[Red Moon]

American Idol: tragedy waiting to happen

So, a failed auditionee for American Idol has apparently committed suicide outside judge Paula Abdul’s house. Why is that not even surprising? It feels like a tragedy that has been waiting to happen ever since this form of televised blood sports became the western world’s favoured Saturday night entertainment.

It is probably unfair to pin the blame for this incident too directly on a television show. The 30-year-old Paula Goodspeed reportedly had a history of mental illness and who knows what combination of forces brought her to that moment of desperation? But the brutal shattering of her private dreams in front of a massive television audience can’t have helped. Is the obvious hurt inflicted on vulnerable individuals on a weekly basis to be accepted as the collateral damage of mainstream public entertainment? People got up in arms about a bad taste joke on Russell Brand’s radio show, but far worse cruelty and humiliation is being served up every week as family fare in prime time TV.

These dubious talent shows, that start of with rounds of brief and often brutal open auditions, are a real theatre of cruelty. They targets people in their most vulnerable spot: their ego. Elaborate fantasies that have taken a lifetime to build up can be shot down with a single cruel remark. Now, I am not saying the judges are wrong in their assessment of the talent on offer, because invariably the harshest judgements are reserved for the most obviously useless contestants. And you could argue that to expose the fantasies of the talentless with impersonal assessment is cruel but fair, sparing them a lifetime of vacuous self-delusion. But it is the very culture of such instant celebrity shows that feeds such delusions, just to enjoy shooting them down. It is a vicious, self-perpetuating circle.

I stopped watching all these new wave talent shows - Pop Idol, X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent - for this very reason. I have been deeply uncomfortable with the way vulnerable and non-media savvy people, often very young, were being set up. They call it reality TV when it is nothing of the sort, because in the real world of entertainment people with no obvious talent would be unable to get prime time television exposure. If they were serious about careers in showbusiness, their limitations would have been exposed way down on the bottom rung of the ladder.

There is, throughout such shows, a careful narrative being crafted for viewers that is not immediately apparent, and is actually quite dishonest. Judges such as Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell (singled out for blame by Goodspeed’s family for his remarks about her teeth brace) don’t actually sit in the room watching the auditions of every individual who thinks they deserve a shot, for rather obvious reasons. There are, in this country, hundreds of thousands of contestants putting themselves forward every season. In the US, you can multiply that by ten or more.

In fact, auditionees are pulled in before researchers and vetted. And talent is not the priority at this stage. Entertainment is. As Cowell told me in a recent interview, “I think it has to be wrong as well as its right, otherwise it’s boring.”

A finalist in one of such show, who has to remain nameless, told me about their own journey to the very first round, when they had to audition before researchers three times before they were put on the shortlist to be viewed by the televised panel. Now, this is someone who eventually almost went whole way, a performer obviously gifted enough to have been in with a shout of winning the big prize. But they almost didn’t make it past the researchers, because, initially, they were not considered good value for televisual entertainment.

But there is another side to this. If an auditionee had to jump through three sets of hoops to get on TV despite the fact that they were obviously musically talented, how do the hopeless, non musical, utterly self–deluded candidates ever get that far? Because their uselessness is the very point. Because the show requires victims, targets for the judges jokes. Because the audience doesn’t just want to see gladiators going into combat, they want to see hapless Christians being fed to the lions. It’s the kind of thing that has been amusing audiences since the Roman Empire. You can call it old fashioned entertainment. That doesn’t make it right.

Source: Daily Telegraph