Nicholas Fraser: Down the tube
Oprah Winfrey is Chicago’s sustaining local deity, a queen of popular consciousness whose every alteration of size or mood is avidly followed. Green signs direct proud bus drivers under the E1 to the Harpo (“it’s her name spelled backwards”) studios. You enter a marble and cream lobby, traverse a human frieze of designer- suited bouncers and there you are, suddenly in a pokey TV studio.
People are wearing their brightest purples, oranges, crimsons and puces. They’re kitted out in swimming-pool blue golfing jackets, polka-dot tracksuits. Even the oldest seem to have been baked to geriatric perfection. They wait patiently for Oprah, and when she arrives, they aren’t disappointed.
Daytime television has become big business in the United States. It is cheap to make, because the talent comes free. Successful shows run for many years, and are exported around the world. In Britain, Sky TV runs The Oprah Winfrey Show, Geraldo, Jenny Jones and Sally Jessy Raphael. Channel Four has Ricki Lake – sister to disgruntled housewives and other marginalised sub- cultures – and Montel Williams. ITV has Jerry Springer. With new digital channels to fill, the market in self-disclosure is about to enter a spectacular period of growth.
But the daytime shows are built around the enjoyment of schlock. Although the researchers cull Oprah guests from mail that arrives each morning, creating a database of the dysfunctional or merely exhibitionistic, mistakes are frequently made. Critics suggest many producers cast the shows without regard to whether participants are telling the truth.
In 1996, Jenny Jones devoted an afternoon to the seemingly uncontroversial subject of secret admirers. One of the guests, a bartender, had been coached to admit that he was infatuated with a waiter who was also on the show. Three days later, the waiter shot the bartender. The judge handed down a sentence of second-degree murder.
Out of daytime TV came not just Lorena Bobbitt and her carving knife, but the tabloid world willy-nilly now inhabited by Bill and Hillary, Kenneth Starr, Network News and the formerly august New York Times itself. I Had Oral Sex in the White House and Kept Semen on the Blue Dress is a show any producer of daytime TV would dream of running.
Last Thanksgiving, Oprah was briefly overtaken in the ratings by a paunchy ex- mayor of Cincinnati who was forced to resign after he was caught handing a hooker a cheque in a Kentucky motel. Jerry Springer takes the most salacious route to the American gut. The show is appalling – badly lit, inaudible, mindlessly sensational. But it is extremely successful, earning more than $60-million per year.
Springer started cautiously, with the usual mix of social issues and titillation, but he rapidly discovered that gay twins, dwarf twins, very fat gay men and even a construction worker who had had breast implants so he could work nights as a stripper were far more interesting to the public. Springer has perfected the tone of cynicism currently prevalent in TV. He calls his show a cultural cartoon.
The global success of American daytime TV is also part of a larger and more subtle story, which is the inexorable end-of-the- century triumph of the US’s entertainment values delivered worldwide by new information systems. With the enormous expansion of TV implied by digital technology, the temptation will be to see people and their problems as wholly disposable. In the new TV wars, the first casualties are found – and they are on the side of truth.