The Glidd of Glood Blog

Trump – How reality TV and Twitter made a moron a fake president

"You're fired!"

Reality TV is, according to Wikipedia, almost as old as TV itself. The premise is fairly simple: Instead of bothering to write a detailed script and have actors perform it as a drama, you just create a situation, which could be a game, draft in some people off the street, put them in the situation and film them. They will write their own drama. The advantages of the format are obvious. It’s far cheaper for a start. No need to pay for a scriptwriter or actors, or even a director. The second advantage is that it is easy for the televisual audience to identify with the protagonists as they are everymen or everywomen – the sort of people you go to work with. You can very easily spin the thing into a series and then duplicate that over many seasons. From a production point of view, it’s a sure-fire winner and TV ratings tend to bear this out. People love watching reality TV, from Big Brother to The Apprentice to The Voice to Love Island.

But, an essential thing to realise is that there is no reality in reality TV. We are not watching a slice of life. We are watching a drama played out which is manipulated by the show’s producers, so that, although it isn’t scripted as such, it will follow an artificial path leading to maximum audience involvement.

You can’t help having noticed how in The Apprentice the participants aren’t, fortunately, the majority of the people you work with. They are the outliers, the ridiculously overbearing fools with few social skills who are somehow convinced of their total genius. Naturally, they aren’t going to get along with their fellow participants or create cohesive teams. On the contrary, conflict is guaranteed and conflict is the stuff of drama and great television. The participants were not drawn out of a hat; they were cast to ensure that The Apprentice is not one long snoozefest (although I sympathise with anyone who thinks that it is).

Similarly, you can’t help noticing that the participants of The Voice, whatever their talent for singing, seem to over-index on the beauty front. Most of them are very good-looking, at least in the French version that I have seen on occasion. If they aren’t telegenic, then they are deliberately odd or quirky looking. What they aren’t is a cross section of society who likes to sing. There are some token older people, but they are guaranteed never to make the latter stages of the competition which is overwhelmingly skewed in favour of teenagers and the young. The public doesn’t want to see a load of old, failed singers; it wants to look at sexy young ones who haven’t yet failed. The “competition”, such as it is, seems hopelessly manipulated by the producers to the extent that you are quickly disabused of the idea that you are looking at some open event in which the chances of the candidates are equal. They aren’t. The ones that weren’t suited to television never made it to your screen.

Donald Trump, had he not been cast as the mogul in the US version of The Apprentice, would have remained some obscure and ridiculous property tycoon, famous only for having trophy wives and an absurd haircut. His chances of rising to the US presidency would have been approximately zero. But there you are. He was cast in the role of a business Solomon, not because of any innate wisdom he might have possessed but because he didn’t even have to act to play the part of an overbearing executive who loved firing people. Naturally, being astonishingly stupid, he believed his own hype, but he was just typecast for the role, for the greater entertainment of the viewing public.

In the UK version, Alan Sugar – Lord Sugar to you – plays the same role. I would not wish to impugn Alan Sugar with being in the same class of stupidity as Donald Trump – not remotely. He has managed to make himself a lot of money (as if that is a yardstick of capability), but he is best known as the founder of Amstrad and you will have noticed that you can’t buy an Amstrad computer anymore. Sugar is not a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates. He’s a hustler, a deal-maker rather than a visionary. Would you want him running the UK? Er… no, not really. Just as well that he doesn’t seem to want to. The criteria for a good Apprentice mogul do not include visionary leadership. Frankly, real visionaries in the Elon Musk mould are far too busy being visionary and making their vision a reality to have time to spend in TV pseudo business games. That’s the clue.

Donald Trump’s excessive narcissism and stupidity made him a great caricature to fill the TV mogul role in the show. It is just sad that large swathes of the American TV-watching public couldn’t see the irony. But then irony has never been an American strong suit.

I first heard of Twitter in either 2008 or 2009. I was at some sort of breakfast meeting in London hearing about the latest developments in social media as marketing opportunities. It was barely called social media then. There was no Instagram, Facebook was still yet to be adopted wholesale and Twitter was the sort of place where only early adopters were going to be found hanging out. I remember thinking at the time that the clue was surely in the name: Twitter, the mindless, non-sensical warbling of humanity, unlikely to say anything profound or interesting in 140 characters as for the most part, entirely lacking in the genius of Ogden Nash.

