On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world by storm’. Unusually, this wasn’t TV hype. Last year, nine of the world’s ten bestselling albums were by Korean acts (the sole westerner being Taylor Swift). Even odder for people over 40, according to such reliable sources as Richard Osman on The Rest is Entertainment podcast and my children, South Korea has replaced America as the cultural centre of the Earth for many British teenagers.
Korean youngsters are trained for pop stardom on an industrial scale
But this global domination hasn’t come about by chance. Korean youngsters are trained for pop stardom on an industrial scale. While they’re being drilled in singing and dancing for up to five years, everything they eat, wear and, above all, post on social media is strictly controlled.
So how might a group of British wannabes get in on this distinctly foreign world? That’s the question posed by Made in Korea – and the answer so far is ‘not terribly well’.
The programme didn’t bring us the presumably oversubscribed auditions. Nonetheless, the five boys chosen to form a band seem appealing enough – if, for the over-40s, again not very recognisable from our own youth: a mix of Brit School graduates, cruise-ship dancers and people who get millions of social-media followers by posting videos of themselves gyrating about.
Before long, the five were off to Seoul to be put through their paces by SM management, who make no old-fashioned bohemian pretence to anything other than making money. At first, the boys appeared to think they were in for a rather jolly TV experience – and for a while they weren’t disabused. A bloke known as ‘the K-pop cowboy’ (and with the hat to prove it) showed them around the city wearing an expression of unflagging excitement. A tubby middle-aged man, improbably described as a K-pop icon, led them in a drinking game. A wellness coach encouraged them to say nice things about each other, rewarding them when they did with a hearty: ‘That’s awesome!’
But this was before they had their first, ominously capitalised Evaluation Day. Granted, as they rehearsed for it, there were signs that they might struggle a bit. When it came to the choreography, for example, Olly – a 20-year-old from Sunderland inevitably close to his nan – seemed to draw much of his inspiration from Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. Even so, nothing prepared them, or us, for what was in store when they performed in front of the project’s steel-bobbed, toweringly heeled supremo Hee Jun Yoon.
As far as the lads were concerned, they executed the song they’d been given – ‘Can You Feel the Vibe?’ – with moderate aplomb. Asked by Hee to award themselves marks out of 100, most hovered around 65. And with that, she unleashed her pitiless verdict. ‘Everything is concerning,’ she began. ‘But it’s the scores you gave yourselves that actually worry me the most. Where does the confidence come from? I don’t think you understand the dire situation you’re in.’ Before stomping off, apparently to consider abandoning the whole project, she accurately noted that: ‘It seems you’ve never had this kind of feedback before.’
And this, of course, is the contrast at the heart of Made in Korea: the cheerful, that’ll-do British approach meets the ruthless professionalism of K-pop. The way the programme’s set up, it looks as if we’re invited to be on the Koreans’ side – with our boys challenged to reach the approved standards. Given that the show is likely to be as manufactured as everything else about K-pop, it may yet be that they do. Either way, I wonder about the premise that the immaculately schooled, somewhat dead-eyed K-pop groups represent some kind of ideal – and ended Saturday’s episode feeling pretty patriotic about good-natured British bumblers.
All of which leaves less room than it deserves for The Kingdom: The World’s Most Powerful Prince, a piece of investigative journalism that combines the unfailingly solid with the eye-opening. Monday’s first episode of two traced the rise of the prince in question, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS), with such thoroughness that it began 53 years before he was born, when in 1932 his grandfather Ibn Saud established a new absolute monarchy in the Arabian desert.
Seeing as Saud had 45 sons, and the succession passed from brother to brother, what followed could easily have been confusing. Instead the programme explained with impressive clarity how MBS has ended up the Crown Prince despite being the seventh son of Saud’s 26th. The result, for me at least, was one of those documentaries that gratifyingly joins the quite scattered dots of what we already knew, turning them into a coherent enough picture for us to become a pub expert on the subject. (My friends have been warned.)
Comments
Comment section temporarily unavailable for maintenance.