no fucking deal

As George Monbiot points out in his excellent editorial in today’s grauniad, the children of this country are richer, fatter and sicker than ever before. The BMA come up with the devastating conclusion that

Rises in mental health problems seem to be associated with improvements in economic conditions

This ain’t the Morning Star medical column. This is the British Medical Association official report. Monbiot put’s forward as one explanation for this frightening corrolation as the increasing chasm between expectation and reality. Between the 30 million to one chance of being a rich and successful Big Brother contestant and spending 24 hours a day watching idiots on TV. Between making the cover of a teen mag under the headline “Get this Bikini bod with no effort” or being one of 11% of girls who have self-harmed. Between the 80% of people surveyed by the New York Times who believed that poor people could be come wealthy ‘just by working hard’, and the 10% of adult men who move from the bottom to the top quartile of the income scale. Between deal and no deal or no fucking deal.

Just looking at his come-hither tan makes me want to lose my lunch for the next week. But railing against his £500,000 book deal for cosmic ordering (the man spent five years or so repeating to himself ‘please can i be back on tv’, and like magic it happened) and his shameless ditching of comedy brother blobby would be to miss the point. The point is that millions of people every day watch a 45 minute show in which absolutely nothing happens, and they CARE. Sure, seinfield was famously a show about nothing. But that really meant it was a show about everything, at least everything that can happen to a fictional comedian which a prime-time TV audience could concievably enjoy. Deal or no deal is about millions of idiots thinking they know better than twenty idiots thinking they no better than one idiot whose sole task is to decide whether or not they want some money. And as the answer is invariably yes, the entire program is devoted to nauseatingly irrelevant faux-tactics, dealing with some fictional ‘Bank Manager’ whom Noel is on the phone to so frequently he has ‘repetitive strain injury’.

At least with the lottery there is no illusion that the prizes are doled out irrespective of merit. While the concept of a tax on the mathematically challenged (read poor) mascarading as a fundraising escapade whilst paving the way for super-casinos is repellent, surely, to anyone with a memory of ten years or so, at least it was obvious. It’s contestants did not pretend to discuss strategy. There was no perceived ’skill’ to winning the jackpot. But even before the lottery and big brother could finish peeling away the last veneer of meritocracy from the public perception of success, it was being painted on again in even cheaper colours.

Deal or no deal is reality television in it’s true 21st century form. A goal is set, which is, as usual, a glittering pot of money. The path to the goal is, as always, a narrow and highly specialised skill of no use outside the context of the show. In this case the skill is choosing when to open a box. It could be anything, from eating an insect in a jungle to outbitching your fellow inmates on channel 4’s open prison. And there is the inevitable irrelevant showboating of people who play the game the way they think people want to see it played. Of such drama dreams are born. Like everything else wrapped in cellophane, their shelf-life is mysteriously decreasing.