When I'm Cleaning... etc.

Ah, George Formby Jr. Classic, supremely talented yet unfairly neglected, etc.

I just about 'get' what the George Formby thing is all about. It's a Northern thing. It's a British thing. It's the kind of thing that makes movies like The Full Monty successful, the idea that 'we' can never be as good as them because we're not as privileged nor as confident in ourselves as they are... But we can try and have fun amidst all the hardship and a sense of community and identity will result. And along the way we can produce pretty good music, films, etc. In other words: we lowly, down-to-earth Brits are not the Americans. And we Northerners are not like you guys from the South...

Frank Skinner's documentary about Formby (August 5th, BBC Four) was dressed up as a reappraisal, designed to persuade us that Formby was deserving of a position in the Twentieth Century roster of brilliant, influential artists. A brilliant ukelele player, and a composer of neat, comic songs, yes. But influential? There's the problem. As Skinner's own performances of Formby songs showed, it seems impossible to 'do' a Formby song without 'doing Formby' (ie. singing in that silly voice). It becomes an impression, a karaoke performance. Given that the style of Formby's music probably descended from ragtime roots and is thus flexible enough to be reinterpreted, it seems surprising that no-one's tried to re-do Formby's songs in his or her own style. But then we come to another problem: those lyrics...

London 2012 - Opening Ceremony

Another example of the self-reflexivity of our heavily mediatized everyday reality: the opening ceremony to the Olympics consisted of Danny Boyle apparently extending the phantasmagoric drug-induced hallucination scenes from Trainspotting to put together a trippy dream of British history and contemporary British reality, which included such bizarre random moments as the Arctic Monkeys playing a version of their 2005 (yes, 2005!) hit 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor' and then a cover of one of John Lennon's most meaningless, yet unmistakably 1960s, songs 'Come Together'. Ok, this was perhaps an Olympic sentiment. But then Paul McCartney was wheeled out to sing 'Hey Jude'. Why? What has this man and this song got to do with the Olympics and/or Britain 2012? The only explanation is that he represents a kind of rock Royalty.

This then became news, with commentators discussing it on the news channels late into the nights. Screened on the BBC, then analysed on the BBC as if it just happended to be a randomly-generated news event, when actually the BBC were talking about themselves!

Contemporary British Cinema

There are three kinds of British movie: 1. the plucky disenfranchised group working together to achieve a momentary success (The Full Monty, Made in Dagenham, Calendar Girls), a film which promotes the 'having a go' side of British life, as people force themselves to do something badly for the greater good and to cheer themselves up; 2. the aspirational (London) movie, where a group of affluent metrosexuals impress the Americans (Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc.); 3. the gritty, dark, bleak portrait of the futility of working-class life (Fishtank, Red Road, Made in England). Only the third is any good. What does this say about Britain and its sense of itself?

Lilya 4-Ever

Possibly the bleakest film ever made, Lilya 4-ever (2002) tells the story of a 16-year-old girl living in extreme squalor in the former Soviet Union (Paldiski in Estonia, to be precise) who ends up becoming tricked by a 'boyfriend' into moving to Sweden in search of a better life only to find herself forced into a life of prostitution. Her departure leads her only friend, a boy named Volodya, to commit suicide. In the most touching scenes in the movie, he appears in her dreams as a guardian angel - the role she played for him but abandoned, just as her mother left her for the United States at the start of the story - and eventually advises her that her pimp has mistakenly left the door to the apartment unlocked, so she can escape. This she does... only to throw herself impulsively off a motorway bridge and die.

The key to the film comes at the end of the final credits in a dedication to 'children around the world exploited by the sex trade'. It signals that the film is bleak for a reason. Its naturalistic style is designed to shock viewers - especially Swedish ones - into recognising that all this actually happens, and that Sweden may be a wealthier and in some ways healthier nation than the states of the former Soviet Union, but has turned a blind eye to the practice of enforced child prostitution. The film is based on the real story of Danguole Rasalaite, a 16-year-old Lithuanian girl who died in similar circumstances in Malmo in 2000. But, at the same time, the film is art not documentary. Maybe I spent too long reading Iris Murdoch's aesthetic theory but a film like this can't help but make me wonder whether art has a duty to provide some kind of redemption to its viewers. The only glimpse into redemption here is the secure but limited afterlife inhabited by Volodya. But his suicide is something he regrets.

Still, seeking relief after the final credits, I turned over to BBC4 and saw an extraordinarily cynical piece of historical revisionism which made Lilya 4-ever's determination to be accurate all the more laudable. 'Taking Control' was a documentary about Janet Jackson, which used the manipulative 'talking heads' format (show someone a clip, ask them to describe it, then edit to make it look as if the topic was so memorable it's impact is still fresh in the interviewee's mind) to try to convince us that she was a hugely influential R&B artist whose 1980s output changed the face of music history. I remember the 1980s, Janet, I was there... I'm not having that. Where's the nearest motorway bridge?

The X Factor and the H Factor

TV is a naturally self-reflexive medium and the TV genre which demonstrates this most clearly is the reality game show. Rising above the myriad sentimental mini-stories which makes up the background of its contestants, the real story of each X Factor series is television's power to transform the lives of ordinary people. The contestants are invited into the televisual universe with the promise that they'll never have to go back to their own, non-tube world. This year's X Factor represents the summit of its particular way of executing this promise, due to a perfect blend of hype, suspense, and reasonable singers. Most of all, though, it is being achieved through the X Factor's mastery of the key principle of reality TV shows: transformation.

But here we can see that the X Factor has now gorged on itself until bloated with its own excessive content. Here are the symptoms:

1. Two judges (Tulisa and Kelly Rowlad) who possess minimal credibility - at least when it comes to the business at which they're professing to excel: scouting and producing talent. Discovering talent and transforming the artists into what they wanted is the background of Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh, and ensures they each possess authority. But Tulisa and Kelly are just singers - for all their 'urban' credentials. (And Tulisa protests her urban credentials so much it comes to seem suspicious. I suspect stage school...)

2. No alternative to Walsh's almost uniform praise. This series is giving us the spectacle of one average karaoke performance after another being greeted with a chorus of 'you have a great voice'. Great? Shouldn't that word be saved for something genuinely special?

3. The dismembering and re-assembling of bands by the judges. A feature of this series is under-qualified judges (see point 1) hubristically creating bands, mixing up members of existing bands (which themselves seem thrown together in the first place). This should really be a new kind of XFactor-type show, in which individual singers are slotted into bands designed and managed by the judges and left to fight it out on stage, a kind of musical Bamzooki. Maybe it could be called...Popstars?

Perhaps the most telling of all the symptoms of decadance - more than the vast number of dancers upstaging every act in dazzling displays, more than the hubristic appearance of contestants appearing as 'stars' in an M&S Christmas ad - is Frankie Cocozza's accelerated entire rock n' roll-biography-in-6-weeks demise. Of course this could have happened any year, but somehow it seems as if it could only happen this year, the year the X Factor - or H for hubris Factor - ate itself.

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.