We’d given TV to the world and the world had done with the medium what it wanted, and some of these things were complete codswallop. We were well capable of producing complete codswallop of our own, of course, but at least we hadn’t been reduced to contriving drama out of a bunch of ninnyish narcissists.
Well, for Made in Chelsea read Created in Scotland. This is to be the name of our version.
The show will be based in Glasgow’s Merchant City although it will also tour Highland castles as it seeks to present a portrait of an elegant, sophisticated milieu.
Almost the first thing the producers have done after booking a hotel for this weekend’s auditions is to distance Created in Scotland from Glow, our previous stab at this kind of dubious entertainment.
Hang on, you wait for ever – sorry, never – for one of these weird, clunky, inane tableaux of materialism and self-absorption and two come along more or less at once? Who knew there was a Glow?
Possibly the title of this show refers to Glasgow, the setting once again, or maybe to the fact that everyone in the cast is orange.
You’ll find at least three tanning studios called Glow before the programme appears in an internet search. It currently broadcasts online and surely John Logie Baird would birl in his grave if it were ever to find its way on to an established channel. He’d probably want us to forget he ever invented television and remember him instead for his pneumatic shoes, which kept bursting, and his only moderately successful thermal socks.
Baird would not be among Glow’s target audience and I guess Amis isn’t either. There’s simply too much pudeur on display. It’s in the boob jobs and hair extensions, the whitened teeth and Tangoed complexions, the gastropub punch-ups and the fierce interrogations which follow every flutter of a false eyelash. That’s
not the only fakery on display in these shows. They’re supposed to be unscripted but surely no one watching believes this. In those big emotional showdowns when the boy confronts his cheating girlfriend or the girl challenges her can’t-commit boyfriend, it seems that each is reading lines off the other’s forehead. Sprayed with a tanning nozzle, presumably.
But the funny thing is, plenty of people watch these programmes so presumably they don’t mind.
Soap operas are supposed to mirror real life but audiences are dwindling. The stars of Made in Chelsea and The Only Way is Essex are real people pretending to be actors but clearly some viewers now prefer that to actors pretending to be real people.
Glow is the wee scabby Scottish bastard child of the leaders in this field.
In the fabulous nightclub of the reality TV world – clubs are the foundation stones of these shows and where the participants spend an awful lot of time, be they fab or not – our contribution to the genre is stuck on the wrong side of the velvet rope and being moved on by the bouncers.
Glow can only dream of one of its stars making it all the way to Saturday primetime and Strictly Come Dancing; just a place in the telly schedules would be nice.
This is the hope of Created in Scotland. It will start life on Youtube and Vimeo but director Victoria Green is already fluttering her eyelashes at the likes of STV2.
Are there enough Scots who want to be famous for ever but only inside their own heads? I suspect the auditions in Glasgow’s Lorne Hotel will tell us that there are.
But I must say I’m now beginning to feel a bit sorry for Glow – words I never thought I’d say immediately after watching some clips and realising that there was an hour I’d never get back.
Created in Scotland thinks it will be superior, a classier show about classier folk. “I want to make a show about the upper-class people of Scotland and for audiences to see the elegant side [of the country],” says Green.
Sounds dangerously like Binky, Proudlock and Toff in kilts.