Nothing since then has convinced me that Twitter isn’t anything other than a total waste of time. Handy, no doubt, to get the low-down, as it is happening, of some terrorist attack or disaster, but at what cost? Who has got the time to scroll through endless pages of inane chatter in the hope of some nugget of truth? Twitter has been responsible for the ending of countless careers as those who would have been better off keeping schtum have felt the need to be voicing their half-arsed and easily misquotable opinions to the world at large.

And who do we most identify with this medium of inanity? Why, Donald Trump, of course, the man who invented not only diplomacy by Twitter, in its least diplomatic form, but also government by Twitter.

If it is safe to say that without his appearance on The Apprentice, Trump wouldn’t have had a snowflake’s chance in hell of being elected president of the US, it is equally true, almost more so, that had Twitter not been invented, the reality TV star would never have made it to the Republican nomination, let alone the White House. Twitter is the means through which Trump could express his narcissism and half-baked prejudices to an audience of half-baked voters. No need for a press conference, just blurt out your ill-formed opinions and someone was bound to be listening and happy to amplify them. It made great copy. What was likely to gain more eyeballs, saying that Mexicans are all rapists, or saying that most Mexicans in the US are hard-working reasonable people with only a small minority posing any kind of problem? Exactly. Twitter is medium made for morons. The more moronic your views, the more likely they are to be amplified. It’s probably coded into the algorithms.

Was Twitter designed to fulfil some higher purpose of bonding humanity into a wiser, more cohesive global whole? Or was it just another Silicon Valley experiment, like Pinterest or Instagram, to see if it couldn’t make its inventor untold millions? A Silicon Valley start-up method is to throw stuff at a wall and see what sticks. Most of it doesn’t, but every now and again, something does. That’s when you hit the big time.

The world could so easily have lived without Twitter and it could so easily again. In the meantime, it has given us chronic disinformation, Russian bot-accounts and the biggest fool that the White House has ever seen. Trump likes to shout “fake news!” at everyone who presents a fact-based narrative that contradicts his fictions, spouted on a daily basis. “You’re fake news!” he says to hapless reporters who dare to question his hype. But Trump himself is a fake president. He is the reality TV president, a bloke sitting at the Oval Office desk who doesn’t have a clue. He would have preferred to be king, but this is as close as he can get. Will the Coronavirus pandemic wake up a somnolent voting public, or will they later in the year vote for a Trump Season Two? It’s by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. Sadly, it all depends on how many more people have to die before voters realise that have a reality TV, Twitter-made president.

My Scientology Movie - a review

 

If you were a business and your product was secrets, you probably wouldn’t be falling over yourself to talk to the press. You’d be even less likely to want to talk to a journalist who has a reputation for exposing humbug and 1.79 million Twitter followers, if you yourself have developed a reputation for questionable business practices.

So, in some respects it came as no surprise when, in the opening minutes of Louis Theroux’s My Scientology Movie which was shown on BBC last night, he informed us that the Church of Scientology had declined to cooperate with him in the making of the film. He would not be allowed to film within the Church and they would not give him interviews. They wanted nothing to do with him. This isn’t the most auspicious start for a documentary film. But then one imagines that documentary film-makers are used to this sort of thing. After all, if everyone just told you whatever you wanted to know, you’d barely need journalists to provide exposés. Getting around obstruction is the journalist’s stock in trade.

Louis was not to be outsmarted so easily. If you can’t get into the Church, what you can do instead is entice it to come to you and gain some sort of access that way. In Theroux’s case, although he didn’t admit to it, what this consisted of was to get the number 1 critic of the Church on board and stage re-enactments of some of the most notorious Scientology events. To create the re-enactments, you advertise for actors. By doing this all under the nose of the Scientology headquarters, you’d be bound to attract their attention and so it proved. At one point in the film, with the Church seemingly well-informed of what Theroux’s team was getting up to, he gleefully inquired “Do you think we have a mole?” It was a bit like a carp angler wondering whether there was a fish on the hook when his float has disappeared beneath the surface of the lake.

Just to make doubly sure, Theroux and his team drove past Scientology’s desert establishment repeatedly and stopped their car or cars in view of the video cameras with which the perimeter fence is festooned. This elicited the desired response. Scientology goons appeared for some “squirrel-busting”, in their jargon, which involves obtrusively filming anyone who they perceive to be a threat whilst a second goon berates the inquisitive person and tells them to go home or desist their interest in the Church. You can see umpteen examples of this bullying tactic in YouTube videos. If you are a lone or essentially powerless individual, it must be very unnerving, but in Theroux’s case it was just hilariously funny. Although the Scientology camera was a large, chunky-looking, professional affair, they were never going to be able to out-film the BBC. The BBC team just outgunned them, as it contained a cameraman, a bloke with a big microphone on a boom and a director, in addition to Theroux and his informant Marty Rathbun.

On one occasion the unfortunate and rather good-looking girl who showed up with a camera-toting colleague at Theroux’s makeshift studio was reduced to squatting on the pavement and smoking a nervous cigarette while Louis and his team attempted to get her to divulge some information. It made great TV.

Marty Rathbun was the erstwhile Scientology Inspector General or enforcer who has since turned grass, if not “supergrass”, as one of his former colleagues alleged that he still wasn’t telling all he knew. This is probably because he spent decades as Scientology’s chief bully, second only to the apparently psychotic supremo David Miscavige and must have done an awful lot of bullying in his time. He came across as an unpleasant individual and his relationship with Theroux was extremely frosty at times, with him calling Theroux a “fucking asshole” when the latter tried to point out that the “squirrel-busters” were perhaps employing techniques that he, Rathbun, had pioneered.

The basic business model of Scientology – and it should be viewed as a business, rather than anything else – is that Scientologists attend a complex set of courses, each costing considerable sums of money, on a ladder to enlightenment and power. What you don’t want, in these circumstances, is for people to let the cat out of the bag before the student has stumped up the cash. Unfortunately for the Church, in this internet age where information is freely available to anyone who wants to look for it, the Church’s more ridiculous esoteric beliefs – that we are all descended from aliens seeded in volcanoes, for instance – have been widely publicised. It would now be hard to want to part with thousands of $$ to be told that.

Scientology’s teachings seem to rely on confrontational methods where students learn to dominate and bully other people by shouting at them, berating and belittling them. As you might imagine, Marty Rathbun was well-versed in this. But Louis Theroux is the perfect investigator for such a task as he appears protected by a cloak of what appears to be almost autism. As many of his films show, he is comfortable in very uncomfortable situations, or at least more comfortable than the people he finds himself with. I hugely enjoyed one scene with him facing Rathbun, both of them staring intently at each other while a silence hung in the air like a stalling jumbo jet. Who would speak first to diffuse it, the ex-professional bully who had spent a career teaching these techniques, or the mild-mannered Englishman to whom they appeared to come naturally? It was Rathbun who blinked first.

I can’t say that I learned anything much in Louis Theroux’s film that I didn’t know already, but that was probably because I once spent a day reading everything I could find on the cult and looking at many videos including Alex Gibney’s film Going Clear which is reckoned to be the definitive work at this time. Scientology is a cult that inspires revulsion and perhaps fear, but Theroux has succeeded in giving it a comedy value that has been maybe ignored up to now. But then isn’t that what he manages to do with most of his subjects of enquiry?

 

Is digital technology making us miserable?

The excellent BBC documentary, The Doctor Who Gave Up Drugs, threw up a couple of interesting and depressing statistics. According to the programmes, if my memory serves me correctly, prescription of anti-depressants and painkillers have both increased in the UK by 50% in the last decade. These are truly staggering statistics. The programmes followed a doctor who is convinced that such widespread prescription is not only pointless but, owing to side effects, very detrimental to long-term health. The programmes pointed out that somewhere in the region of a quarter of the population is in chronic pain.

This programme was followed up last night with an even more depressing one about the level of Type 2 diabetes which apparently affects some 4 million people in the UK with a further million bound to arrive as the disease is already there, just undiagnosed. Type 2 diabetes is an entirely avoidable disease occasioned by a lousy diet (high in sugar) and no exercise.

What struck me was the changes in lifestyle in the past decade and how they might relate to this apparently enormous increase in ill-health, both physical and mental. It would be facile to trace a direct cause and effect relationship between technology and ill-health, but there are some interesting avenues for reflection.

The first of these is the advent of social media. Facebook was launched in 2004, a mere 12 years ago. Naturally there were also Friends Reunited and MySpace which existed previously, but neither had the reach and the societal-changing effect which Facebook has produced. Twitter only arrived in 2006 and started to get some traction in 2007. Instagram hasn’t been around for more than 6 years at the time of writing.

The premise of social media is to allow distant people to be in frequent contact, to build groups and belonging and to create and strengthen social ties. Its popularity would indicate that these are things which humankind values immensely. You would expect it to increase people’s wellbeing and fight off loneliness. It seems strange, therefore, that as social media has taken over people’s lives and leisure time that this should coincide with a massive increase in the need for anti-depression medication. At the very least, if social media makes people happy, you would expect it to ward off depression and reduce the need for pills. At the worst, it is directly contributing to unhappiness.

I would contend that social media is less about keeping in touch with people you value and more about establishing a permanent and all-pervasive popularity contest. When you think about it, most people don’t have more than a very limited amount of meaningful friendships. How would you define that term? We might say that a real friend is someone who will go out of their way to help you even at some detriment to themselves. They are people you can count on, who know you well and accept your faults and foibles because on balance, they find spending time in your company enriching. When you meet them, communication is effortless. They understand you and you them. If you thought about them as a Venn diagramme, much of their personality and experience would overlap with yours.

Real friendship means seeing them, at least from time to time, or perhaps, as second best, you might phone them up and have a long, fun and interesting conversation with them. If you couldn’t do that, you might write long letters to them and get them back, even if this is by email. What meaningful deep friendship is not is having a plethora of people you hardly know “like” a picture or a comment you have posted. And yet, most of social media is precisely this. You have an army of acquaintances with whom you have friendly if superficial relationships and with whom you share your life. Can you really have 100, 200 or 300 friends?

Facebook is particularly bizarre. Here you share pictures of your children, your holidays and your achievements in the hope that they will interest someone. Naturally, you filter your life to present only the most interesting and envy-making moments. Your children have achieved special distinction and are wonderfully accomplished budding individuals. You don’t mention when they throw insufferable tantrums. You don’t so much photograph the banal evening you are having in your local pub, but your visit to the expensive Michelin-starred restaurant. You ignore your visit to a Saturday afternoon, choc-a-bloc Ikea to buy curtain material, but your 5 days in Marrakesh are extravagantly illustrated. You aren’t seen as you crawl out of bed with a hangover, but you snap yourself trying on some chic outfit in a designer store.

The impression that this leaves us all is that everyone else is having a completely brilliant time consisting of exotic holidays, mouth-watering eating experiences, admirable achievements and a wardrobe-full of expensive designer outfits. People who photograph themselves on Instagram are all would-be models and are happy to snap themselves in the gym, flaunting their toned bodies. How is this likely to make you feel? You compare your humdrum existence with its annoyances and worries with the carefree, hyper-successful lives of all those people you seem to know, albeit tenuously. You might expect this to lower your self-esteem and more importantly to increase your FOMO.

FOMO, for those who don’t already know, is the disease of our times. It is the Fear Of Missing Out. Easyjet sends you their summer offers, where you can visit the whole of Europe for peanuts. Amazon sends you their hot books, which you absolutely must read. You are assaulted with offers you can’t afford to miss, places you don’t have time to go, hotels you can’t afford to stay in, concert tours you can’t possibly attend. All this contributes to the feeling that life is passing you by. More successful, organised and richer people are stuffing their lives with all this goodness, but not you. But you don’t dare switch off. You might miss that offer that is exactly what you were looking for, the piece of information that was precisely destined for you.

Of course, these things have always been happening, but you just didn’t know about many of them, because you weren’t living your life on-line. You might have found out retrospectively that you’d missed out on something, but it was too late. There wasn’t anything that you could now do about it. Digital communication, on the other hand, fills you with daily angst that you are missing out on something. You’ve got to keep up with it: keep reading those emails, keep checking people’s status updates.

Twitter is similarly meaningless. If you get really engaged with Twitter, you won’t be doing anything else. Entire hours and days can pass as you click on all those links that people are posting to interesting pictures, articles or videos. A week later you can’t remember any of them, but you will have filled those 7 days with another feast of “content”. What were you expecting in 140 characters? Wisdom? Twitter is not full of Ogden Nashes. With Twitter you are just trying to convince the greater world of your brilliance and worthiness. You don’t even know these people and the vast majority you’ll never meet. If you really cared about them, you’d spend some time with them. It’s just a meaningless distraction. How would Twitter keep you off Prozac?

By and large, social media wastes your time and makes you unhappy, not fulfilled. It’s odd that we seem to spend so much time involved in it.

The next great revolution of the past decade is the smartphone. Apple launched the iPhone in 2007. Although it wasn’t the first smartphone, it was immediately the best and the one which kicked off the whole industry. The smartphone is a truly staggering invention. It’s not really a phone at all, it’s a pocket computer which can access the entirety of human knowledge and incidentally make phone calls. It is pointless to even start to list all the things it can do and we all know what they are in any case. It is closely related to social media as the camera allows you to document your life permanently, should you wish to, and the various apps and communication tools allow you both to share it with everyone else and to be permanently abreast of what they are doing themselves. And seemingly whatever absent people are doing is more interesting than what you are doing. That is why you consult it frequently even as you are meeting your real friends. That is why you attend to its every beep whilst they are attempting to have a conversation with you. Not to worry, they will stop listening to you to attend to their own beeps as you start talking. With the smartphone, you can live in a constant state of FOMO. And what happens when your friend’s phone beeps continually and they start to attend to their myriad “friends” while yours stays resolutely silent? Well, clearly, you’re just not a person who is interesting enough to be in demand. You loser.

More pernicious, perhaps, than 24/7 social media in your pocket is having an office in your pocket. In the old days, you finished work sometime in the late afternoon or evening and went home. If you were wise, you forgot about work and got on with life until the next morning. Not any more. Now significant emails might arrive at any time of day or night and you probably ought to attend to them at once if you want to have any sort of career. You are still at work on your sofa at 10 pm. The only way you leave the office is when you are asleep (don’t forget to download an app to make sure that you aren’t sleeping like a loser. You probably are.) You’re checking your emails before you have even got out of bed. In a globalised world, someone is always in the office, even if it’s not their sofa. Stuff floods in from the States, Japan, Australia. Some insomniac with no life seems to want to make you miserable by doing all her emails at 6 am. You haven’t even had breakfast. You loser.

Of course, it wouldn’t matter that much but you know that unseen people are queuing up to do your job. Cheaper. Better keep on top of it. It’s not a rat-race, it’s a hamster race and you just better keep scampering around in that wheel that never seems to stop. Have to commute to work? Better start on the emails. There’s plenty of work you can do before you even arrive physically at the office. And now we are promised driverless cars. This will be brilliant. You’ll be able to sit in your car and do emails in the traffic jams, or check your “friends’” updates and status. Or you could have no end of fun looking at cat videos.

I really am struggling to see how this bombardment of digital information which completely overwhelms you and demands your attention could possibly contribute to your zen sense of wellbeing. You would expect it to give rise to anxiety, dissatisfaction, feelings of inadequacy and stress. What was that about consumption of anti-depressants increasing by 50% in the past decade?

Take a train. Are people looking idly out of the window lost in reverie or contemplating the countryside? No. They are all glued to their smartphones and tablets, working or interacting. Maybe a few are reading a book. Good on them.

Naturally, if you are spending your time looking at a screen, you won’t be spending it going for a walk or kicking a football around, or even having a cup of tea with anyone. You might expect exercise levels to drop and weight gain to increase. Surprise surprise, this is precisely what you do see. The machines that were meant to set us free have in fact enslaved us. Charlie Chaplin may have satirised the factory, machine world in Modern Times in 1936 where workers struggled to keep up with the cadence dictated by machines, but now it’s just the same except that machines aren’t conveyor belts but digital devices.

Another consideration is that machines function more efficiently than people and this is supposedly a good thing. You can get a machine to do something better than you can. This might have kicked off quaintly with the pocket calculator in the early 70s. Now, with a few button-stabs, you could perform complex calculations that would take you hours of long division and the consulting of log tables. It was superb. Fast forward a few decades and we all have ABS on our cars because the machine can work out for you how hard you should be braking in order for it to be optimal. It’s hard not to quibble with such a safety device. But it hasn’t stopped there, has it? Now you have driving modes, computers that will set the engine characteristics for you, warn you about everything you might not have noticed (but most of which you will have), keep you from skidding, assist your steering and now do the parking (because you are too inept to do it yourself). This will end when the car just does all the driving. How much fun is all this? Do you just want to be a passenger in your daily life? If machines can do everything better than you, what is there left for you to do apart from look at cat pictures?

