Wednesday September 20th 2000

And now, Celebrity Ansaphone Messages. This week: Jamie Theakston:

“Hi, this is Jamie. I’m not in right now, but whatever it is, I’ll do it. BEEP.”

Maybe I should just watch less TV. Clearly it’s getting to me. Mr Theakston seems to be on everything. Except the phenomenally successful Big Brother. Which reminds me of “The Living Soap” palaver of yesteryear.

“The Living Soap”, unlike Big Brother, was not at all successful. In fact, it was an unmitigated disaster, meeting a new pitfall every week. Which made it all the more interesting to watch. It appeared on BBC2 in the early 90s and was inspired by the success of the US show “The Real World”, where a houseful of young people would be filmed as they went about their lives, and the results were broadcast weekly to the nation.

But for reasons presumably to do with national differences in character, innate exhibitionism and attitudes towards being on TV between Americans and the British (see also Jerry Springer), The Living Soap proved somewhat more short-lived than its US counterpart. In America, everyone is on TV, indeed prefers to discuss their life-changing marital disputes on air, and no one bats an eyelid when a camera crew follows someone in a supermarket. In Britain, we have a much more complicated attitude to television and the art of being on it. We are both resentful of other people being more famous than us, while obsessed with celebrity gossip and still secretly dying to be on TV ourselves, if only to shout “hello mum” (and nothing else… no TV-as-confessional fans, us). If the events shown on a docusoap have already happened sometime ago, (as in “Paddington Green, “Airport” etc), things tend to be straightforward; reality stays fairly real. If it’s ongoing, though, and not sealed hermetically from the outside world like Big Brother, disaster is guaranteed.

So once the first edition of The Living Soap’s Manchester house full of first-year students appeared on the box, the occupants’ “real world” was turned into a farcical contrivance of reality. People did turn a hair when a housemate and their attendant camera crew walked into their local pub. The house’s location was quickly discovered and besieged: a brick thrown through a window proved particularly memorable. One of the show’s “stars”, an Asian girl called Spider, thought that the missile was a racist attack on herself. That might have been true, but no less likely was the possible reason that, thanks to the programme’s mercilessly edited portrayal of her, everyone in the country thought she was a bit thick.

In fact, all the students quickly became aware that the country saw them as self-deluding, naive stereotypes (it’s difficult to be a teenage student on TV and not look a naive idiot), and the numbers in the house started to dwindle. The inital lure to a student of living rent-free and poverty-free for a year in exchange for being filmed had lost its appeal. Even starvation and homelessness seemed more attractive than being on TV, if it had to be on such terms. Dan, the “Nasty Nick” of the house, was a wily and charismatic middle-class Tory boy who saw what was happening, and got out fast. His place was taken by Colin, a camp opportunist who knew exactly what was going on, and allegedly signed secret sponsorship deals with various firms to product-place their pizzas or trainers to the cameras as much as possible. Previously the show had been no fun for the housemates, but great TV for the rest of us. Once Colin moved in, it just wasn’t fun for the viewer either. The jig was up. The housemates moved out, few wanted to move in, the series spluttered and died months ahead of its intended one-year time span, finally reduced to a couple of late-night “highlight” specials narrated by that student nostalgia icon, Brian Cant.

Since then, British docusoaps (with the exception of Big Brother), are filmed in blocks of entire series before being broadcast. The main subjects also tend to be at least 29 and hence have worked out who they exactly are and how to present that persona to the cameras, so it will survive even the most brutal editing. “Nasty” Nick knew exactly who he was and what he was doing. And unlike Colin, he had the decency to be in his early 30s. British TV viewers prefer to love-to-hate someone who’s not too young, rather than someone who’s actually young, who they just hate. For being young. Still, the joy of watching young adults being beastly to each other in their formative years on TV has turned up again on Channel 4’s “Shipwrecked” programme, earlier on this year. It was a kind of updated version of “Minipops”… As far as TV exploitation goes, you’re a child until you’re the wrong side of 25. After that, don’t fret, you can still go on nostalgia programmes and talk about how great Space Dust was.