The greatest TV show on earth
As Ballard readers know...
my father was fascinated by the way that advances in technology and the mass media have changed and revolutionized our lives in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the beginnings of this century. As a scientist by nature, and by training, he was deeply interested in technological changes and developments in every sphere.
He was fascinated by the way that technology was changing our lives, including: the explosion of cities, the creation of suburbia, the motorway landscape, and in medical technological advances, most notably The Human Genome Project. All the myriad ways that technology is improving our lives but also creating a different way of living, and a new form of reality.
Television particularly interested him. He once said, “Reality now is a kind of huge advertising campaign, selling television’s image of what life is about.”
The birth of television and the way it has changed and radically impacted our lives is something that he lived through. In the early 1950s he watched TV with his parents in Manchester on a tiny set that was little more than a glowing light bulb. But by the mid 1960s TV was a window into the world—viewers saw events unfolding virtually live—events such as The Vietnam War, or the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. This transformed TV into “a window on the world”.
The arrival of colour tv heightened this experience further. Indeed I remember when we were children growing up in Shepperton, our excitement the day that our first colour television set arrived. It was as if we were stepping into a whole new world. No more black and white, everything seemed different, more real. As a family in the evenings we gathered around the television together after supper. My father was particularly excited by the US space programme, and I remember watching with him the Apollo rocket launches from Cape Canaveral. It was deeply exciting to see these events beamed live into our living room.
The US space programme was the ultimate technological feat—an ambitious project that showed man’s advances and pioneering spirit, and sought to discover and go beyond what we knew. It brought together my father’s love of aviation with his interest and excitement in technological and scientific advances. It also seemed to sum up everything that was great about America—pioneering, advancing, looking to the future. The country that created the Ford motor car was now taking us to the moon and beyond.
As a child and teenager growing up, I remember many key world events that we watched together on television. After spending a day writing, and making sure we were fed and bathed after school, my father liked to sit down with a whisky or gin and tonic and watch tv with us. It was an eclectic mix – he loved American crime dramas—The Rockford Files, Hawai-50, more recently CSI—particularly the edition set in Miami as it was a city he loved and often dreamt of living in. He also liked gritty British cop dramas like The Sweeney, and several British sitcoms—Steptoe & Son, Minder.
But of course he was not just watching TV for entertainment. He was watching the way that it was shaping our reality, and delivering our view of the world. Everything from Kennedy’s assassination, to Reagan’s election, the rise of Mrs Thatcher, the arrival of punk in the UK, the cult of Princess Diana—he was fascinated by the way that television was presenting and filtering events that were happening on the world stage. In parallel to this, he also followed advertising and the techniques that were being used in this field, to sell us not just products but dreams of a better life—or so we thought.
I often wonder if my interest in television—and my choice to pursue it as a career—I went into television after university, and became a producer—was influenced by those early days, and by the constant and ever evolving conversation I would have with my father about the way that the media was exploding and impacting our lives. Some years ago I devised an idea for a documentary series when I was working at the BBC—entitled Fame in the Twentieth Century. The purpose was to look at both the rise of the mass media and also the cult of celebrity in our new electronic age. Did achievement mean anything any more? People could become famous just for being famous. Warhol and the way that he was exploring this area, very much interested my father.
When reality television became a massive new trend, initially in the UK and then America—my father was unsurprised—I think he knew it was coming. He once said to me—“How about a series with celebrities fighting?!”…uttered of course with a certain amount of glee in his voice and a mischievous chuckle. Of course he was right—we’ve seen that many times over now, from I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here to other incarnations. American cable TV is awash with such formats. The rise of reality TV spawned formats such as The Kardashians family series—a bizarre show that was, and remains, a form of “constructed reality”. Supposedly about their “everyday” lives, it features fighting and dramas, all carefully scripted and produced I’m sure. Indeed working in television as I do, it’s not unusual to hear producers discussing what will “work” for an audience and what will constitute entertainment.
