Voyeurism

I haven’t been feeling great lately--I have a sort of cold that never becomes full blown, but never goes away. So I’m watching more TV than usual because I’m beat at night.

The British do great variety shows. A bit of comedy, a musical number from the West End, a prank played on an audience member (with the participation of a spouse), and so on. One of the skits is “send to all” where a guest celebrity hands his or her phone over to the show’s MC, who sends an off-colour text to a few hundred of the celebrity’s contacts. The text is usually something that would be embarrassing to the celebrity, somehow inappropriate in a text. At the end of the show, the MC reads back some of the replies.

British people love to see celebrities squirm. Maybe it’s human nature, but British TV plays to this shamelessly. The celebrity is squirming because many of his or her contacts are reading a weird text that the celebrity would never have sent. Then the replies are read to the TV audience of millions when the reply was meant to be read by the celebrity only. The audience eats it up.

Another example is a show called: "I’m a celebrity, get me out of here.” Wherein minor celebrities are put into extreme physical and mental challenges and the TV viewers watch how they deal. If they can’t deal, the say the words in the title of the show and are extracted from whatever situation they are in. This might involve lying down in a small enclosed space full of roaches or putting their arm through a hole into a space with snakes slithering around or swimming under water with eels and trying to make it to a box that has air in it. Apropos of yesterday’s woe-is-the-world text, I wonder at the human condition that this is entertainment. I think Bill Bryson used to write about this British trait of building people up so that they can tear them down. I watch a show called Gogglebox, where TV viewers are shown reacting to what they see on TV. I’m sorry to report that the viewers are very mean to the minor celebrities, calling them wimps or cowards or whatever. I guess this is the modern equivalent of the Roman’s bread and circuses, when cheap entertainment replaced civic engagement or responsibility.

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