Over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog, Lib Dem blogger James Graham argues that political engagement via entertainment is a failed model, and asks – shouldn’t we be talking about how to make politics less like the X Factor? Here’s an excerpt:
The public perception of MPs and X Factor contestants is remarkably similar: both are regarded as vapid, essentially interchangeable, only in it for the money and the glory, bitchy, having laughable hairstyles and as all coming from the same school. … In reality, the X Factor could only dream of having as many voters as we take for granted in UK elections. Ten million votes may sound like a lot, but it is only two-thirds the number of people who voted in the European parliament elections this year and a third the number of people who voted in the 2005 general election. …
The blurring between politics and entertainment is a process that has been going on for decades. As a method of engagement, it has comprehensively failed. Maybe, just maybe, people will only start taking politics seriously again when its exponents start doing the same.
You can read James’s article in full here.
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Well, one thing that X Factor (and all Cowell’s other stuff) has in common with a distressingly large amount of UK politics, is that it’s all completely rigged. For some reason, people trust that the show is “genuine”; that the contestants are just crazy members of the public, and that what you see is a fair reproduction of what happens.
The reality is, it’s partially scripted, filmed out-of-order like any other entertainment show (and unlike most game shows), the judges know exactly what’s coming ahead of time, and the contestants are carefully selected to have the “correct” proportion of winners, losers, and comic failures in each show. The latter group is particularly nasty, since they are often gathered by grabbing some unsuspecting members of the public, doing a lot of fast talking, and dragging them on stage almost right away with no prep. Every time you look at it and think “Why are these people here? Did they seriously think they could win like this?”, the answer is probably that they didn’t and got suckered into making a fool of themselves.
All of which reminds me of the spin doctors, lobbyists, meaningless scripted speeches, bogus claims of secrecy, and party whips.
I heartily recommend Ben Elton’s Chart Throb. Like all Elton’s books, it’s a read-it-once-and-chuck-it affair, but it’s a cracking demolition job on the X-Factor madness. Like he says, you just gotta do the maths.