UnReality TV

Dear Stan,

Another brilliant piece by Peter Hitchens. It underlines the sinister effect of TV on so many people - if you see it "with your own eyes" it must be real and true. The most unreal of all are of course "reality TV" shows like Big Brother or, the mother of them all, "The Family" which depicted the "real life" of a Reading family in 1974 and which I described in an earlier post. As proof that you cannot keep a bad idea down, a 2008 version of "The Family" has just been aired, showing the dreary life of a family in Canterbury, 40 miles south-east of London. Needless to say, that city's peerless cathedral and Christian heritage were not much in evidence.

I particularly loved Peter's observation on men wearing makeup. A few years ago Reading Crown Court was under media siege because of the trial of a woman accused of murdering three of her children. As I walked past the court building and the satellite trucks, a young man was powdering his face and studying the results in a small mirror. It was a particulary creepy and unsettling moment; I assume he was a reporter for one of the numerous channels I do not watch, as I did not recognise him. Even a purely "factual" report evidently could not be delivered straight without the reporter adjusting his own image.

The young mother was acquitted of all three counts and all the channels displayed her joy at being "proved" innocent. But, in the best whodunnit tradition, it was revealed afterwards that she had been investigated separately for the attempted murder of a fourth child.....

Peter's comments on our two biggest icons, Tony B. Liar and Princess Diana, are particularly revealing. Both were plainly utterly unworthy of the status and public influence they were given; Tony's catastrophic appointments to Government positions alone show how completely unfit he was for public office. But somehow on TV they were highly convincing performers. Princess Diana must have been the most "recognisable" person in history; yet Peter did not recognise her at first meeting.

===================================================================================

........the perniciousness of TV would be just as bad even if it were used to promote causes I like. I can say this quite safely since I know that it won't do so, but it also happens to be true. TV influences the human mind in ways which defy and avoid reason and ignore facts. It is also seduced by appearances, and extraordinarily bad at picking up the subtle negative signs that humans give off when you meet them personally. I have often pointed out that TV is good at making bad people look good, and also at making good people look bad.

Two striking examples of this are Princess Diana and Anthony Blair ( and of course now Barack Obama). I am not suggesting that any of these were or are personally wicked. But I am suggesting that their effects on our society have generally been bad, and that without TV they could not have achieved those things. Diana's televisual glamour was astonishing, and made people ignore her many episodes of bad behaviour, most notably her erratic private life (surely unwise in the mother of young boys) and her incredibly destructive BBC interview with Martin Bashir. Compare the response to Prince Charles's equally destructive TV interview with Jonathan Dimbleby, which rightly rebounded hard on him and has done him damage ever since.

In the case of Mr Blair and Mr Obama, I have never seen Mr Obama in the flesh so I can only comment on his record, but he seems to me to be a rather ordinary and undistinguished politician who once made one good speech but generally contents himself with imitations of Martin Luther King. Those who have the 'I have a dream' speech imprinted on their brains, as many of my generation do, must have noticed how similar Mr Obama's voice, cadences and inflections are to those of Dr King. As I scurried through various US airports during the election campaign, Mr Obama's speeches were often relayed on TVs in the concourses, and more than once I thought I was actually hearing Dr King. But how can this be? Dr King's voice and vocabulary were the product of a specifically Southern and deeply Christian upbringing and background, especially an intimate knowledge of the Authorised (King James) version of the Bible.

Mr Obama has never lived anywhere in the American South, he did not have a Christian upbringing and his acquaintance with the Bible only began when he signed up to Trinity Church. If he sounds like Dr King ( and he does) it must be because he - consciously or unconsciously - seeks to do so. You think this unlikely? You're welcome to do so. But politicians are very concerned about how they sound. We learned on Sunday from my colleague Simon Walters that the teenage Tory Shadow Chancellor, George Osborne, has used a voice coach, apparently in a (not wholly successful) effort to make himself sound less posh.

In the flesh I expect Mr Obama is a fairly ordinary person, who I suspect smells quite strongly and unglamorously of cigarettes if you can get close enough to him. Princess Diana, likewise, was so beloved by the camera that the reality was deeply disappointing. The first time I saw her in person, from about ten feet away, it took me 30 seconds to realise that this was the face that launched a thousand headlines. This angular, awkward figure was the monarch of glamour? Surely not. Yet it was so.

As for Mr Blair, my own experience and that of many others who have dealt with him directly has been that he is a person who knows very little about the world, rarely reads, and is of rather limited intelligence. Yet TV has managed to make him look like a world statesman.

That is one of TV's faults, its creation of wholly false images. But because it enters the mind unmediated, a word whose significance Mr Lewis seems to have missed, it bypasses all kinds of important filters. A child dealing with an adult, be it a parent and teacher, gets its impression of that adult not just from a screen persona which may or may not be true, but from a complete experience. the child will see that person when in a hurry, on the mornings when that person has overslept or missed the bus or had a puncture, or left a label standing up at the back of a shirt. The child will have seen that person in good and bad moods, tired, irritable, distracted. In short, it will be much better able to judge what that person says. TV persons are too good. They never make mistakes or have spots. They are always on their best behaviour, always combed and properly dressed, always carefully lit to their advantage, always anxious to show their good sides and conceal their bad ones. Even the men wear make-up, and (I speak as a person who has appeared a few times on TV) the relaxation of tension when the cameras finally turn away and the microphones are off is considerable, as is the difference between the behaviour and language of TV people off and on screen. People on TV are consciously not being fully themselves.

Then there is the difference between books and TV. A child who reads books forms his own pictures of the characters, sometimes aided by verbal description but undoubtedly his own. He imagines their voices and mannerisms. So does the author. But each experience is individual. This is why, for those of us who were brought up before TV was the overwhelming master of our culture, the filming of beloved classic books is always a disappointment. We know the characters did not speak or look like that . Similarly, once TV or movies have taken over a classic, there is only one image. Sherlock Holmes will now always look more or less like Basil Rathbone (actors who play him until the end of time have to pass this test) Inspector Morse, who didn't look in the least like John Thaw in Colin Dexter's early books, came in the later books to be identical to Mr Thaw, and acquired a red Jaguar too. Even 'Brideshead Revisited' was so taken over by the Jeremy Irons version that the miserable movie remake often copies the TV series in visual imaging (the casting of the minor character Hooper is particularly striking. The film actor is obviously based on the TV actor). As for 'Pride and Prejudice' , this is now rapidly ceasing to be the property of Jane Austen. In the end, Andrew Davies will have remodelled most of English literature.