{"id":22950,"date":"2023-01-09T13:19:55","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T13:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=22950"},"modified":"2023-01-09T13:20:27","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T13:20:27","slug":"the-blair-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2023\/01\/09\/the-blair-show\/","title":{"rendered":"The Blair Show"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article written by Jason Okundaye \u00a0was first posted by Tribune<\/a>. It looks at the interaction of the Blair political project and the demonisation of the working class on reality TV.<\/strong><\/p>\n

THE BLAIR SHOW<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At the last Queen\u2019s Speech before the 2001 general election, then Prime Minister Tony Blair scolded William Hague by telling him\u00a0\u201cyou are the weakest link, goodbye\u201d<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a reference, according to Frank Millar, to\u00a0Hague\u2019s tendency to summarise his policies in six words<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This scripted dig at the ill-fated opposition leader also provided a parliamentary stamp of approval for Anne Robinson\u2019s\u00a0The Weakest Link<\/em>, which had popularised the phrase as a final put-down to contestants who were eliminated from the show.\u00a0The Weakest Link<\/em>\u00a0had premiered on 14 August 2000 on BBC Two, with host Anne Robinson, already a household BBC name, gaining a reputation for her sardonic taunting of contestants, scratching the hopeful gazes out of their eyes by exhibiting troubled personal lives and flaws of character.<\/p>\n

The Weakest Link<\/em>\u00a0holds a warm place within public nostalgia for 2000s television, but last year\u00a0old footage of the show resurfaced on social media<\/a>\u00a0which threw that into question. In one of her \u2018spiky\u2019 exchanges, Robinson notes that her contestant is a single mother to three boys, before subsequently asking \u201chow many ASBOs?\u201d, \u201chow many of your three boys have got tags on their ankles?\u201d, \u201care you on benefits?\u201d, and \u201cyou didn\u2019t go gay did you?\u201d after forcing the contestant to reveal details of her broken down marriages. It beggars belief how conduct like this was treated as a palatable feature of daytime television less than two decades ago.<\/p>\n

This intrusive reproach and degradation of a woman demonstratively of a lower social class was not apropos of nothing, neither was Anne Robinson\u2019s archetypal scolding a particularly exceptional feature of 2000s television. Rather, late \u201890s and 2000s television marks a period where television and popular culture was most intimately shaped and influenced by the political landscape \u2013 in this case, the benefits bashing of the New Labour years under Tony Blair.<\/p>\n

Gameshows, reality television, and comedies were the central genres of mainstream public broadcast which offered up those seeking fame, financial prosperity, or interventions in their personal lives for ritual humiliation to gratify middle-class attitudes towards lower social classes. Blairism\u2019s regular attacks on \u2018scroungers\u2019, \u2018chavs\u2019, single mothers, asylum seekers, and hooded youths provided a sheen of respectability to TV executives who made a career out of mocking Britain\u2019s most marginalised, allowing it to become a pursuit of popular culture. It is not that the preceding Thatcher and Major administrations hated these groups any less, but the Conservatives did not possess the cultural cache to make hating them quite so widely accepted \u2013 this was the prerogative of the liberals.<\/p>\n

It is not spurious or grasping to assert that the culture of exploitative 2000s television was distinctly Blairite. It is no coincidence that British shows like\u00a0X Factor, Big Brother, Supernanny, Wife Swap, The Jeremy Kyle Show, Fat Families<\/em>, and\u00a0There\u2019s Something About Miriam<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 all subject to controversy and retrospective denouncement for degrading ethnic minorities, working class people, fat people, queer and trans people, migrants, and other groups \u2013 emerged from that political era.<\/p>\n

In fact, in 2008\u00a0the United Nations ordered New Labour to implement regulations to end the exploitation of children in reality television shows<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a projected measure which, though not explicitly named, would cover the Channel 4 shows\u00a0Supernanny<\/em>and\u00a0Wifeswap<\/em>. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child made clear that these broadcasts were inextricably linked to New Labour\u2019s Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) on children and teenagers, which enabled a \u201cgeneral climate of intolerance\u201d towards British youth.<\/p>\n

