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CELEBRITY “BEAR-BAITING” The modern world of size “0”s, paparazi and rehab is one maintained by our own mass hysteria. Where does this celebrity idolatry come from? Why do we feel we can laugh at anyone as long as they are on TV? Dave Isaacs investigates by looking at Jeremy Kyle, Bears and Gladiator.
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ecently Jeremy Kyle – paragon of virtue – was labelled morally bankrupt by a high court judge, accused of ‘bear-baiting’, his show serving no other purpose than the fashioning of entertainment out of serious misfortune. Yup. Correct. And I should, at this juncture, point out that when labelling him ‘paragon of virtue’, I am in fact engaging in a kind of knowing irony; he is not a paragon of virtue. He is a cunt. I wonder, however, what said High Court judge would make of an episode of Jerry Springer. At least Kyle pretends to care about his guests. But Jerry… Jesus! His guests… they’re sad people, struggling. Kyle’s guests just need someone to talk to. Jerry’s need serious help. They are toothless, obese, willing to take their clothes off at any opportunity, and probably more often than not; mentally ill. His shows usually ending with nudity and GBH. The only difference between these scenarios and bear-baiting is that the bears are covered in fur. They, at least, have their dignity. Why are they so willing to humiliate themselves? I imagine it has something to do with the inexplicable impulse modern man seems to have towards fame. Now, don’t think I’m jumping on the whole ‘let’s-denounce-fame-andstuff-because-now-it’s-fashionable-to-care’ wagon because, actually, I quite like fame, I quite like celebrity – I would almost go as far as to say it’s healthy. What I have a problem with is things like panel shows: usually entertaining, but when a room full
VIVID 2nd Edition March 2008
of otherwise talented comedians start making witless jokes about Britney Spears losing custody over her children, jokes about Heather Mills’ divorce, jokes about the McCanns losing their child, to rapturous laughter – even applause – from a studio audience of normal, intelligent, probably caring people… this is what Gervais meant when he said that the Victorian Freak Show never went away. We’re allowed – encouraged – to laugh at these people. And why is that? Why is it that if these things were to happen to people we know we would be supportive and sympathetic, but we feel we can publicly laugh at the serious misfortunes of others just because they’re on TV? A private joke is one thing, a joke about the perpetrators of a crime is one thing (we can laugh at Hitler, we can laugh at serial killers, we can laugh at Noel Edmunds), but jokes, guiltless jokes, about serious victims, made in the arena that they have found themselves forced into – why do we feel that’s acceptable? It’s because the instant an individual becomes famous, to whatever degree, for however long, they become part of a story, part of a collective fiction; Heather Mills part of the ongoing Beatles story, the McCanns part of the ongoing paedophilia story, Springer’s guests part of the Springer story. Even When people become fiction they become unreality. Britney – she’s a prime example of what happens to someone when they become a shared, imagined reality, property of the
Jeremy Kyle - human bear baiter
community: they implode, shave their hair off, throw food at people, start speaking in strange accents, retreat inside their own head, invent new systems, new ideologies – they try to prove that they can act of their own free will, that they are not the person we’ve made them. That they exist. The other night I watched Gladiator. In the scenes in Rome, I was sure I could hear the mob chanting, ‘Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!’ And it struck me that just as where Maximus Decimus Meridius was forced into slavery, his existence entirely predicated to the whims of a mob, so with Springer’s guests, so with Britney, so with the McCanns. Our laughing at them, our being riveted by their misadventures, is no different to, and no less dangerous than, what has gone on for centuries – millennia – before now. We have not moved on. It’s not that the Victorian Freak Show never went away; the gladiatorial arena never went away. V
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