The boundaries of what is permissible on TV now, have also been pushed further: in the UK, Channel 4—once the home of arts and documentary programming—now screens a dating show called Naked Attraction, where contestants stand entirely naked with their genitals scrutinized in close-up as they serve themselves up ready to be chosen. The genitals are not pixillated. TV audiences and commissioners are looking for the next thrill and what was considered shocking 10, or even 5 years ago, is now acceptable to our jaded palates. What will come next? I wish I could discuss it with my father—I suspect he would say, “Live Sex”. We almost have it on some shows, but usually peeked at through night-vision cameras which catch the furtive fumblings of contestants under the duvet at 2am on Big Brother. Full intercourse is bound to follow, I’m convinced.
But in a way TV itself is now finding itself outdated, making way for new forms of technology, new forms of entertainment and reality. With the arrival of You Tube and the internet, who needs a mainstream TV network or channel to serve up the audience a pre-programmed diet of shows they have selected, featuring manicured and over-produced celebrities? I think my father knew that people would tire of conventional television and would find their own lives more fascinating, especially where they could become the central star themselves. As most Ballard fans know, he predicted You Tube nearly 30 years ago, in 1977, in an interview with Vogue magazine:
“…the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.”
With those prescient words, he was also predicting Facebook and other social media such as Instagram. My own children have grown up with Facebook and now Instagram, and I see them and their friends filtering and manipulating their profiles and photos to present what they see as the best version of themselves and their lives. Photos are re-touched before posting, social media etiquette is carefully positioned.
What is staggering of course is that my father never owned a computer or accessed the internet directly himself. I often offered to buy him a computer to save him endlessly typing out his successive drafts, but he always resisted it. So he was formulating these visions purely based on his own observations and knowledge of the human psyche, married with his knowledge and interest in technology. He was also a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines.
Some years later, once the internet had arrived, and computers were becoming commonplace in our lives, he accessed material from the internet via Claire Walsh, who would fax him interesting articles she came across. I also discussed with him on a regular basis changes in technology and the latest developments in media.
I think the next really interesting phase in the advancement of media technology is going to be virtual reality and augmented reality. My father was already aware of some of the nascent technology being developed, and this area fascinated him. We are now about to see the launch in September of Facebook’s Oculus, which its publicity material describes as:
“VR has the power to change the world by enabling people to experience anything, anywhere, with anyone”
Virtual reality technology is also being developed by Google—theirs is revealingly and enticingly called “Daydream”. Sony is releasing its new PlayStation VR in October.
This new technology blurs the line between gaming and reality, and will allow users to step into worlds and experiences that are far removed from their daily lives. The extensions of what may be possible are endless. Of course the benevolent uses of this are wonderful—who would not want to experience the thrill of deep-sea diving off the Great Barrier Reef from the safe comfort of their living room in suburbia? But what else might people be tempted to try, just for the thrill of it? As my father once said,
“We will have the freedom to pretend to be a mass murderer for the evening…You’ll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/ dramas”.
I read recently that engineers at Audi have created a virtual Audi A4 that uses an Oculus Rift headset to stimulate emergency situations:
According to reports The Audi Virtual Experience car has a number of features that enable a driver to wear a headset and then go out for a drive in a real car. The simulation takes place on a controlled track at Munich airport. The virtual world features a track around a virtual city. In the virtual world a cyclist falls over and another virtual car pulls out in front of the driver. The experience demonstrates the car’s autonomous emergency braking system which activates and brings the car to a stop without any input from the driver. This technology is used to give customers the chance to experience the emergency technology in a safe environment. It is set to be rolled out around the world soon.
It doesn’t feel like we are a world away from Crash and my father’s famous equation:
Sex x Technology = The FuTure.
The thrill of car crashes without the injuries or death. Although users might enjoy that too? The ultimate thrill? As long as they can take off their helmet at the end and go back to walking the dog, or visiting the shopping mall. As my father once said: “Modern technology makes possible the expression of guilt-free psychopathology”.
