Television - Charlotte Raven on an all-action reality show that exploits everyone equally
When I was a little girl, I went to a wrestling match with one of my crazed Cornish aunts. The thing that scared me, much more than the antics of the men in the ring, was the women, whose faces were contorted in what seemed like genuine hatred for the black-caped baddie. The thing they were shouting at wasn't real, but somehow their emotion was. I'd never understood what they felt like until I watched Masters and Servants (Channel 4, Thursdays, 9pm). Knowing that the reality show was a set-up, that the combat was always in some sense contrived, did not stop me from feeling just as angry with its pantomime villains as my aunt had been with the Camborne Crusher.
In the blue corner for the second show was Christine Rose, a builder's wife from Warrington whose defining traits were vicious snobbery and a weird, Pauline Fowleresque pathology about her family. "We do everything together," she said as her troupe of eight children performed synchronised dance steps to a show tune of their own devising. Happily for them, the kids were far too young to have divined any contradictions in a moral code that prohibited swearing but encouraged them to shout abuse at house guests.
"Wipe that smirk off your face!" On day two of his family's stint as the Roses' servants, Richard Mills was subjected to a torrent of insults from Christine and one of her pigtailed horrors. He was doing his best to be a good head butler, but "milady" and her infernal brood were not going to rest until he had absorbed the message that his lot were "pathetic" and a "waste of space".
"Why is life so difficult?" he sighed. You wanted to go in and shake him into some kind of action against the most oppressive masters in the series so far. The rules of the programme state that the family designated as servants must "speak politely at all times" to their betters and get used to being treated like pieces of shit. At the end of a week, the roles are reversed and they get to lord it - literally - over their former masters. Perhaps it was the thought of this prize that prevented Richard from telling Christine Rose where to stick her dishcloths. As humiliation piled on humiliation, it became clear that neither he nor his wife was prepared to break the terms of their contract. Decent people, they worked like slaves until the day came when the Roses were delivered into their service.
"Keep that bitch in check," I thought, "or she's going to walk all over you." If I'd had a handbag, I would have brandished it the way my aunt did that night in Newquay. Sadly, Richard's wife was far too nice to act on my advice. As the Roses pronounced her a slut and not fit to be a mother, she wondered if it was she who was "making an idiot of myself". Eventually, pushed to the limit by her housemaid's refusal to complete her tasks, she exploded. "You're a lazy bitch." "Come on, Sue!" I urged, but it was too little, too late. "Don't let that cow get away with it." At that point, I would have given my right arm to have seen Christine reduced to a blubbering mass of Scouse self-pity.
It was ugly but wotthehell. The only way of responding to this grotesque programme was to whoop and shout obscenities along with the hapless participants. If that makes you feel queasy, then you'd be better off watching reruns of Faking It or other reality shows where the people involved are more than just one-trick ciphers. There is conflict in these formats as well, but it always arises organically as people struggle to find their bearings outside their comfort zones. Their reflections on this process are what gives the shows coherence. The point is not what's happening - the jump attempted, the record successfully mixed - but the personal journey that yokes all these incidents together.
Masters and Servants dispenses with all this. His quest for an all-action reality format has led Stephen Lambert, its creator, to cut all meta-narrative threads. We don't find out what Christine Rose feels about being a servant - all her video diary entries show her still in character as a disgusted mistress who can't get her staff to co-operate. Sue's entries, similarly, outline her resentment at how she is being treated by "these horrible people". It's as if we are watching a drama. We never get to hear the film-makers' questions to their characters because that would impact on our capacity to suspend disbelief and treat what's on the screen as a kind of staged entertainment. A la-di-da Penelope Keith voice-over locates the action even more precisely in the realm of knockabout, class-based comedy.
"It's the rich that get everything and the poor that get trod on." Mandy Nutley's reflection, in the first programme, doesn't come close to the truth about a show where everyone is exploited equally. The nobs are trashed for being dim and heartless, the vulgar northern builders are lampooned for their lack of taste. No one can come out of this format with their dignity intact. If the Roses had been good servants, they would have emerged with the taint of servility rather than arrogance. We would still have shouted at them while feeling, as I did at the wrestling match, degraded by a viewing experience that allows you to vent your viciousness while forgetting that a staged clinch can still deliver genuine pain.
Andrew Billen is away
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