In such a fantasy, the world would not be coming to an end in a dramatic, Terminator-style apocalypse of infra-red night scopes, killing machines and rebels in the ruins; rather it would simply – dully, even – have ground to a dirty, multiple food-allergic, worn-out, hyper-polluted inevitable halt because of humankind’s insatiable greed. The New Barbarians could be strolling through the last days of the biggest shopping centre on Earth, still complaining, still greedy, still defensive of their self-interest above all. As an artwork, however, ‘The New Barbarians’ is owned by a wealthy private collector, for whom its message, wit and undeniably disturbing presence must perform the task once undertaken by classical allegorical painting to seventeenth-century aristocrats.
By the middle of the Nineties, the slipstream of the zeitgeist was pretty much dominated by a steady cross-cultural cloning of the two principal Attitudes: Irony and Authenticity, conflating mid-decade to breed the cult of Confession and the mediation of the formerly private and personal as mass public spectacle – another attraction in the Jurassic Park of post-modernism (with the writings of Theodor Adorno standing in for the Jeff Goldblum character’s warnings about fiddling around with evolution).
[Subsequently, a web-site would be launched at www.theory.org.uk which ‘packaged’ leading cultural figures as though they were children’s poseable action figures and bubble-gum trading cards (infantilism strikes again!) The theory.org.uk Trading Card for Theodor Adorno summarized his biography, strengths and weaknesses as follows: ‘German Thinker, 1903–69. Member of the Frankfurt School. Argued that popular media is the product of a “culture industry” which keeps the population passive, preserving dominance of capitalism at the expense of true happiness. Mass media is standardized, and the pleasures it offers are illusory – the result of “false needs” which the culture industry creates. Argument is elitist, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong necessarily.
‘Strengths: Saw culture to be as important as economics.
‘Weaknesses: Shows no understanding of popular tastes.
‘Special Skills: Extreme anti-capitalist argument.’]
Like the cloned dinosaurs, cloned media were reasonably single-minded about their message, and now the public were the new stars – so long as they were offering sex, violence, sentimentality or converting their back bedroom into a nursery. As the writer Michael Collins put the case, rephrasing Warhol’s maxim on fame, ‘In the future everybody will be ordinary for fifteen minutes.’
The Moment of Truth
On the evening of 1 December 1976, at around 6.25 p.m., a lorry driver by the names of James Holmes kicked in the screen of his ‘£380 colour television’ – as he later told the Daily Mirror – because he did not want his eight-year-old son, Lee, to hear ‘the kind of muck’ that Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols had just been coerced into speaking, live in the ‘Today’ studio, by presenter Bill Grundy. The following day, the exchange between Jones and Grundy was reported with some outrage by most of the British newspapers, providing punk rock with one of its more iconic labels: a banner headline in the Daily Mirror which exclaimed ‘The Filth and the Fury’.
Viewed now, the spoken dialogue between Jones and Grundy sounds curiously quaint, but the episode as a whole is still engaging. The actual swearing – ‘the muck’ that prompted Mr Holmes to put his boot through the tube – seems almost as weighed down by self-consciousness as Bill Grundy’s attempts to rise above his cheeky guests with a touch of schoolmasterly sarcasm. ‘What a clever boy!’ he purrs, with thinly veiled rage, as Jones responds to his challenge to ‘say something outrageous’ by calling him first a ‘dirty fucker’ and then a ‘fucking rotter’.
Leaving aside the early-evening transmission time – which was the overriding factor that got ‘Today’ into trouble and Grundy suspended – what remains compelling is the all too apparent manner in which the presenter loses control of his guests, and, as a consequence, reveals the speed with which television itself can lose its assumed authority. Throughout the shambolic interview, during which it becomes clear that the Sex Pistols are not going to submit to the role of ‘studio guests’, there is a gradual accumulation of tension – part embarrassment and part threat – that derives less from the inevitability of a conflict, than from the sense that we are witnessing an authentic breakdown in the power of television to contain its subject. As Grundy attempts to return to the autocue – his only lifeline to safety – we see a moment of extreme vulnerability in a medium that relies (or used to rely) on the illusion of control.
There is a common social impulse to witness spectacle, and, equally importantly, a desire to experience that frisson of excitement, shock or fear that accompanies the moment when the predictable passage of daily events is suddenly converted into drama by the occurrence of extreme behaviour. From a scuffle in the street to a major disaster, these moments of transition disrupt our sense of security and our perception of the world. To be present in the vicinity of such a disruption is to experience the adrenaline rush of confusion and fear we instinctively generate to protect ourselves. And to witness those same occasions in their mediated form is to experience all of their drama, but with none of the personal danger. We absorb the atmosphere of spectacle as a kind of narrative – a fact that has been well illustrated, in photographic terms, by Weegee’s stark images of life and death ‘as it happened’ on the streets of New York.
Through modern media we can pick out the soft centres, as it were, of heightened emotions and volatile situations. We can all become members of an invisible audience, the legitimacy of whose presence is morally and ethnically ambiguous. But whether we authorize our consumption of mediated events in the name of public interest and reportage, or whether we argue the fine line between voyeurism and documentary, we require, above all, that the occasions of disruption that comprise our sense of spectacle are authentic – ‘authenticity’ is the hallmark of truth, and hence the gauge of social value.
Today, authenticity as spectacle has become the Holy Grail of contemporary culture, the unifying style by which the zeitgeist is seen to be made articulate. From the gritty pop realism and boiled-beef brutalism of geezer fiction and Britflicks, to the interactive scenarios of third-person video games such as ‘Metal Gear Solid’ or ‘Silent Hill’ – in which media techniques of truthfulness are used to heighten action, control and suspense – there is now the sense that authenticity itself can be sculpted to suggest veracity as an image, in which truth remains ambiguous. This is not a marginalized creative form: the reshaping of current affairs programming to convey immediacy has been matched by the rise of broadsheet columnists recounting their personal lives as contemporary fables, embracing the breadth of the human condition.
But nowhere has this trend been more pervasive, and the issue of veracity more contested, than within the wake of ‘popular factual programming’: a genre which links the ‘authenticity’ of docu-soap and docu-drama to the studio-based spectacle of conflict of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ or ‘Vanessa’. As a cultural phenomenon, popular factual programme-making – and its impact on television, advertising and commentary – can be seen as the defining spirit of the 1990s: how do we mediate ourselves and who defines the mediation?
Back in the mid-1970s, television barely understood that programmes could be made by simply filming volatile ‘real life’ domestic and civic situations, and rely entirely on flashpoints of confrontation to hold the attention of the viewers. Televised conflict, beyond the sphere of current affairs, was a rarity, and the occasions on which the medium had been challenged by circumstances beyond its control – as it had with the Sex Pistols – were regarded as memorable. When the dramatist and critic Kenneth Tynan became the first man to say ‘fuck’ on television, during a debate over censorship on Ned Sherrin’s ‘BBC3’, on 13 November 1965, he remarked that he would probably be remembered only for that incident. And the (now forgotten) fact that he had used the word within a dry academic discussion about an audience’s relationship