Obama has made a virtual reality film about Yosemite National Park, in which you can take a tour of the park with the President. Produced to mark the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, it’s a lovely idea to promote interest in this important natural resource. But think of the other possibilities featuring celebrities harnessed to a VR experience—I’m sure it won’t be long before you can have virtual sex with your favourite celebrity—just imagine, you could have sex with Beyonce, or Tom Cruise, if you so desire?
The other aspect of virtual reality that I have observed is the trend towards solo, rather than shared, experiences. Conventional television used to be a shared experience— families gathering around the TV set to watch a programme together, as we used to do with my father in the evenings, growing up in Shepperton. However now with the explosion of VOD channels, the watching of television and screens is becoming more solitary. I see it among my friends and their teenagers, and also at home with my own kids—we are all watching screens—usually laptops—in different rooms, and rarely watch simultaneously, all together, one television and programme. The generation now growing up wants to watch what they want to watch, on demand, when they want to watch it. I feel the same way. The huge popularity of Netflix is testimony to this, and it is why other providers such as Amazon and HBO are now ramping up their offerings and creating more TV content. They are taking on the big networks and winning. Partly this is because they are creating great cutting edge new content— Netflix in particular has commissioned a number of brilliant new dramas and documentaries—from House of Cards, to Narcos, to Making of a Murderer.
Part of this new TV watching culture is binge-viewing— we want to be able to motor through 4 or 5 episodes at once in an evening or over a weekend. Being forced to wait a week by a TV network for the next episode feels antiquated. Rather like going back to watching black and white TV after watching colour. In this sense I think conventional linear TV is dead. I envisage a time when it’s only watched by an increasingly aged audience, who are not tech-savvy and are still happy to be passively fed a diet of scheduled programming, chosen for them by someone else.
The developments in media technology have also had a profound impact on the world of politics. I would love to know what my father would have to say about Trump’s meteoric political rise and his current race for the White House. He would have found it fascinating. Given that my father predicted a B-movie actor (Ronald Reagan) becoming President, I doubt he would have been surprised that a TV reality star might be heading for the White House. But it’s hard to imagine it happening in a world before TV and social media. TV loves Trump’s sound-bite style—his brashness and machismo. In the American Apprentice series Trump sat in a boardroom similar to the Oval Office. It was a dramatic setting clearly designed to accentuate his power: the mahogany oak table, the superior lighting, the American flag in the background and the informed advisers conjure an image of Trump as pseudo-president.
Perhaps the reason his approval rating amongst the American public is so high is because he’s appeared in their living rooms for so long as a TV reality star, playing a fictional commander. They like the idea of a powerful and decisive leader who dismisses people with a fierce “You’re Fired!”
In the UK the recent EU referendum was also played out like a TV show. Four major debates were staged on TV to discuss Leave or Remain, with politicians representing the opposing sides. The debates were staged like a TV talent show, with the politicians on stage debating in short, sound-bite style. One of the debates was held at Wembley Arena—in front of a vast crowd who either hollered approval or jeered, Hunger Games style. This was not a debate that was conducted with intelligence and due consideration, even though it had severe implications for the UK’s future. It was about who performed best on TV. Like just another episode of The X Factor. Except that Britain got to lose its future health and stability, rather than missing out on a record company contract.
Interestingly the tide of nationalist, anti-immigration hysteria which has enveloped Britain, and ultimately led to Brexit, was something my father had already spotted in the UK and written about in Millennium People and Kingdom Come. We are now seeing this rise in nationalist sentiment coming to the fore in other parts of Europe—perhaps most notably in France—all played out on TV of course. As Marine Le Pen vows to “win back Freedom for France”, we see her riding a global mood that unites her and Trump.
Trump…Le Pen…the break-up of Europe…the rise of nationalism… violent terrorist attacks…the world feels eerily unstable at present, and meanwhile we will retreat into new private worlds of fantasy and escape through virtual reality. It feels like we really are heading for The Greatest TV Show on Earth…
Essay from Deep Ends: The J.G. Ballard Anthology.