This morning I watched Dancing on Ice: The Final, a repeat from Sunday evening. Being pathologically unable to watch television without my laptop in front of me, I'd already seen that Ray Quinn, a celebrity due to his previous appearance as runner-up on the X Factor, having discovered a genuine talent for ice skating through the competition had then won overall. He beat Donal MacIntyre, a journalist, made celebrity due to his willingness to go undercover and put his life in danger, which seemed a little at odds with the neon spandex of his ice dance costumes; and Jessica Taylor, a celebrity due to her previous appearance on the talent competition Pop Stars, a forerunner of X Factor, where she and the other runners up became the momentarily successful pop group Liberty X.
Over the series, Torvill and Dean, famous for being incredibly successful at their sport of ice dance and winning a lot of medals, auditioned amateur none-celebrities (there ought to be a word for people who aren't celebrities now, just to distinguish them. Might I suggest 'ignority', one who is unworthy of notice?) to become their Ice Stars. So, they auditioned a selection of ignorities, all of whom were talented ice skaters, all of whom were wannabe celebrities, and they selected five acts to appear last week, the winner of which would appear live on last night's Dancing on Ice: The Final. The finalists were interviewed, worked with the choreographers from the show, then performed for Jane and Chris, who chose a group of five lads calling themselves The Oxford Freestylers, as being suitably talented but also 'street' and 'out there' for their ignority act. It is important that when sharing a stage with a genuine celebrity that an ignority is either a rough diamond (in their performance, their accent, their intelligence or their clothing) or if showing potentially equal talent to the real celebrities (ie, they've appeared in a reality TV final before as Ray and Jessica had), then they must be only about six years old in order that they will not pose an immediate threat and so that the tabloid press can chart their slow decline into rehab by the age of fifteen.
Am I starting to sound cynical? I do apologise, stay with me, there is a point...
The Oxford Freestylers were interviewed before their performance about what winning Meant To Them. And their youngest member, straight to camera, said that for him, it had been an amazing journey. And it got me thinking... how on earth did a fourteen year old come out with the words 'amazing journey'? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd been listening to Ray, Donal and Jessica for the last hour- 'chance of a lifetime', 'such an honour', 'amazing thrill', 'pleasure to work with', 'didn't think I'd get so far', 'just wanted the experience' almost on a loop, but something struck me about hearing it from someone so young. It's not a natural thing for a teenager to say. And his expression when he said it- so earnest, so serious, so self deprecating- now modesty is all well and good, but I know teenagers, and when they're good at something they like to tell you about it. And I realised, he'd learned it from watching. From our (un)reality TV soaked culture, where every contestant knows that they must strike the right balance between confident and humble, charming and demure, endearing and cheesy, must profess shock when they win and gratitude (and tears) when they lose, must, in short, play the game by the established celebrity rules.
We are reaching a point where our teenagers will expect that when they go for a job interview it will involve a ten minute piece to camera about how much the job means to them, what they will feel if they get it, how much they've enjoyed the selection process, how great it's been to meet the potential employers and other candidates, and a tearful tribute to their nan, who's always believed in them This will be followed by a vote and a prolonged announcement of the winning candidate by the MD. Oh, and lesser jobs awarded for the runners up so no-one feels left out.
I contrast this with three news reports, two from today, one from earlier in the week. In the earlier one, Dr Carol Craig, addressing a conference of Headteachers, warned that the constant drive to build self-esteem in schoolchildren had gone too far, and that we were in danger of creating a society of narcissists, unable to take criticism. 'If we say to people the most important thing is how you feel about yourself, then if a child fails maths and feels bad, it is very tempting for them to blame it on others like teachers and parents.'
The second, from today, was from Childline, the charity set up with the whole purpose of listening to children, and how they feel. They said that the number of children ringing to talk about feelings of suicide had tripled in the last five years, some calls from children under the age of eleven. Tripled. Now this would seem to be at odds with Dr Craig's assessment of the way we manage the feelings of children, were it not for the fact that Dr Craig's job is as chief executive of the Centre for Confidence and Wellbeing.
Now before I get lynched at dawn, please understand, I am a great supporter of therapy, having been in it for several years, and fully support people being in touch with their feelings, an expression which has always reminded me of the old joke about having baths- once a month, whether I need it or not. How do you get in touch with your feelings? By email? a quick call? Perhaps these days a tweet is all that is necessary- in touch in 140 characters or less. And there, in all seriousness, lies the problem.
We encourage children to feel, but then we don't tell them what to do with those feelings once they've got them; how to manage a sense of success and failure, how to form sense of well-being and develop a proportionate response to things around them. We compartmentalise feelings into something you 'do' when a camera is pointed at you, or when a tragedy occurs. We then blur the lines between tragedy, setback and minor disappointment. We set up celebrity role models to show them the correct way to respond to disappointment, the depth of sincerity required to get anywhere ('it means the world/my life/everything to me'- count how many times it occurs on the next X Factor auditions) and the expectation that you too can be Ray, can be Alicia, can be Jade. And I write this knowing the end of that particular tragic drama, whilst already the 'peoples princess' comparisons are being written and the black- edged red- tops tout their particular pledge for a legacy, a tribute, a memorial. We tell our kids that they can have that. They deserve it. And why? Because they're worth it. And then we're surprised when they feel an overwhelming sense of hollowness, of failure, when they wonder what the point of life is and talk genuinely about suicide, and we're shocked by how harshly they judge each other, bully each other to establish the same pecking order that we as the adults show them to be the norm. Dr Craig is right- we have to find a way to teach them what reality is, but more than that, we have to show them some way of handling their feelings in life, and somehow start to realign our culture to promote role models who do that successfully, and I'm not talking about Rooney's little tantrum on Sunday. I'd be willing to bet that the statistics on not only suicide, but also drug abuse and teenage pregnancy would show a remarkable shift if this was our aim, rather than mere A-C at GCSE.
The Oxford Freestylers were fantastic, really, and I genuinely applaud them, the parents who supported them going, and the people who coached them. They were very talented, and their routine was creative and innovative. I just pray that when the lights fade on the Dancing on Ice tour that there is enough satisfaction within themselves to sustain the interest in their hobby, and pass it on to another generation of Oxford skating kids. To find the merit in a journey away from the media spotlight.
Interestingly, the third news item was about a report from Becta, suggesting that parents are beginning to feel left out by their children's reluctance to talk about school and their lives. There's already a psychologist on the case, ready to deal with the anxiety the parents feel about this matter. Maybe we're a generation further in to the narcissism than we thought. How do we teach this new generation of reality culture parents to begin to introduce realism into their own parenting?
Would it be cynical of me to suggest they bought a video camera?