The introduction of ASBOs by Tony Blair in 1998 followed his crass exploitation of the killing of James Bulger in 1993 after which, Peter Squires argues in\u00a0ASBO Nation<\/em><\/a>, he \u201cchallenged the \u2018moral vacuum\u2019 in society\u201d with a \u201cnew call for respect\u201d, at a time where \u201ctraditional moral and political ideas had lost their meaning.\u201d The introduction of policies such as ASBOs enshrined an institutional response to what Blair considered the decline of \u2018small c\u2019 conservative traditional moral values.<\/p>\n

Public moral panic over \u2018ASBO\u2019 children was indulged by Home Secretary Charles Clarke who, in 2005, announced that guidelines to police and local authorities would be issued to\u00a0\u201cname and shame\u201d<\/a>\u00a0adults and children as young as 10 by publicising their names and photographs in leaflets, newspapers, television, and radio.\u00a0Supernanny\u00a0<\/em>further enabled the public spectacle of ASBOs, which criminalised nuisance and implied that delinquent children presented an existential threat to national moral virtue.<\/p>\n

Premiering in 2004, a year which saw the Home Office provide 1,826 ASBOs in the first 9 months alone,\u00a0Supernanny\u00a0<\/em>imported professional nanny Jo Frost as an archetypal scolding British figure, much like Anne Robinson, whose purpose was to discipline unruly children. The reality show helped to calcify public attitudes towards \u2018unruly children\u2019 and their \u2018irresponsible parents\u2019 with\u00a0local papers reporting the introduction of \u2018Supernanny plans\u2019<\/a>\u00a0to expand the ASBO regime to compulsory parenting orders. This era wasn\u2019t just a cultural residue of Blairism, there was an active relationship between reality entertainment and popular political consciousness \u2013 with television shaping policy and policy shaping television.<\/p>\n

Television promoting individualised interventions to fix the social deprivation which correlated with \u2018bad behaviour\u2019 could also be found in a number of shows arising under New Labour which focused on fat people and their diets. Dieting programme\u00a0You Are What You Eat\u00a0<\/em>debuted on Channel 4 in 2004,\u00a0Supersize vs Superskinny\u00a0<\/em>in 2008, and\u00a0Fat Families\u00a0<\/em>aired on Sky 1 in 2010. In 2009, the Channel 4 show\u00a0Girls And Boys Alone<\/em><\/a>\u00a0received upward of 180 complaints to OFCOM for \u201cchild abuse and cruelty,\u201d being labelled a\u00a0\u201cridiculous freak show\u201d<\/a>\u00a0as it followed the lives of children with weight issues.<\/p>\n

In 2006,\u00a0Blair opined that public health issues, such as obesity, routinely described as a \u201cpandemic\u201d amongst children, could be resolved by individual lifestyle changes<\/a>, claiming that it was the job of ministers to \u201cempower the individual, rather than command.\u201d This neoliberal governance and responsibilisation of ill-health was true to New Labour\u2019s maintenance of the Thatcherite consensus of good health being a matter of individual will.<\/p>\n

The philosopher Lauren Berlant in\u00a0Slow Death<\/em><\/a>\u00a0describes this phenomenon as the \u201cmoral science of biopolitics, which links the political administration of life to a melodrama of the care of the monadic self.\u201d The melodrama of self-governed care found validation in such television programmes which dramatised individual diets as extreme and shocking.\u00a0Supersize vs Superskinny\u00a0<\/em>saw weekly meals and snacks piled on to a scale to emphasise the calories, sugar and saturated fat content of fat people\u2019s \u2018extreme diets\u2019 \u2013 confirming public health as a matter of individual management, rather than state strategy, to the average British audience.<\/p>\n

Blairism\u2019s cultural impact was significant, coming in many ways to represent the political wing of \u2018Britpop\u2019 and \u2018Cool Brittania.\u2019 But as Blair\u2019s guitar-playing youthful appeal declined\u00a0so did Britpop<\/a>, as the optimism of the 1990s gave way to the War on Terror 2000s. Sure enough, shortly after the Iraq War came the\u00a0X Factor<\/em>. Once again, the show was built around the derogatory behaviour of Simon Cowell \u2013 who would mock the personal failings of contestants who dared to dream they, too, might have a shot at the celebrity millions Blairism persuaded so many were within their reach.\u00a0This was well integrated in the grey, market-oriented landscape of 00s Britain \u2013 where talent shows like the\u00a0X Factor\u00a0<\/em>enforced the most cramped, conformist, individualised, and competitive neoliberal views of what constituted music-making and musical talent.<\/p>\n

