Carol Vorderman has given a speech to the Edinburgh Television Festival, in which she complains that the TV industry is too middle class. This is a bit like rocking up at an Elvis convention and saying that Elvis was overrated rubbish. But she still got a standing ovation.
Vorderman has merely reoriented herself to where the money is – performative spluttering about the Tories
‘After 14 years of austerity and lying by the privileged political class,’ she told her adoring throng, ‘this country is in an absolute mess and the TV industry must accept part of the responsibility for that too, including the riots.’ Who knew that the TV industry was responsible for people running amok and setting fire to public property? Though, to be fair, Richard Osman’s House of Games often made me feel like going on a rampage.
Vorderman got a big hand because middle class TV people love nothing better than feeling what they do is important, and being pretend-reprimanded by their own kind. This is her role now.
She has even produced a book cashing in on this, modestly titled Out of Order: What’s Gone Wrong with Britain and One Woman’s Mission to Fix It. Her promo includes a glam video where she does her schtick of saying how the right wingers will be coming for her for writing it. This might be more convincing if ‘right wingers’ had actually been anywhere near power in the last 30 or so years, but never mind.
Hilariously, CV claims she can speak her mind now that her TV career is over and so she’s not ‘beholden to anybody’. Yes, because of course TV presenters are famed for their reticence in expressing bog-standard liberal elite views. Packham, Lineker, Toksvig, Neville – we never hear a squeak out of them in that Tory-dominated industry.
Now with my track record I can hardly start casting stones at Vorderman’s house of cheapo telly. Still, this an individual who was previously renowned for grotesque crassness – from flogging payday loans to relating the mystery of haunted computers. Her name above a project was a guarantor of tawdry, tacky and often quite queasy lowest common denominator TV tat – not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Vorderman has merely reoriented herself, in this new age of micro-audiences and freelance personal brand privateering, to where the money is – performative spluttering about the Tories. There’s gold in them extreme centrist hills. In fact, it’s a dangerously crowded market, what with James O’Brien, Led By Donkeys, the Rest is Politics, the News Agents etc. All coming from pretty much the same place and doing very nicely out of it. And again, nothing wrong in that.
But this is the issue. The problem is not with people in the broadcast media having opinions. The problem is with all those opinions being exactly the same.
Writer James Graham said much the same as Carol about the TV business and class in his own address to the festival. But so what if television is middle class? Just not rubbish would be fine. That would suit me and I suspect most viewers. It’s a tiny industry, and it is not there to change or reflect society but to entertain it.
The British TV industry played its part in the systematic destruction, from the 80s onwards, of the shows and indeed the national culture that working class people enjoyed. It also dumbed down the highbrow stuff, leaving us all with a kind of grisly DEI mush, equally unattractive to every demographic. This all came from the liberal middle class – the same type of person now fawning over Vorderman.
‘Working class people feel they are not represented, their situation is not represented, the lack of opportunities and lack of money and jobs is not represented,’ Vorderman gushed, parroting the same old ancient boilerplate of the progressive TV middle classes. Remember, this is the same woman who thinks that putting Farage on I’m A Celebrity would stir up the natives, because they don’t know any better.
If the TV industry seriously meant to address class, they would have to widen their ‘inclusivity’ to include the large percentage of the population that considers, rightly, ‘diversity equity inclusion’ to be the massive boondoggle for the talentless and the grievance-ridden that it is. The people who consider mass immigration to have been a cultural and economic disaster, the people that loathe the entire political class, not just the Tories but the ‘nice’ Labour party and Lib Dems too.
And that would blow the floor out from under their entire model. They’re not going to do that. They will just carry on, and Carol will carry on, socking it to an establishment that was curled up and dead 50 years ago.
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