There is no denying the essential appeal of Stacey Solomon and Joe Swash. As seen in new BBC reality show Stacey & Joe, their home life is almost exactly as you’d imagine – a bit chaotic but full of warmth and sweetness too. But this mediated narrative of fishing lakes, al fresco dining and avocado toast in bed does feel like the latest expression of a trend that’s been building in terrestrial television for a while now. It’s a sort of performative cosiness; a default setting of placid, beige gentleness. Happy tears and hugging. There’s an earnestness about lots of primetime TV now that would have been seen as gauche 20 years ago.
When reality TV was born, it soon tested its limits and established its boundaries. Big Brother (and its celebrity variations) headed for the extremes fairly quickly. In reality TV (as in much of the comedy of the late Nineties and early Noughties), there was an unseemly taste for harshness, for cringe, maybe even for cruelty. There were millions of takers for the barely submerged sneering of Little Britain, for the neck-snapping wince of Wife Swap, for the voyeuristic horror of The Jeremy Kyle Show. If normal people were going to be represented on TV, it seemed they’d better get used to being the targets of mockery. And they’d better be ready to sing for their supper.
It’s significant that during that period, Britain’s underlying signs were stable. There was an assumption of prosperity – the UK economy enjoyed a remarkable 40 consecutive quarters of growth between 1997 and 2008. Since then, as a nation, we’ve been on what a prime time TV commissioning editor might describe as “a journey”. The financial crisis. Austerity. Brexit. The pandemic. War in Europe. More austerity. Much of this turmoil has been underpinned by a sense of political failure – and worse still, of political betrayal. There’s been a sense of society losing its bearings. We don’t really know who we are anymore.
And accordingly, a comforting, unifying narrative has been more important than ever. The Great British Bake Off arguably started this trend, kicking off in lockstep with austerity in 2010; pretty much a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster in the form of a TV series. Similar shows have joined it in the schedules: The Great British Sewing Bee and Britain’s Best Woodworker tell a similarly wholesome story of modesty, ingenuity and capability. Strikingly, even the eliminative reality show de nos jours (The Traitors) is an essentially friendly affair – of course, there are arguments and deceptions, but all within the parameters of what is universally understood to be a parlour game.
In the world of reality TV, decisions about casting and decisions about tone are intertwined. The brilliance of The Traitors lies partly in its choice to stick with the normies. Most first-wave reality TV shows started codifying and curating themselves and their participants incredibly quickly. This meant that before long, we were watching a series of people auditioning for ongoing careers in the ecosystem of reality TV – rather than a reflection of ourselves and people we knew.
But now, we’ve come full circle and arrived at a sort of mediated normality. Obviously the contestants on The Traitors owe a debt to their Big Brother forebears, but it feels like the casting couch is currently facing away from the garish and the extreme and towards the familiar. Stacey Solomon is a perfect example of this – a woman who rose to fame via The X Factor before establishing herself as a cheerful avatar of common sense, dispensing earthy insights on Loose Women; helping struggling families to declutter in Sort Your Life Out. She’s basically the nation’s dream next-door neighbour. We’ve decided we want to be pleasantly surprised rather than shocked by the people we see on television – in Channel 4’s shopping precinct, ivory-tinkling free-for-all The Piano for example, the emergence from the crowd of a lad in jeans and a hoodie who can play like a dream suddenly hits harder than almost any other narrative imaginable. It’s the theatre of the everyday.
And now, it’s everywhere. Recent episodes of Dragon’s Den have felt notably gentler; there are Ukrainian refugees getting a helping hand from the Dragons and a man who somehow makes a living teaching dogs to swim. There’s The Dog House, a show which feels almost pornographic in its cuteness. Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse continue to dish out genial wisdom from the nation’s riverbanks. Andi Oliver’s Fabulous Feasts is almost guaranteed to end in happy tears, as Oliver visits hard-pressed corners of the land and treats pillars of the various communities to glorious tables of food and gale-force gusts of goodwill.
Is there any harm in this? Up to a point, of course not. Many of these programmes are, on their own terms, a delight. Times are tough, and while TV is an opinion former, it also reacts to public need. Kindness is never a bad thing and for the last decade and a half, it has felt in desperately short supply in other areas of public life.
But can giving people what they want get in the way of giving them what they need? As previously noted in these pages, a show like Adolescence feels like a fierce shot across the bows of, in particular, the BBC and Channel 4. This is exactly the kind of television that, even a decade ago, they would have made. Not only that but it would have been assumed that, given their public service mandate (and the obligations that come with it), only they could have made it. But could we be entering an era when, thanks to a combination of funding constraints and political timidity, terrestrial broadcasters cede ownership of the challenging and the potentially controversial to the streamers?
We’d better hope not. If the BBC and Channel 4 have a purpose, it surely involves leading the national conversation. As things stand, there’s a danger of this small screen gentleness turning into something like default passivity. The kind of sweetness exemplified by Stacey & Joe is fine – but only as part of a balanced diet.
