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‘Big Brother’ - the perfect neoliberal TV programme
150/Phil Hearse
DATELINE: 25/2/06
In the recent debate about whether Respect MP George Galloway should have taken part in Channel 4’s reality show Celebrity Big Brother perhaps the least discussed aspect was that he was lending credibility to the perfect neoliberal TV programme - Big Brother itself .
No programme so completely captures, in just about every conceivable aspect, the economics, politics and cultural banality of our neoliberal age.
As Mike Wayne points out in his book Marxism and Media Studies (Pluto Press), Big Brother in terms of the hours of viewing generated and advertising revenue brought in, is wonderfully cheap TV. Together with Big Brother's Little Brother, hour upon tedious hour is generated and it is all 'new'. No problem of repeats, because the house's inmates will do something 'different' (or at least say something different) each day.
Revenue is also generated by the high cost of phone calls to vote on which housemates should be evicted. On one evening seven million people rang in to vote. Further revenue streams are created by books, magazines, caps and T-shirts.
Ideologically Big Brother involves a series of vile elements.
First and foremost is a sadistic element - delight in ritual humiliation. The programme can only work if the inmates make idiots of themselves.
Also there is the idea that people will do anything for money. To get large amounts of money in capitalist society you will give away your dignity and grovel. (Of course is that is what numerous service workers do on a daily basis, but they do it because they have to, not out of ambition and greed.)
Then again Big Brother - in its 'normal' as well as 'celebrity' version - is part of the cultural apparatus of late capitalism celebrating 'celebrity' itself. Celebrity today is a uniquely debased and mystifying version of the Hollywood-created 'star system', generated in the 1920s and '30s.
A vast exaggeration of the merits of the few very famous devalues the merits of the millions of 'ordinary' people who are by definition 'unimportant'. And of course it promotes the notion that the only solutions are individual work-based solutions which will make you better off, even if you can never aspire to fame or real celebrity. Collective solutions are not so much subversive as merely unthinkable.Big Brother.
is political by banning politics (one of many miscalculations by George Galloway). The programme allows controversy only about the most trivial of things within the house itself.
And Big Brother celebrates one of the most threatening aspects of modern Britain - surveillance itself. Britain is the most monitored and watched society in the world, even if post-Patriot Act America is catching up.
Finally, Big Brother comes into its own in its symbiotic relationship with the popular press. Part of that is the witch hunt. Contestants, particularly women, are singled out by the popular press, as being hate figures because they are variously nasty, fat (a favourite), 'slags', gay, transexual and of course - finally we have it - left-wing in the shape of George Galloway.
All this suggests that for all those making a radical critique of modern society, any association whatever with Big Brother and similar shows is to make a pact with the devil - one you can never win.
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Last modified: Saturday, February 25, 2006
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