There is a new challenger for the most baleful piece of television commissioning. It is called “Caroline Flack: Search for the Truth”, a two-part Disney documentary into the entertainer’s 2020 suicide. The story goes something like this: Flack was a beloved star of the small screen – hosting X-factor and Love Island, winning Strictly Come Dancing – before an arrest for assault, a fall from grace, a public monstering at the hands of the tabloids, and her tragic suicide. Now a TV show trawls through her final weeks under the faux-noble guise of “truth seeking”.
It’s enough to make me want to discard my phone in a lake and move to the Eurasian steppe. The show suggests that Flack was treated with unusual harshness by the police because she was a celebrity, and says that the media fuelled the crisis for the same reason. Normal people are not victims of excessive prying into their private lives, so goes the commonplace argument. And so to honour the legacy, life, and ultimate tragedy of Flack? A two-part series involving one last act of excessive prying.
The reality media ecosystem is in a doom loop. TV begets fame, which begets a downfall, which begets tragedy, which begets more TV, and more fame. And what incentive is there for anyone to arrest this runaway train of profit maximising? In this theatre of dubious ethical stature, the studios and their executives fill their pockets, the consumers get what they want (a never ending feed of content and gossip). And so what of it, if the whole thing damages people along the way? That’s just another TV show to make. This is the cruelty premium of reality programming.
But we know all of this already: in 2018 a former contestant on Love Island, Sophie Gradon, took her own life; the following year another participant in the show, Mike Thalassitis, also died by suicide. Flack was a presenter on the show and she died the year after that. Meanwhile, it took the suicide of Steve Dymond, shortly after appearing on the Jeremy Kyle Show, for that programme to be taken off the air for good. And it is not always so extreme – reality stars routinely recount the destruction of their lives that followed small-screen fame; the public humiliation that is a necessary condition of participation. Who remembers Jane Goody? Or the endless parade of delusionals hauled in front of Simon Cowell on Britain’s Got Talent, for no other reason than to be made fun of?
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In the case of “Caroline Flack: Search for the Truth” we must note that it was her own mother who led the investigation and presented the documentary into the star’s final days. But more generally there is no escaping the obviously degraded realm all of this operates in: incentivising studios to tear apart the quotidian lives of civilians at the altar of so-called “light” entertainment; turning the normal viewer into a passive drone, inured to the spectacle of nastiness reality TV depends on; encouraging fame-hungry contestants to offer themselves as sacrificial lambs to the entire ecosystem. And so, it goes on.
How, one is minded to ask, did this ever become the defining televisual medium of the past 20 years? I was certain I was no modernophobe, but all of it should be enough to make even the liberal-minded among us feel like Mary Whitehouse. The social experiment has failed. And who could have seen that one coming? The manufactured cultural panopticon – composed of tabloids, citizen “journalists” with smartphones, reality-TV script writers and a whole host of attendant vultures – was always destined to lead us here. I remember a time when even Big Brother was deemed too cruel. It all seems rather benign to what we have now.
There has been a recent moral panic in the cultural sphere. Society used to, so the argument goes, provide abundant invention: new modes of cinematography; distinct artistic movements (has anything interesting happened since surrealism?); the emergence of innovative musical genres. But now culture is stagnant – Hollywood is stuck in the lucrative franchise system, artists keep remaking old scripts, TV shows are rebooted and novels are adapted, but where are all the new characters? I am sympathetic to the concern. No one wants to live in a cultural backwater.
But, you know, the biggest innovation of this century has been reality TV – engineered on screen misery consumed by viewers in their millions, regardless of the format. Maybe it tells us something deep about ourselves. Or maybe – as Martha Nussbaum puts it in her history of reality TV Cue the Sun! – it promises us “something authentic buried within something fake”. I think both are overstating the case. What have we learned from the emergence of this particular genre? There’s nothing to celebrate about cultural novelty for its own sake. That instinct will have us innovating into the moral abyss.
Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie
