"New Republic." A good look at your culture, Pearly. :^)
THE NEW BRITISH INVASION.
Trash Pickup
by Andrew Sullivan
When visiting Britain last February, I was struck by the number of people who were awfully late for my sister's fortieth birthday party. When I mentioned this to her, she seemed unfazed. "Oh, it's the finale for `Pop Idol' tonight," she explained. "The whole country is watching." "`Pop Idol'?" I asked. I was treated to a breathless account of the talent-search TV phenomenon that had racked up record ratings in the gloom of the British winter. By the finale, it was hard to find any other news in the British tabloids. "You wait," my London friends confidently informed me the following week. "It'll go over there soon. Our crap television always does."
Sure enough, just a few months later, the United States endured "American Idol," a direct copy of the British series and as stunning a ratings success as the original. It followed fellow imports "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" and "The Weakest Link"--both lowest-common-denominator entertainment lifted directly from British television. And there's more to come. The latest cheesy British mega-hit is "I'm a Celebrity--Get Me Out of Here!" a "Survivor"-"Hollywood Squares" hybrid that sends celebrity has-beens to desert islands for reality-TV showdowns. Brace yourselves for the spectacle of Suzanne Somers and Victoria Principal trying to spear a wild hog.
It's something of a cultural turnaround, this British dumbing-down of the United States. Though the trend has been gaining momentum for years, it still hasn't quite been recognized by Americans. Old brands, after all, die hard. And there are few things more dear to Americans than the notion of Britain (or, more accurately, England) as a halcyon place of tea, crumpets, and generations of aesthetes who went to tony private schools and know much of Shakespeare and Milton by heart. In this cranny of the American psyche, the English are eternally polite, classy, reliable fuddy-duddies. The image is kept afloat by stray, elevated English exports that always find a market and appeal particularly to culturally insecure Americans--The Economist, any film by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the Harry Potter novels, The New York Review of Books pieces by Simon Schama, a new PBS production of The Forsyte Saga (now breathing new life into that flagship of civilized Britannia, "Masterpiece Theatre"). But in the last decade or so, as British society has morphed into a free-market melting pot of cultural brashness, these upmarket products have become the exceptions. The most powerful British influences on American culture today are ferociously crass, unvarnished, unseemly--and completely unapologetic about it. They are, in fact, one of the latest assaults on what was once quite a civilized country.
Television is the most glaring example. The salient elements of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire," one of the first of the recent Brit imports, were the extremely dumb questions--often related to the ephemera of entertainment culture--and the ruthless weeding-out process. Most quiz shows rely on these elements to a certain degree, but "Millionaire"'s genius was to ratchet up the crudeness and stupidity several notches. The money at stake was far higher than in all previous game shows and the sets and staging far more aggressive. With spotlights swirling around the sci-fi stage, the show looked like a cross between "Family Feud" and "Starlight Express." The game-show format, of course, couldn't be more American. But the Brits took that traditional formula--middle-class, comforting shows like "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy"--and turned it into self-loving, massively overproduced camp. If you don't recognize the essential Britishness of this formula, I have three words for you: Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Close on the heels of "Millionaire" came "The Weakest Link," which added a new wrinkle (subsequently picked up by "American Idol"): Its British host, Anne Robinson, was presented not as a genteel, erudite tutor but rather as a rude, sarcastic jerk. It is, in fact, a more honest portrayal of the contemporary United Kingdom. Americans are still a polite people--a fact obscured, I'll concede, when you visit New York City but nonetheless true overall. One of the main cultural adjustments I have to make when visiting London, after living in the United States for almost 20 years, is to prepare for general rudeness. Brits these days are blunter, cruder, and drunker than most Americans. It makes for a coarser, livelier public culture. (Have you watched the boorishness of the House of Commons lately? Or looked at a British tabloid?) Americans, by contrast--especially in this hypersensitive, culturally diverse era--are desperate to steer clear of confrontation and avoid putting others down publicly. That's why "The Weakest Link"'s Robinson was merely an amusement in Britain but almost a shocker here in the United States. One of the cardinal rules of the American game show was that its host be a benign male creature, offering hearty congratulation to winners, gentle support to losers, and prizes all around. "The Weakest Link" pioneered the reversal of this archetype: Instead of a blow-dried, brown-suited, well-toothed male, you had The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie riding herd on nervous and ignorant amateurs. The formulaic tables had been turned, and the sadistic results provided riveting television. It wore thin quite quickly, of course. But another taboo of American civility had been broken.
It's important to note here that Robinson was not exactly a sophisticated conversationalist. Her insults weren't witty or classy or dry, as traditional Anglophiles might have expected. They were crude, blunt, and coarse, as much of British culture now is. And Robinson smoothed the terrain for one Simon Cowell, the British record executive who this past year served as one of the three judges on "American Idol." Cowell's trademark was reducing jittery auditioners to tears with his brutal put-downs of their acts. As earnest young Americans paraded into audition studios, Cowell would scowl, splutter, and emit sighs of disdain. And once they'd finished their numbers, he'd let it rip. Again, his comments were not urbane or clever; the words "awful," "hopeless," and "loser" tripped effortlessly off his tongue. As the series progressed, Cowell's insults began to overshadow the would-be performers. People tuned in to watch the show as much for his putdowns of the losers as they did for the selection of the winners. In mainstream American culture, where cutthroat competition is usually supplemented with uplifting bromides--where no one is a loser anymore--this was a fresh, radical concept. Not to mention, enormously popular. And highly New Brit.
[I] t's not just television. The U.S. print media have similarly received the gospel of brutishness from a host of British missionaries. Some of the big tabloids, such as Star magazine, are now largely run by Brit imports. Their emergence as serious players in breaking political scandals--from the Gennifer Flowers scandal to Jesse Jackson's sexual travails--rests on a quintessentially British tabloid tradition: They pay for stories, they have no respect for anyone's privacy, and they have a serious knack for writing about what interests people.
