Wednesday 19 October 2011

Essex Education

London Fields # 97
First
published Inpress (Issue # 1196), Melbourne on 19 October 2011, and in Drum Media (Issue # 1082), Sydney on 18 October 2011
NB: Each column has a name, but these do not appear in print; printed versions may differ slightly to those displayed here

It was hard to not notice her, but it proved somewhat harder to remember how or why we all recognised her. We were in a park-side local after work taking advantage of one of the recent strangely warm autumnal evenings when we noticed someone doing the whole ‘don’t look at me, I’m here incognito’ thingy; the one that just makes you tend to take more notice while affecting not to at all. Finally it twigged – she had been one of the housemates in the very first series of the UK version of Big Brother over a decade earlier. When it began here back in 2000 it was an interesting social experiment; by the third year it had degraded into a platform for nobodies who were only involved as they wished to become somebodies (or just had a personality disorder). It could be argued that the decline of the television documentary began with two offerings from the BBC – Airport in 1996 and
Driving School in 1997. From these a new phenomenon was born – the reality star; an ordinary person living their normal life who now attained some kind of celebrity status merely by doing what they did (followed by a film crew). This was like some sort of dystopian imaginings from science fiction, and the phenomenon became full entrenched once Big Brother arrived.

The staged reality soap can be seen as the latest incarnation in the blurring of the lines from documentary via reality television to pure soap. What began with MTV’s The Real World de-evolved into Jersey Shore and The Hills, which in turn led to UK equivalents which were something else entirely. Last year ITV2 had a surprise hit (and winner of the BAFTA audience vote) when The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE) arrived and brought vajazzle into the lexicon. This year it was followed by Channel 4’s entry into the genre, the godawful Made In Chelsea, and last week Vice recently reported that auditions are underway for a Shoreditch-based one (which if they had any sense of humour they’d name Hoxton Twats but not tell the participants until it aired). All these bear possibly even less resemblance to real life than EastEnders does to living in East London or Neighbours does to suburban Melbourne. What these staged-reality shows do have in common with the latest version of Big Brother (now on Channel 5) is how the names of the “characters” are embossed on screen each time they appear. Is this just to help first-time viewers, or is it a sad indication of what the makers consider to be the average viewers’ attention span, or merely an honest admission that the people portrayed are so forgettable that you need to be reminded who they are every time they appear?

But a documentary series currently screening on Channel 4 showing real people in their ordinary lives moves away from many of these recent conventions and simply allows the actions to tell the story. That show is Educating Essex and was filmed with real Year 11 and 12 students and their teachers at
Passmores School in Harlow, Essex. Placing 65 cameras all over the school meant they were able to film without the intrusion of a film crew (although one was used for interviews after) which meant that people acted more normally. Yes of course the students were aware of the cameras and so subject to the Hawthorne effect, and of course the filmmakers selected the footage and highlighted stories for effect and narrative drive. Yet despite all this, what emerges is a cabal of caring, dedicated individuals with seemingly incredible patience spending a great deal of time on a small percentage of pupils with behavioural problems or personal crises. While series like TOWIE seek to reinforce the opinions, prejudices and stereotypes that we might expect for the subjects that they portray, Educating Essex instead challenges them and does all it can to rewire them. Media coverage of modern schooling in the UK is almost uniformly negative and the continual improvement in examination results is linked to a supposed dumbing down of the tests themselves, while the press if full of stories about the “youth” are out of control, and the cause of so many of ‘Broken’ Britain’s woes. What Educating Essex shares in common with its comic predecessor Summer Heights High, is that the stories of these people are initially funny and finally deeply moving, just as Chris Lilley’s series was.


© James McGalliard 2011

Inpress: Published on page 61
Drum: Published on page 62