That's Not Real To Me

The song this post’s title comes from is Real To Me by good old Brian McFadden!  I’ll be talking all about how so much of what we see in the media in today’s society isn’t real, and the difficulties that we face in distinguishing what is real and what isn’t.

What inspired me to write this post is something I saw on TV on Sunday.  I caught the second episode of Superstar, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s latest reality talent show, in which he searches for a ‘Jesus’; someone to play the lead role in Jesus Christ Superstar.  To my surprise, Jonathan Ansell (or ‘the blond one out of G4’) appeared on the show.  He’d got through to the boot-camp-style training stage of the show but was sadly sent home at that point.  Anyway, there ended up being a bit of an uproar on Twitter where Jonathan received a lot of stick for being ‘arrogant’, as a result of him being edited to be portrayed in such a light on the show. 

 

Now, back in the day I was a MASSIVE G4 fan (and proud, might I add!) and have followed Jon’s solo career to certain extent since they disbanded.  As a result, I’ve met him quite a few times at gigs and happen to know that he is actually a really lovely guy and has a huge amount of time and respect for his fans.  But 10 minutes on TV showing viewers a couple of moments that don’t paint him in a good light and bang!  A great number of people is left with an inaccurate, negative, but probably lasting impression of his personality.

On a brighter note, Ben Elton has written some quite entertaining novels that illustrate this propensity of reality TV producers to edit people in whichever way they like to make a more entertaining show (namely, Dead Famous and Chart Throb.  Dead Famous in particular is a good read, in my opinion).  Chart Throb basically takes the mick out of singing competitions like The X Factor.  In this story, the Simon Cowell-like producer of the show uses the powers of television editing to make some perfectly reasonable people seem like complete idiots.  For example, a sound-bite of “I’m not claiming I’m the next Elvis” would later be cut down to “I’m the next Elvis”, to make a humble individual seem perfectly arrogant.  Although it’s obviously a fiction book, I wouldn’t mind betting this is a fairly accurate, if slightly exaggerated, representation of how things work on these show in real life! 

As well as being damaging to individuals’ reputations, the media’s portrayal of certain things can also be damaging on a much wider scale to it’s consumers.  I’m talking particularly about media influence on body image, ideal self and self-esteem.  As you may have picked up on in previous posts, body image is something I feel really strongly about and there is a lot of work to be done by various parties to diminish the deep-set problem of poor body-image and self-esteem in modern Western society.  The media has a key role to play in this issue, with the use of airbrushing to create unrealistic ideals in appearance that real people can never hope to achieve, and for that matter shouldn’t hope to achieve!

An example of the images used in Media Smart's educational package

Fortunately, awareness of this problem seems to be on the up, and the Government’s Body Confidence Team has recently worked in conjunction with Media Smart to create an educational package which is designed to teach 11 year-olds about airbrushing and how to distinguish between what is and isn’t real; what images they should and shouldn’t aspire to be like.  What’s really great about this package is that it uses images of really famous people, like Britney Spears and Keira Knightly, and shows children how these people look before and after airbrushing.  This should help to give people the tools, from a young age, to view media images critically and learn how to avoid striving for unrealistic ideals in their appearance.  There is a lot of work still to do, but I think this is a great start.

I could go on about body image all day, but for now I’ll finish there.  Please do leave comments if you have any views on this, and please do come back for more on my views on body image in later posts.  As always, thanks for reading!