Status Anxiety

26 September 2009

America’s superpower status is the flip side of its massive inferiority complex

‘You’re bringing a book?’ That was the reaction of Tom Colicchio, one of my fellow judges on an American reality show, when I clambered into the limousine taking us to the Emmys last Sunday. The programme in question, Top Chef, had been nominated for six of these awards and I had been flown to Los Angeles in case we won. My reason for taking a book is that I didn’t think I could muster enough interest in the ceremony to stave off boredom for its three-hour running time.

In fact, the telecast turned out to be quite entertaining, mainly because the people presenting the awards kept making jokes about how awful it was. Is that a paradox? Best joke of the evening was delivered by Ricky Gervais, who has carved out a career for himself in America largely on the strength of his ability to enliven tedious awards ceremonies by pointing out just how tedious they are. He began by making rather a complicated joke about the creative accounting practices used by American television networks to cheat writers and producers out of their just rewards. ‘That’s a joke aimed at the 5,000 people in this auditorium rather than the 5,000 people watching,’ he said. It brought the house down.

For programmes like Top Chef, being nominated for an Emmy is a big deal because the ‘reality’ genre is the bastard child of American television, desperately hankering for respectability. This was the third year in a row we’d been nominated and the main preoccupation of the Top Chef contingent was whether any significance could be attached to the fact that we were seated near the front. Had the organisers deliberately placed us within easy reach of the podium? Just before the winners were announced in our category there was a general buzz of anticipation and I tucked my book away under my seat. I didn’t want to get up on stage clutching a copy of Hold Tight by Harlan Coben.

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