The Evil Clown posted by Richard Seymour

Sadism comes with a goofy smile, some sleazy glitter and a cackle. It is the filler between Nescafe and the new Renault Megane. Torture is no more than a Britney Spears stage routine, or a bit of college hazing. What is it about television these days that produces such Sadism Spectaculars? From insipid dance/pop shows featuring catty judges to reality shows and - oh dear me, yes - Big Brother, the growth in programmes that actively attempt to convoke an audience of giggling torturers is just phenomenal. The latest avatar of this tendency is The Apprentice, in which a gaggle of ambitious young men and women seek to appease and impress some curmudgeonly boss (Alan Sugar? Who he?). The thrilling catch-phrase: "You're Fired". The posters with this caption show the belligerent boss sitting behind his desk pointing a smoking finger at you: being fired is so cool! [Correction: a journey to work this morning confirmed that the caption on the posters is actually "Ready. Aim. Fired." Just in case the analogy isn't obvious enough for you.]

Of course, there's always a moral escape that makes it palatable for the television audience: the scenario is carefully manipulated so that the evicted/fired/humiliated is a Bad Guy (thereby inducing Schadenfreude), or one is invited to scorn the catty judge while at the same getting a cheap thrill out of his/her nastiness (thereby inducing hypocritical righteousness). And what these have in common is their glamorisation and elevation of the dull, stressful, idiotic competition of daily life. We are at such a pretty pass that ruling norms such as competitiveness and back-stabbing can be offered as entertainment. And there is no more manipulable and pliable demographic group than the television audience.

What is this "television audience"? One thing it is not is social, organised, actively self-conscious. It's just a happenstance aggregate of people in many ways. It's about as meaningful a designation as "hair-dyers" and "baked bean-eaters". Yet as a member of this audience, you are encouraged to think of yourself as having some kind of power: an autonomous, sovereign consumer, making choices as you go about your day. The range of choices can be vast, and yet incredibly narrow. Somehow, no matter which channel you change to, you can find someone being demeaned and put down - in a harmless, fun, light-hearted, family entertainment kind of way of course. You can find 'Dr' Gillian McKeith prodding the flab on a middle-aged man, while hectoring and moaning: "lookit whit yer daein tae yer boady, yer gaunnae kill yerself", she might say while pointing to a wheelbarrow full of bacon that illustrates the amount of fat this person consumes in a week. Or you can watch a show about bailliffs chucking people out of their home because of bad debt - a stark warning, a salutary finger-wagging, a vivid image of what befalls bad debtors. Humiliation is fun, and it makes you think! And then there are what I can only call "chav" shows, those oriented around the family problems of people on low incomes from council estates with difficult lives and burdensome emotional issues. The participants are encouraged to bare all, to humiliate themselves and their relatives and loved ones in front of the camera. The studio audience, a synthetic stand-in for the viewer sitting at home, oohs, aahs, tuts, emotes and laughs. The presenter stands amid the always-already judging crowd of people (and where do they get these braying bullies from anyway?): no mistaking whose side s/he is on. Humiliation is now not only fun and thought-provoking: it is humanitarian, it helps people. We'll see you after the break when Gabby will return with the results of her son's DNA test.

Yeah, but it's just a television show. You don't have to watch it. They're only giving people what they want, after all. Oh really? When was the last time you turned on the television and found something you really, honestly wanted to watch? I thought so.

Here's Slavoj Zizek:

This choice - between Social Democrat or Christian Democrat in Germany, Democrat or Republican in the States - recalls nothing so much as the predicament of someone who wants an artificial sweetener in an American cafeteria, where the omnipresent alternatives are Nutra-Sweet Equal and High & Low, small bags of red and blue, and most consumers have a habitual preference (avoid the red ones, they contain cancerous substances, or vice versa) whose ridiculous persistence merely highlights the meaninglessness of the options themselves.

Does the same not go for late-night talk shows, where 'freedom of channels' comes down to a choice between Jay Leno and David Letterman? Or for the soda drinks: Coke or Pepsi? It is a well-known fact that the Close the Door button in most elevators is a totally inoperative placebo, placed there just to give people the impression they are somehow contributing to the speed of the elevator journey - whereas in fact, when we push this button, the door closes in exactly the same time as when we simply pressed the floor button. This extreme case of fake participation is an appropriate metaphor for the role accorded citizens in our 'postmodern' political process.

And here's Le Colonel Chabert:

Is it possible to watch this without thinking about bulldozers evicting people in Palestine, and high rents making people homeless in London? No, it is not possible. But it trains you to feel generally good about these thoughts, untroubled, to frame them in delight. One is being taught to enjoy the idea in principle, and indeed to participate in it as faux-active, controlled spectators. The audience, delighted by the circus, willingly, eagerly becomes an agent of eviction. As in life; this is the subtext of all television consumption brought up to the surface. Watch the television and as you do, evict people from their homes, disappear them, evict them from the earth. One is learning the proper posture of the spectators of politics, the politics we have, our politics, those of eviction.

England loves Big Brother more than any other audience - unsurprisingly, for there is among the propertied great widespread attachment to the property boom there, heartless self-interested cheering on despite the calamity this causes, the human catastrophe resulting in one of the richest societies on earth.

But it's just a teevee show, right? Sure it is.

Update. Noel Douglas sends me this:



In a time of enormous recession, widespread unemployment and impoverishment spreading right up into the hitherto privileged middle class, teevee gives you a chance to humiliate yourself and win a menial job.