We’ve been watching Steve Backshall’s Expedition recently – it’s good “not much brainpower” evening stuff, a sort of adult equivalent of Deadly 60 which we used to love watching with the kids when they were little.
It’s good. But it – and I’ve noticed this a lot recently, particularly with documentaries – has caught the Massively Overblown Tension Bug.
It’s the same formula across many of these shows: high drama music; lots of crashing cymbals and big orchestral rises, lots of Steve talking to camera about how this next section of cave is the bit that really scares him more than anything he’s ever done, or his crew looking down a pot hole and saying “and of course if we don’t see him in the next 2 hours then he’s really in trouble”, or a shot of a camera man slicing his finger on a rock and a whole “of course this remote into the jungle, this could be the difference between LIFE and DEATH” type stuff…
The thing is, it’s all obviously bullshit. No, Steve didn’t die – because if he did we’d have heard and they wouldn’t have put the show on air – and the guy with the cut finger wasn’t left behind in the jungle because ..the same reason – but for some reason it’s there, and it’s the game we seem to have to play nowadays. Both sides know it’s a lie – I know it’s a lie when I watch it, and of course the film-makers know it’s a lie when they film it. We’re both supposed to be complicit in this lie, engaging in a fakery when we all know it’s a fakery.
Maybe it’s my English sensibility pushing back against what feels like a US-centric sense of MegaDrama, but to me these shows have plenty going for them without all this drama. They’re already well made, beautifully shot, interesting enough as a topic area, and the presenters (Steve among them) tend to be pretty affable and engaging. There’s just no need.
Then today I got an reply from an email to a helpdesk beginning with “I’m delighted you’ve contacted us” – and it struck me as the same sort of thing. Because no, you’re not delighted that someone has contacted your helpdesk (as someone who does support as part of his day job, I know you instead groan internally when you see a new ticket and you certainly aren’t delighted to have yet another thing to do). It’s not the MegaDrama of Steve’s show, but it’s a similar sort of dance – a kind of fakery where both sides know exactly what’s going on but continue to propagate the myth that it’s something completely different.
And then I thought – this is exactly what social media does to us now, and maybe that’s where the blame lies.
As in: pretty much everyone on The Socialz is playing this exact same game – endless posts with endless filtered images showing endless beautiful people doing endless beautiful things and making other people jealous about those things, no mention of the sadness or depression or hardship or the reality of a normal life – just a constant pretence of The Good Otherness. And again, everyone knows. When you talk to someone you know face to face and they say times are hard and they haven’t really got much work on and then their Insta profile is full of stories about how busy they are…
We all know it’s a fakery, and we all play along.
Anyway. Back to watching Steve. Maybe he will get stuck and die down a crevasse or something and the show will end on some terrible tragic note, in which case – sorry Steve, maybe the music was right after all…