You might think that technology is perhaps not setting us free and enriching our lives. It is making us incapable (how many phone numbers can you remember?). It is making us irrelevant. And it is set to continue to do so. The much vaunted Internet of Things is coming. You won’t even have to turn on the lights or go shopping. Your fridge will have made up your mind for you. It will probably even have decided what you are having for dinner. You car will sense when you leave the house. It will have already reversed out of the garage and opened its door for you (the rear one).

All that you will be left is taking pictures of your cat, but no doubt an app will arrive to do it for you and post them on line to all your “friends”. Or you could go to the pub, if your diabetes will let you and it doesn’t interfere with your anti-depressants.

 

 

The irrelevancy of the FIFA Blatter succession

By the time you read this, the FIFA election will have happened and a new president will have been voted in. As if we cared.

We don’t care because nothing much will change at FIFA. Nothing much will change, because the very idea of FIFA is flawed and will mean that it can’t change in substance. FIFA exists principally to organise the World Cup, rake in all the cash it generates, and then supposedly distribute that cash around the world in football-esq projects. You have to think, therefore, that the president of FIFA is a sort of Father Christmas character who just showers you with money. Once he has given you the money, his job is pretty well done. What you decide to do with it, in your country, is somewhat up to you. Perhaps some of it never leaves Switzerland; it just changes bank accounts. Some of it will be used to build a new stadium, a plush football headquarters, or at least partially build those things. There certainly doesn’t appear to be a great deal of governance.

The idea of democracy is that it promotes fair and inclusive government. The fairer, more inclusive and less corrupt a government is, the better a country or organisation is generally run which is why the Western democracies set such store on probity. FIFA looks very democratic, from the outside. Every country gets a vote; every country gets a say. Unfortunately, that means that Vanuatu’s opinion is just as important as Germany’s, which in football terms doesn’t seem to make a great deal of sense. There are a lot more footballers and football fans in Germany than in Micronesia. The other essential problem for most of the world, is that their only interest in FIFA is how much money they are going to get out of it. This would imply that it’s quite easy to buy their votes, even if none of the money was actually remitted in a brown envelope or to an offshore bank account.

Arte’s 2 hour, TV documentary Planet FIFA showed how, from the very moment that FIFA took to the international stage, corruption was endemic and institutionalised. Votes are bought for everything, from the presidency, to the attribution of World Cups. Sponsorship deals are corrupt as well. FIFA really is a Mafia.

Voting in a new president, in these circumstances, is just like putting a sticking plaster on someone with several broken ribs, a broken leg and a ruptured spleen: it’s just not going to make any difference whatsoever. The real solution would be for the Swiss to dissolve the whole enterprise on the premise that it is in fact a criminal organisation. Then FIFA could be totally rebuilt anew on entirely different principles.

It’s a money-making enterprise and thus should be run like any other money-making enterprise. Company boards are not elected by their suppliers or even customers. People are sought and appointed to the top jobs. It’s not perfect, but it seems to be better than most other systems. Paradoxically, democracy just can’t work in some circumstances.

I’m not big on presidents. You might think that the purpose of a president would be to preside over meetings, get buy-in, smooth the waters, help set policy and direction. But these days, presidents appear to be more like kings, living in palaces, travelling first class, setting the rules, consolidating their powerbases. You only have to look at France to see that the kings and emperors never really went away. They are just called presidents now. And naturally, there is barely a credible president in the whole of Africa. If you want see a real presidency in action, ironically you need look no further than Switzerland where the presidency of the governing council changes every year, and president is a purely honorary title – the person who has to do all the protocol for foreign visits and the like.

It is heartening to see that the FIFA president, whatever else they do with the organisation, now only gets one term of 4 years. Their time with their nose in the trough now being limited at least to some degree. The idea of someone like Blatter going on and on and on is quite clearly ridiculous. He saw himself as a king, demanding to be treated in all countries like a head of state. And what guarantee do we have that the future president won’t expect the same honours?

FIFA is not fit for purpose and it’s high time it bit the (Qatari) dust.