In Britain this tradition of bawdy, rude, no-frills media has a long pedigree. But for decades it was contained within its own class boundaries by the social controls that hemmed British culture in. There were, until relatively recently, only four major British TV stations and a tightly regulated and restricted radio market. This kept the highbrow gatekeepers of British culture in charge. But today, in the deregulated, post-Margaret Thatcher media universe, there are dozens of TV and radio options--cable, satellite, Internet, and other offshoots of BBC and old-line media companies--all vying for market share. Newspapers are just as varied and highly competitive, giving London's press an almost eighteenth-century liveliness, in contrast to the staid and stuffy monopoly newspaper tradition in the United States. When you supplement this media explosion with an equally profound shift in the shape and tone of British popular culture, you begin to see how the new Britishness has become so influential.
Nowhere has that influence been more apparent in recent years than in the U.S. market for men's magazines. Not so long ago the men's-magazine market in the United States was stable but relatively small: Esquire and GQ at the (relatively) highbrow end, and Playboy at the more salacious end--and going rapidly down the cheesecake slalom from there. As media journalist David Carr recently wrote in The New York Times, "Then came the British publishers. They attacked the American market by mating the bawdy Fleet Street tabloid tradition to the untethered humor of Monty Python and conjured something truly new--must-read magazines like Maxim, Stuff, and FHM for the Gen X and Gen Y young man. They captured nearly five million new American readers, virtually all men and all lost to American publishers." This kind of coup rarely happens in magazine journalism, and it says something about how Brit-receptive American culture has become. True to form, the new media Goths don't exactly see themselves as custodians of an elevated journalistic tradition. In a speech to students at the Columbia School of Journalism, Keith Blanchard, the editor-in-chief of Maxim, ridiculed those American editors who "see themselves as keepers of the flame of culture. ... As a class, they believe it's their right, nay, their sacred duty as the informed elite to use their pages to educate and uplift a nation of irrelevant drones." A brief look at the September 2002 issue will testify that he hasn't made the same mistake. Above its banner is the following list of subjects: "SEX. SPORTS. BEER. GADGETS. CLOTHES. FOOTBALL. " The only article of any length is a racy account of warfare between Hell's Angels and their rival gangs. And the closest it gets to "new man" sensitivity is the following quiz: "ARE YOU A GIRL? TAKE THIS QUIZ AND FIND OUT, NANCY!" Needless to say, it's one of the fastest-growing magazines in the United States.
But lowbrow as Maxim may be, it's hard not to be impressed by its energy, humor, and irreverence. It reads the way most men speak in private, without the forced and awkward heterosexuality of the more upscale men's mags--their pretensions to literature, their cloying celebrity profiles. It's refreshing to read a Q & A with a sexy film star that begins with the sentence, "There are far worse visions to see upon arriving at a Malibu beach house than Lucy Liu in a micro-size white bikini sprawled on the sand out back." Or another Q & A with LL Cool J that begins quite simply: "Just how many hats do you own?" Or another questionnaire that offers to answer the question, "ARE YOU AS DUMB AS YOU LOOK ?" This is the new British subculture that you see in the movies of, say, Guy Ritchie, Madonna's husband (I'm not including his direction of the latest Madonna vehicle). It is fast-paced, highly visual, working-class, anti-p.c.--and often very funny.
[T] he perfect emblem of the new Britishness, however, isn't Maxim or "The Weakest Link," "American Idol," or the New York Post. It's Ozzy Osbourne. [Illustration by Harry Campbell] The long-since-addled rocker's popular reality show, "The Osbournes"--in which viewers observe him and his deranged family trying to deal with everyday life--is centered on Ozzy's personality. And while you never forget he's British, Rex Harrison he ain't. He's offensive, a terrible influence on the younger generation, a man who has consumed more illicit substances than most of us have ever heard of, and a purveyor of ear-splitting cacophony.
He's also irresistible. And the reason for this, I'd hazard, is his complete honesty and lack of concern for what anyone else thinks of him. He's completely integrated into the cultural establishment--wowing the crowds at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and performing for the Queen at Buckingham Palace--but is a deeply anti-establishment figure, a man who could break the rules at any time. He says what he thinks and is utterly without piety. In this respect, he echoes his New Brit peers. Say what you like about Tina Brown, the erstwhile editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk Magazine; for all her faults, she never passed herself off as some grand crusader for social justice or great journalism, as understood by Columbia J-School types. She was an impresario of entertainment that could include, but was not exclusively geared toward, writing-for-the-ages journalism. Reading her magazines or watching Ozzy or listening to Cowell berate teenybopper wannabes, the one thing you don't feel is that you're being condescended to. Try watching PBS or reading GQ or listening to Peter Jennings, and you'll see what I mean.
Of course, this Britishness becomes, like so many cultural imports into the United States, effortlessly churned into a new American hybrid. Ozzy and Tina and "Pop Idol" and Maxim are not British in anything but a tangential sense anymore. They're American. In time, these cultural mixtures will surely migrate back to Britain where they will become another thing entirely. And some British cultural exports are Americanized almost as soon as they arrive here. The Harry Potter movies are a case in point, their literary polish sandblasted away by Hollywood upon impact. And what to make of Austin Powers? It's a Canadian comic's homage to a British movie tradition marketed primarily to Americans. But what it has in common with the other recent British imports is that it doesn't even pretend that Britain is somehow the repository of culture or learning or sophistication anymore. It's people with bad teeth, awful chest hair, and inscrutable slang. And we've never loved them more. |
