Signed by Katie Price

Meanwhile, back at Reality Talent Show Central... Katie Price has launched her own version of the X Factor, but with a twist unprecedented in world of reality talent shows. This time Katie and her team of judges are looking for... another Katie!

The contestants go through what is by now a highly familiar sequence. The ‘live’ auditions (in front of the audience, Katie, and an unconvincingly stern couple of fellow judges who resemble bullied men each tentatively trying to inhabit the persona of an alpha male) are followed by the ‘judges' house’ section (only it’s not really Katie’s house, but a country pile which stokes the aspirational hysteria of the contestants still further), then the 'final twelve' stage (only it’s thirteen, for some reason... and then twelve again as one gets sent home early because he backed two horses on the reality talent show merry-go-round and goes off to appear on Big Brother) as a handful of lucky contestants get to move into a luxury house together to go through an increasingly exacting series of tasks.

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There are hysterical celebrations at the luxury surroundings, tears as the contestants vie with each other for Katie's affection, and lectures or hugs from the hostess as she awkwardly tries to display her 'people-skills' (actually she seems uncomfortable, even a touch timid, whenever she has to address the contestants).

As familiar as all these rituals are, however, one question lingers over proceedings. What, exactly, are the contestants auditioning for? 

Clearly the judges are looking for someone - either male or female - blessed with all of Katie's attributes: good-looking (especially if it's the kind of not-so-obvious good looks which mean one can undergo the transformation from 'duck to swan', to use Katie's favourite metaphor), business-savvy, determined, professional. But what exactly is the chosen one going to do, once 'signed by Katie Price'? We know from the business meetings we see between Katie and her management team that the winner will have their own website, a presence on twitter, and splashes in major media outlets. Yet can they be anything other than glamour models? The tasks in the series - at which point it becomes more like The Apprentice than the X Factor - would have us think they can. After all, they have been working together to achieve complex business goals such as, er, making homemade t-shirts. But surely it's impossible to repeat Katie Price's trick of being famous for being famous without doing so through one's own efforts and not those of a management team, no matter how media-savvy they are. Katie's own narcissistic drive has got her where she is. Displacing that drive onto a protege surely cannot work.

Writing about 'Loft Story', a French version of Big Brother, Jean Baudrillard outlined the principle of 'radical democracy' upon which he thought reality TV is founded. Democracy as we used to understand it was based on an 'order of merit, and on an equivalence between merit and recognition'. The more you deserved it, the more recognition you received. But in the world of Big Brother, 'there's no equivalence between merit and glory'. Contestants receive 'maximum exultation for minimum qualification'. Minimal qualifications are apparently crucial to Signed by Katie Price. One of them, Nathan, says, 'I just want to be known, big time'. Another, Susie, describes herself without a trace of irony as 'a blank canvas'. Jemma tells us 'I just want to show Katie what I can do', and then we see her climbing awkwardly onto a horse for a photoshoot and Katie telling her 'I want you like that... sort of, leaning'. The series is proof that what really matters in the reality talent show is not the content but the rituals, the structure, the very televisual mechanism itself. What drives it are: 1. the relentless desire of contestants to be known, big time (rather than to show off a particular talent); 2. the endless process of judging and elimination, 3. the mechanics of transformation, as a nobody becomes a somebody, a duck becomes a swan, all through the magical power of television. The contestants - and the judges, as X Factor proves - are all ultimately dispensible, all interchangeable, just so long as the machine clanks on. This is why Signed by Katie Price, though utterly execrable, nevertheless represents the genre at its purest.

Jeff Koons, Hook (2003)

And of course this particular show is not really about producing a Katie clone, or a credible replacement for her in some strand of her publicity empire. The title says it all: it's the signature that's important. What matters is being signed by Katie Price, just as the signature of the artist confers value upon an artwork - and indeed just as she herself sold millions of copies of ghostwritten novels (Angel and Crystal) by branding them with her name. This real aim of the show is alluded to subtly throughout. As the brief profiles are put on screen to enable viewers to disintinguish between the final twelve contestants, it is noticeable how many times, alongside banal, 'individualizing' facts such as 'hates spiders', 'is a mummy's boy', etc. contestants claim to 'fancy Katie Price', or to have 'a shelf full of Katie Price products' at home. The show is really a glorified fanclub outing, a meet your heroine day. One lucky fan, though, will become a walking postmodern work of art - signed by Katie Price.

The Banality of Magic: The Tooth Fairy

Before watching this, I couldn't help envisaging a children's film starring the terrifying serial killer in Red Dragon. And sure enough, the sinister implications of a job which involves intruding into people's homes at night and visiting their children as they lie alone in their beds is something the film can never quite conquer, despite the acquiesence of the child characters. It's made worse by the outfit that its hero settles on to play the Tooth Fairy - a combination of Disney fairy and ice hockey uniform, one of the looks favoured by scary characters in slasher movies, not to mention his charming habit of spraying an 'amnesiac-spray', which seems like CS gas, into people's faces to stop them questioning him. What a mischievous man!

But this is not the most problematic contradiction in the movie. Almost the last line in the movie is when the elf-like creature played by Billy Crystal yells 'I love my job!' as he sits on a goal-bound ice-hockey puck. It's amazing how important work is to Hollywood kids movies. The Tooth Fairy is another example (see Santa Claus or Monsters Inc.) of Hollywood's determination to show us that magic is a particular kind of work. It's almost impossible to immerse yourself in the movie without grappling with the obvious irony upon which it rests. In a world in which 'children just don't believe anymore', the movie sets out to demonstrate that magic really happens, and anyone can 'believe'. It does this by propelling its cynical, charmless hero, Derek Thompson (played quite appropriately, if not deliberately, without an iota of charm by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) into the world of the tooth fairy. Having been on the point of telling his girlfriend's six-year-old daughter that the tooth fairy does not exist (to get himself off the hook from stealing her tooth money) Derek is suddenly sentenced to a week's community service where he has to become a tooth fairy. And, surprise surprise, what does Fairyland look like but a large US corporation in which hierarchies are rigidly sustained, employees are cynical yet continue to do their jobs, and the whole operation depends upon a series of tried-and-tested processes being applied smoothly and without question. It's a kind of strange 'reverse-Marxism': the Hollywood machine seeks to uphold the values of magic by demystifying them, revealing that the escapist fantasy-world which provides the antidote to the dreary world of reality (signified here by Derek's declining career as a once-lauded ice hockey pro) in fact runs on precisely the same principles. Magic, in other words, needs to be run like a large business. More than this, to really change things does not require magic so much as hard work, energy and focus: this is how Derek finally rescues himself from a boorish hell, by working damn hard.