Tabrett Bethell as Cara - a real dominatrix in an S&M fest

This blog has been taken over by admirers of Tabrett Bethell. Actually, that’s a bit harsh; they haven’t taken over anything, as most visit and leave silently, but it is true to say that now about 95% of this blog’s visitors, from what I can see, are those who have an interest in Tabrett Bethell. I can’t say I blame them. I can imagine that Tabrett’s leather-clad form is infinitely more interesting than anything I can write. Still, it would be pandering to this interest to just become another babe blog, so I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll now write something about Cara, Tabrett, Legend of the Seeker and the wardrobe mistress for all you Legend of the Seeker fans.

  

The first question that springs to mind is, would there be so many people coming to this blog to look at Tabrett photos if, in them, she was wearing a floral print dress (actually, she is, in my third photo in the original post), or is it the leather outfit that attracts? I naturally don’t have an answer to this question (so any LOTS fans reading this might like to tell me) but I have my suspicions. Those suspicions are grounded in simple economics. It is in the interests of the show’s producers to gain as big an audience for the Legend of the Seeker as they can, and it is surely no coincidence that the actresses in it are all babes, while the hero, Richard Cypher (played by Craig Horner) has muscle definition that would put most Olympic athletes to shame. The series has manifest sex-appeal and this has been ramped up in Series 2.

 

 It is said that The Avengers series in the 60s set out deliberately to capture a male audience through the strategy of having Diana Rigg, in the character of Emma Peel, wear a variety of catsuits and go-go boots and other appealing attire. The blatancy of this strategy was even contained in her name: Emma Peel = M Appeal = Man Appeal.

 

Before we go any further with examining Legend of the Seeker, I should like to answer the charge that the TV show is just portraying the books on screen and that all that leather is already in the books. The answer to that objection is multiple. Firstly, the show’s producers wouldn’t hesitate to divert from the original text if they felt that sticking to it would harm viewing figures. Secondly, you might wonder why Terry Goodkind put all the leather in the books (if he did – I haven’t read them) – could it be to increase his readership? Thirdly, the show’s producers must have taken the decision to create LOTS for the screen partly because they could see its sex-appeal and how it would garner audiences. After all, nothing made them do it, and their decision would have been a purely commercial one (such is the way of TV executives and producers).

 

So you have to reckon that having huge amounts of screen time with Tabrett Bethell as Cara encased in leather is doing the ratings no harm at all.

 

 

The leather costume as selling strategy is a common one in the arts – and that can only be because it is very effective. From Barbarella to The Matrix, to Underworld to Catwoman to Barb Wire, entire films have been made predicated on the appeal of good-looking women wearing something tight and shiny. And of course it is used to sell records to you too. If Shakira, Beyoncé, Britney Spears or Posh Spice appear in all-over leather (or PVC – same difference), it’s to stimulate the only interaction you are ever likely to have with them – buying their warblings. I’m not against this strategy. As someone who is highly unlikely to ever download one of their tracks, let alone buy an album, at least they are easy on the eye.

 

Back to the Legend. Rarely can a show have had such a dominant (ha!) S&M theme. It is obvious that the Mord Sith are nothing more than dominatrices. It is all there: the skintight leather outfits, corsetry, boots, pulled-back plaited hair, and the dildo-like leather-covered agiels. Fearfully attractive, they do nothing but inflict pain and misery. It is interesting to see just how much their power is wrapped up in the costume. 

 

Take the example of Denna – the chief dominatrix. There she is, strutting around in her sublime white leather outfit, until she chops it in for a conventional dress in order to escape. Suddenly, prior to falling over a cliff to her death in the manner of Wile E. Coyote, she is stripped of her magnificence and becomes a slightly tearful little girl. We immediately lose all interest in her – or at least her sex appeal takes a big hit. It looks as if she is going to be transformed into a goodie – and what fun is that? Maybe she makes a return subsequently, after all, characters in this show pop in and out of the Underworld with the regularity of visiting a supermarket.

 

Cara is a more nuanced character and here we have the key to her appeal. She is now a goodie, sworn to help the Seeker in his quest, but she still remains ballsy and indomitable and of course gets to keep the leather outfit. So now she is the perfect fantasy figure – tough, self-reliant, unapproachable, infinitely sexy but with a heart of gold under the hard exterior. What’s not to like? No wonder viewers are flocking to admire her. Some seem to think that Tabrett would be uncomfortable (and I don’t just mean physically) wearing that outfit, but this seems dubious reasoning. What actress doesn’t want to hog the limelight? Indeed, the impression is given that Bridget Regan as Khalan felt the need to up her own sex-appeal as she was being shaded out by Tabrett Bethell in the Cara role. Of her new costume she says:

  

“Yeah, it’s funny, because it looks so different from how Kahlan looked before, but the funny part about it is a lot of it I’ve always worn. I’ve always worn this corset under my white dress. The belt I’ve always worn, I’ve always worn black boots — they did extend them up for me, because I was really into the thigh-high boot look.” 