But perhaps no show inculcated the social attitudes which defined Blairism more than Channel 4\u2019s\u00a0Big Brother<\/em>, which brought reality television to a new level of popularity in 2003.<\/em>\u00a0Descended from a Dutch original, the British version of\u00a0Big Brother\u00a0<\/em>was produced by Endemol UK Ltd, then headed by Sir Peter Bazalgette. Even the\u00a0Daily Mail<\/em>, when criticising Bazalgette\u2019s inclusion in a New Year honour list, described Bazalgette\u00a0and Big Brother<\/em>\u00a0as having \u201cinstitutionalised the disgusting culture of voyeurism, humiliation and cruelty which has so degraded television and the society it serves.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is beyond dispute by this stage that\u00a0Big Brother<\/em>\u00a0encouraged vicious vilification of the working-class. A key example was breakout star and working-class Bermondsey resident Jade Goody from the third series of the show who, aged just 20 when cast in 2002, was treated with cruel contempt by the tabloid press. This took place during a particularly shameful chapter under New Labour, where the\u00a0fear of \u201cchavs\u201d was epidemic<\/a>\u00a0and their access to wealth was treated as offensive. Social mobility was a core feature of the Blairite philosophy, but only if achieved through the legitimate means of \u201ceducation, education, education\u201d \u2013 with the unsurprising consequence, as a Resolution Foundation study\u00a0found<\/a>, that that \u201cthose at the bottom were less far likely to move up a substantial distance than those in the middle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Channel 4 had\u00a0radical roots<\/a>\u2013 and its path from there to hosting such reactionary drivel were a long-term consequence of Thatcher\u2019s deregulation of broadcasting. As\u00a0Julian Coman writes in\u00a0The Guardian<\/em><\/a>, \u201cprobably not anticipating that [Channel 4] would popularise fiercely anti-establishment output\u201d after helping to create it in 1982,Thatcher introduced the Broadcasting Act 1990<\/a>\u00a0to liberalise and deregulate the broadcasting industry, and abolish the Independent Broadcasting Authority which had regulated ITV and Channel 4.<\/p>\n

Though it narrowly escaped privatisation, this competition-driven deregulation of Channel 4 was consolidated by New Labour and, as a result, shows like\u00a0Big Brother\u00a0<\/em>benefited from more \u201clight touch\u201d regulation. Channel 4, once home to the cultural outputs of marginalised and radical voices, over time became a network responsible for savaging the lower classes \u2013 contempt for which was bred by New Labour\u2019s particularly punitive and humiliating social policies on welfare, housing, and\u00a0bizarre justice policy<\/a>\u00a0which at one point sought to assess every child in the country to determine their risk of offending.<\/p>\n

The cultural imprint of Blairism means that the broadcasting output of the 2000s, perhaps unlike any other era in modern British history, can be defined by an open, pro-establishment hostility to marginalised people, in which entertainment and politics were engaged in reciprocal dialogue. The 2000s is often regarded as a relatively culture-less decade, driving interest in the internet and on-demand television thereafter, but the essence of its cultural identity is surely the shameful toxicity of reality television \u2013 and how this was enabled by the state and political class.<\/p>\n

29.6.22<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The following article written by Jason Okundaye \u00a0was first posted by Tribune. It looks at the interaction of the Blair political project and the demonisation of the working class on reality TV. THE BLAIR SHOW At the last Queen\u2019s Speech before the 2001 general election, then Prime Minister Tony Blair scolded William Hague by telling…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1843,1861,1854,1862],"tags":[9158],"class_list":["post-22950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-capitalists-organise","category-alienation-self-determination","category-the-left-crisis","category-ideology-and-religion","tag-author-jason-okundaye"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/mastodon.scot\/@rcfscotland\/109659448741950053","error":""},"views":2126,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22950"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22953,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22950\/revisions\/22953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}