Red Nose Day is a bullying smugfest for a nation of cretins
Rod Liddle says that Comic Relief, no less than premium-rate phone-in programmes, reflects a pathetic deference to anything which happens to be on television Next week, your sides will be split. You will be overcome by a tsunami of hilarity, almost certainly involving the Vicar of Dibley, Billy Connolly, Ant and Dec and Rowan Atkinson’s famous, gurning Mr Bean. Not only that, but the most irritating people in your office, if you work in an office, will be playing rib-tickling pranks upon one another, or will be decked out in amusing costumes, or will be asking for the day off in order to swim the Channel or hop from Cardiff to Felixstowe. And, as you attempt to restrain your mirth at this cornucopia of wit spilling out around you, this crazy, crazy behaviour from a right old bunch of nutters! — remember it’s all in a good cause. Actually, you won’t need to remember it’s in a good cause because you’ll be told as much every second of the day by newsreaders and continuity announcers and disc jockeys and celebrities, their faces wreathed in sanctimony. Next Friday is Red Nose Day, you see. They’re after your money again; their hands are reaching into your jacket pocket even now. There will be film of Africans looking very glum and then film of the same Africans looking very happy because that skaghead Russell Brand has just given them a goat. There will be constant injunctions to pay up. Remember: £50 will buy you a pistol to shoot Lenny Henry, if you have the right contacts in Stockwell or Clapham, and £250 will pay for a thug to give Richard Curtis a real red nose. Every little helps.
‘Help create a world free from poverty’ goes the blurb on one of the million or so Red Nose websites, all of which offer advice on how you might join in the fun. Clare Short, when she was appointed international development secretary during the first heady rush of the Blair government, announced that she intended to end poverty everywhere, for good and for all. Bless her, she didn’t quite manage it — and so we still have Red Nose Day with which to contend every year and woe betide if you don’t join in.
It’s easy to sneer, I suppose — but still, that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t. It is not the raising of money to alleviate misery that grates, of course, but the relentless, bullying, almost fascistic nature of this yearly event. And of course the dismal attempts at humour. The notion that money is being donated only because television is telling us to; that the thought of giving wouldn’t occur were it not for the sight of Andrew Marr dressed in a leather basque to the strains of ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ or something. It’s the dragooning of the general public, the imposition upon every individual of a 24-hour moral conscience, with a nail through the temple. It makes me think of Huxley’s Brave New World, rewritten so that 95 per cent of the population are Epsilons.
Of course we all have, comparatively, too much money, even if it doesn’t feel like it from day to day — and of course we know that others are in very great need. You might argue that of all the manifestations of what is sometimes called our celebrity culture — of our obeisance before television and its perpetually compelling morphic field — Red Nose Day is the least objectionable. It does some good, surely? Without it, far, far less money would be raised for undoubtedly deserving causes, both at home and abroad. This, though, is rather my point. Why do we need Billy Connolly to tell us that people are in need? Why should Ant and Dec’s presence make us dig deeper into our pockets?
The flipside of our obedience to television, the boundless gullibility which descends when we have the remote control in our hands, was also seen on display last week when ITV announced that it would be suspending the use of premium-rate phone-in charges for a whole gamut of programmes, following criticism in the press. Once again, it’s the Epsilon factor. Only a cretin, surely, would take part in a cretinous quiz on Britain’s most cretinous programme, Richard and Judy, and pay through the nose for the privilege of so doing on a premium-rate line. Well, if that’s the case, we have a fecundity of cretins at large in the country; we are awash with them. And there is a vast array of programmes which invite the public to phone in and as a result trouser quite remarkable sums of money for the television companies for having provided the public with the opportunity to take part. The pseudo-celeb talent shows — Dancing On Ice, for example — the mindless quiz inserts, such as those which occur during Ant and Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. I am fairly sure that in these cases — as with Red Nose Day — the allure is less whatever minuscule prize is on offer, more the desire on the side of the viewer to be a part of the television programme, to be on the box.
Fifteen or so years ago there was an imperative for TV companies to become more interactive, to enfranchise the viewer, to encourage public participation. This undoubtedly wellmeaning democratic initiative led, in the end, to an infinite number of the almost comically dull ‘reality’ TV shows — from Big Brother downwards, which now spoil our viewing. And, worse still, led to the extraordinarily lucrative tyranny of the phone-in lines for comment and competition, whereas once viewers were simply asked to send in a postcard. The democratic impulse has turned into an enormous money spinner — so, I suppose, you might argue that the television companies got it right. There is a very big market.
At its very worst, this has resulted in late night shows such as Quizmania or Quiz Nation or something on ITV1 — a programme so staggeringly bad, so naked in its intention to wrench money from a stupid public, that on the first occasion I stumbled across it I assumed it was a Ricky Gervais or Chris Morris spoof. Here a young, bovine woman asks a question of mind-numbing banality and invites the public to ring in with the right answer. But it is the sort of question to which there is no ‘right’ answer, other than the one which exists in the mind of the programme producer. So, famously, on one occasion the question asked was: what items would you be likely to find in a woman’s handbag? And among the answers the public was expected to give were ‘rawl plugs’ and ‘a balaclava’. The striking thing about this programme — which is truly a disgrace to ITV1 — is that there is no attempt whatsoever to entertain the viewer. There is just one camera shot — of the woman asking the question — and absolutely nothing in the way of chat or banter. There is just a static shot and silence, demanding that the viewer break the spell by ringing in. The bovine woman just stands there, grinning like a jackass, waiting for punters to spend their money with an inappropriate and almost certainly wrong, as it turns out, answer. And occasionally exhorting them to do so: come on, pick up your phone, the money could be yours. So naked is the intention behind the interminable periods of silence on the screen and the vague, indeterminate nature of the questions that only a cretin, surely, would be so stupid as to think he or she could win the comparatively small cash prize. And yet once again, if that’s the case, we are living in a country of cretins. The company which makes programmes like this has made a £9 million profit in just four months.
What is it about television which manages to dissolve our natural defences and leaves us open to the blatant chicanery of Quizmania or, for that matter, the regimented smugfest of Comic Relief and Red Nose Day? Why do we suspend, along with our disbelief, almost all of our critical faculties? Why do government ministers feel compelled to offer a comment on the unpleasant behaviour of contestants on Celebrity Big Brother? Is it because the government ministers are cretins, too?
At almost every turn, television behaves in a way which, were we to experience such a thing in any other walk of life, we would greet it with a punch on the nose and a tirade of abuse. But instead, because it is TV, we all do as we are told. I’ve heard plenty of explanations for our collective state of mind — structuralist, post-modernist, deconstructionist, Marxist — but none of them really do the job. Answers, please. On a postcard?
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