POMO/NARRATIVE: HI v POP Cul: Austen v TOWIE!

Nice article here from someone who did an English degree and finds themselves distraught at becoming an avid follower of the horror that is TOWIE ... but then intelligently reflecting on the actual nature of the show and comparing to historical reaction to the Brontes work...
I've put this in as its a nice illustration of the high v popular culture binary opposition - music vids are seen as simple pop cul, tho are often vastly superior to productions by name-artists whose 'video art' will screen in art galleries (eg, Corbijn's work for DMode is generally stunning)
This debate is particularly relevant for analysis of Audience; if you do any wider reading on this you'll soon discover that academics in Media/Cultural Studies have long been debating the ideological issues around this (cf. Leavis, Williams, Hoggart, Arnold and more recently Sunderland Uni's John Storey)...
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_culture and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_culture

The Only Way is Austen: In Defence of TOWIE and Co

By Kate Wellham on Mar 20, 2012 in Blogs, Film and TV

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One of the things we decided to try and do at Louder Than War was to experiment with a debating club challenge; defending some seemingly indefensible guilty pleasures that even we’re not convinced about, and trying to find a bit of punk in the apparently punkless.
We’ve done Coronation Street and Leeds Festival so far, and they turned out to be pretty easy to defend.

So now I’m cracking the toughest, most nauseating nut I can think of: The Only Way Is Essex.

Make no mistake, this was not easy.

My dad was responsible for my first encounter with The Only Way Is Essex. I remember I was at my parents’ house one day, and in the minutes it took me to leave the room to make a cuppa, it seems he watched a bit of the first episode of TOWIE by accident.

By the time I re-entered the living room, he was livid with me and my entire generation for doing whatever it was we’d done that had convinced commissioning editors we were a potential audience for this show, thus leading to its existence.

Naturally, as a sensible adult, I decided that whatever my dad hated, I was going to love, and would watch later in secret.

At first, TOWIE disgusted and confused me, and I was convinced it had misfired. Was it real? Was it fake? Does anyone really live like this? And… can I actually SMELL Mark’s Eu de Smug Pour Homme through my screen as he casually buys a shiny three grand watch in which to see his own reflection when he’s on the go?

But, inevitably, by the end of the first episode I was hooked, and – worst of all – it was for all of the above reasons. You have no idea how much this upset me. Not least of all because I had to tell my dad when I next saw him that I had developed a TOWIE habit. I’d rather have told him I was partial to a bit of crack (make of that what you will).

I stopped watching it after the first series because I started to have regular fantasies about Mark Wright: Mark Wright suddenly realising he’s losing his hair and isn’t one of those guys who looks good bald; Mark Wright publicly finding out that one of his previous wank-puppets was a post-op transsexual; Mark Wright gambling away all of his mysteriously available cash and having to get a job as Arg’s cleaner. It was just distracting.

Having since cast a glance over Made In Chelsea and Desperate Scousewives, it seems the format, characters and appeal are the same dramality genre of The Hills. But there’s something else familiar about this…

I studied 19th Century literature at uni, love Jane Austen, and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair is probably my favourite novel of any century ever. I could watch the six-hour BBC adaptation once a week and not just because of the things their Rawden Crawley and his dashing ‘tash do to me.

The real appeal of the fiction of TOWIE, Made In Chelsea and Desperate Scousewives is that they push some of the same buttons, for better or for worse, as those classics. I know it sounds far-fetched, but consider criticisms of Jane Austen back in the day:

‘Why do you like Miss Austen so very much?… I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace (everyday) face; carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.’
Charlotte Bronte
‘I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion,” and “Pride & Prejudice,” is marriageableness. All that interests in any character introduced is still this one: has he or she money to marry with, and conditions conforming? ‘Tis “the nympholepsy of a fond despair”… Suicide is more respectable.’
Ralph Waldo Emerson

So even Austen was worthless trash to some at the time, and to others a guilty pleasure.

What Char and Ralph took issue with is that Austen’s fiction is set in tiny, self-contained but showy worlds, with their own restrictive customs and conventions, the characters are unremarkable, flawed and unsympathetic, and the only thing they really care about is hooking up.
Remind you of anything?

Vanity Fair is, famously, ‘A Novel Without A Hero’. Well, I can’t think of a more appropriate summation of a show like TOWIE, with its distinct lack of even the most substandard hero.

So the people in these TV shows are real. Ok, I’ll buy that, considering how unlikely it is that each program has managed to find a whole ensemble of actors we’ve never seen before, who are so good that they can completely embody whatever facet of human failing they’ve been cast as. It’s how they are played with that makes it compulsive.

The narrative is the carefully constructed maze that these obedient but clueless little mice run around as and when they’re told. Producers use set-ups to exaggerate them into caricatures of themselves, and to fit the role that they’re there to fill, whether it’s horrible sleazebag, likeable idiot, manipulative cow, put-upon girlfriend, vacuous airhead or bitchy queen. And somehow, producers manage to bring out the very worst of their cast, magnifying commonplace character flaws to cartoon proportions.

Mark Wright (TOWIE), Spencer Matthews (Made In Chelsea) and Joe McMahon (Desperate Scousewives) are straight from the mould that made George Osborne (Vanity Fair). Horrible, flashy men we only watch in the hope that, at some point, they’ll have to fight something the size of their ego using only something the size of their penis. If Mark is George Osbourne, then Lauren is his deluded Amelia, Arg is slow, jovial Jos Sedley. Almost all of the girls flip from soppy Amelias to ruthless Beckys and back again.

We can marvel at the Scouse Brow, the Vajazzle and nipping off to Cannes for the weekend with the same alien fascination as we might also read about the scandal of not having a chaperone, leaving calling cards, or ‘cutting’ someone at the ball as an ultimate diss.

Every pivotal, life-changing, relationship-defining scene has to take place at some sort of huge social occasion that coincidentally brings all parties together in one place. Whether it’s one of the many balls thrown at someone’s house in the absence of any decent clubs in London at the time of Austen or Thackeray, or one of the many nights thrown in honour of the opening of the latest bottle of Lambrini at the Sugar Hut.

Either way, as soon as there’s a sniff of a night out, you just know that someone’s going to try it on, have a bust-up, or make an arse of themselves in a way that will propel the storyline forward dramatically. This kind of shit doesn’t really happen in real life, not since we were in sixth form, sneaking into the rock club, hormonal and unleashed, convinced at 17 that Tonight Really Matters In The Grand Scheme Of Things So Everything Has To Happen In The Next Four Hours.

These things are not soaps or dramas. In soaps and dramas, things actually happen. There are crimes, births, deaths, big fake stories set in what is meant to be The Real World. Dramality shows, on the other hand, are tiny, daily, semi-real melodramas set in obviously fake, sandbox worlds, based entirely around the play between various provocative characters we recognize from our own and others’ failings.

It’s the nuances of communication between two people who really like each other, or really don’t; the building tensions we know are going to explode into displays of emotion; the will they / won’t they, did they / didn’t they of various pairings; the exaggerated idiosyncrasies that, when presented to us again and again, add up to a character we can almost believe in, because a well-written Thackeray character and a TOWIE star are about as real as each other.