 

So, uncomfortable as a sex-symbol? It doesn’t look like it. In series 1, as the only constant female character, the limelight was all hers and she could get away with the unflattering forest green dress, which might be all very mediaeval, but it hardly packs in the punters. Thankfully it now seems to have disappeared for good.

 

Taking the S&M theme even further, you can even see the entire relationship between Richard and Khalan as vaguely sadistic. There they are, in love with each other, but unable to consummate their relationship owing to their duty to the bigger world. They thus tantalise and torture each other in this predicament, for the greater entertainment of the viewing public.

 

Finally, and apropos of nothing, I want to put in a plug here for Craig Parker as Darken Rahl. After Tabrett Bethell, he is the reason for looking at the show. Immensely amusing, every time he appears (alas, all too briefly in Season 2), I just fall about. He has got the tone bang on – playing the role entirely for laughs. What we need now is an exclusively Cara and Darken Rahl episode.

 

Brilliant Migros chicken ad

A lot of Swiss advertising is pretty dire. Come to that, a lot of advertising is fairly dire, full stop. But the two major Swiss supermarket chains, Coop and Migros, seem to really have raised their game of late. New agencies, new people on the account, or new marketing managers? Who knows.

My favourite ad at the moment is this Migros chicken ad. A complete fairy story, but you can’t help feeling warm and fuzzy about Migros after watching it. And if you think their eggs are fresh, I suppose that that’s a bonus.

If I could buy shares in Tabrett Bethell, I would

Unfortunately, Tabrett Bethell is not a company, or at least not a company you can buy shares in. She is a starlet. Even this might not be true. A starlet is apparently a young actress promoted as being a future star. I am not sure that she is being promoted at all, but I’ll start: she will be a future star.

 
 

Currently playing in a sword and sorcery series screened in the States – Legend of the Seeker (dubbed by one wag as "Legend of the Cleavage") - she has just too much sex-appeal and charisma to remain unnoticed. Unlike many starlets, there is an intelligence in Tabrett Bethell’s eyes that, together with her phenomenal beauty, set her apart from nearly all other women on screen, big or small (screen that is...). Intelligence + sex-appeal is a sure passport to the top. I confidently predict that she will feature shortly in some major films. She and her agent are going to make lots of money.

 

Of course, in a couple of years, she will feature in the BBC’s Celebdaq game and you will be able to buy shares in her. But by this stage, she will be too expensive, which is sad. After all, what’s the point in discovering something and then having to wait until everyone else is in on the act and the price has quintupled before you can buy it? This sounds very mercantile of me. Just take it, like Celebdaq, with a few handfuls of salt.

 

Why mention her at all? I have three very good reasons for this:

 

The first is so that I can do some self-aggrandising “Ha! I told you so!” in a couple of years time, when she is a household name. After all, I may doubt the existence of God, but we aren’t really likely to find out one way or another any time soon, so no one will tell me how wise I was. Whereas when Taberett Bethell is famous, this post will be there in black and white.

 

Secondly, this blog needs more readers. As Tabrett Bethell is so far little known, there is a much better chance of this blog page coming up if anyone searches the web for her, than there is, say, if you search the name Thierry Henry, or “furniture”. So it is a subtle advertising ploy for the blog. Of course, I suspect that the sort of people who do search the web for Tabrett Bethell will find the rest of this blog completely uninteresting and thus will soon move on. But I want to see the uptick in the stats… (You will notice the clever repetition of the name Tabrett Bethell in this post, in order to convince Google that this page is extremely relevant for those looking for information about Tabrett Bethell….)

 

Finally, this blog needs spicing up with a little sex-appeal. There hasn’t been any at all yet, apart from the James Bond with Ursula Andress photo somewhere. It’s about time this changed.

 

If you are one of the roughly 95% of visitors to this blog with a dominant interest in Tabrett Bethell, you can see another post in which she features (and more pix!) here.