Not if you’re a victim, sorry; ‘guest’, on the Jeremy Kyle Show, it doesn’t. Or one of the thousands who audition for the X Factor.
If there is a more loathsome and repellent individual on TV than the sneering, sanctimonious and judgemental Mr Kyle, I’ve yet to make their acquaintance.
How watching some nasty, smug-faced little shit shouting, screaming and haranguing the dupes that appear on his vile show can, in any way, be adjudged entertaining, or even informative, is utterly beyond my ability to reason.
Similarly, the horrendous X Factor auditions, where we are invited to ridicule the gullible and, possibly, mentally ill people who are offered up as objects of our scorn and derision.
I know the comparison with Bedlam is an obvious one and also one that has been made many times. The latest example appearing this very month in Moonshine Magazine, courtesy of my good friend, Sack Sabbath guitarist, Russ ‘Sacko’ Saxton. But that doesn’t, in any way, invalidate its worth.
The infamous asylum is well known, of course, for its appalling cruelty and abuse of its patient-inmates (sound familiar?) and for a fee of one penny, one could tour its chambers of madness and despair and laugh at the loonies. Incredibly, some of its more distressed and most severely afflicted residents were banded together and presented as the “Show of Bethlehem”. In much the same way, I submit, that three hundred-odd years later, DVDs of the most pitiful X Factor contestants are released. So we can relive some poor sap’s, possibly life-wrecking, humiliation on national television again and again and again.
Think I’m going a bit far, do you? Well, If you pop along to Amazon and enter the requisite search, you will find a review of one of these DVDs, under the heading ‘Very good entertainment’, that reads, “From the scary eyed cook “So I hope I can cook you up something today” to the saracophagal toothless widow “I’m 47″ (Tuttenkhamun [sic] actually looks better today!!) and the look on the faces of the panel, this DVD is a barrel of laughs. Living abroad where many of the guests we entertain are non English speakers, this kind of entertainment bridges the language barrier, always guaranteeing rip roaring fun for all. Eagerly awaiting more of the same.”
I don’t know about you, but I was, and am, disgusted to a degree not felt since Thatcher’s cynical and immoral Falklands adventure.
The odious Kyle, however, effortlessly conjures up even worse spectacles on a daily basis. Pregnancies, paternity disputes, infidelity and worse, are spewed out in every ghoulish and sordid detail for the perverse pleasure of the viewing public, as the bullying ringmaster screams, shouts and abuses those foolish enough to participate.
Lives are, literally, ruined as peoples’ dirty washing is hung out to dry and the millions chuckle, sneer and cast their judgment from the safety and security of their impregnable moral castles.
Don’t waste your time telling me that these marks take part of their own free will, that no one forces them. So bloody what? Does that make it OK then for the rest of us to indulge in proxy bullying? Christ, if kids in a school yard treated each other in this fashion they’d be expelled and rightly so.
Apart from anything else, in a society driven entirely by greed and the new ethos of get famous, get rich, get on TV and get it now, it’s hardly surprising some of our less fortunate and most deprived citizens think their public denigration, humiliation and shame is a price worth paying for their fifteen minutes. Of course they do. It’s what our masters want them to think. That’s how these insidious creations of anti-working class propaganda work.
Marx referred to these people as the lumpen proletariat. These days they’re called chavs, neds, scum and doleys. Personally, I prefer to think of them as human beings…
I know, and I’m sure you do as well, exactly what all this says about the makers of these rotten programmes but what does it say about us? A society that enjoys them? That watches them in our millions? That supports, however unthinkingly, vicious attacks on the most underprivileged and desperate people in our midst?
Well, I’ll tell you; we spit in the face of humanity.
Artwork reproduced by kind permission of Doug Savage. Copyright © Savage Chickens 2011. All rights reserved. www.savagechickens.com