Recently, a friend blogged her commentary about this year’s (spectacular) Eurovision Song Contest.  Read the post here; but then read the comments.  She suggested I might be interested in contributing to the discussion on the difference between US and UK/European entertainment tastes.  It turns out I was so interested that my brief comment on her blog has turned into an entire post on my blog.  So think of this as an extended comment, if you will.

I can really only speak about British and American television here, and as someone who doesn’t own a TV and hasn’t for several years now, you may want to take anything I write on the subject with a massive grain of salt.

But I’ve always felt that the best British television tends to fall into one of two categories: the classic (often costume) drama, or the witty/deadpan comedy show.  Neither of which is something we tend to do particularly well in the US; instead, we’ve chosen to perfect the art of the sitcom, the slick crime show, the glamorous reality show (which, yes, tends to take itself just a little too seriously).  We (in the US) are subsequently afraid to laugh at our own product, because we haven’t set it up as something to be laughed at.  We can laugh at the jokes in a sitcom, or the spoiled 16-year-old girls on MTV who cry because Daddy bought them the wrong colour Humvee, but there’s always a flashiness factor that wows even the most skeptical audience (myself included), and suddenly, making fun of these things seems almost more trouble than it’s worth.  It’s like staring at a remarkably shiny diamond, glinting in the sun.  Pretty.  Interesting, even.  But eventually you need to avert your eyes.

The reason, I think, is this: there’s a culture of celebrity in the US–specifically television and film-related celebrity–so powerful, so pervasive, that what we create when we create a TV show is not just a conduit for entertainment.  It’s actually a shrine to this celebrity culture–something like the grand European cathedrals, only in a modern form, an offering not for a god but for an entire race of beautiful, smooth-faced people who spend their lives behind a camera.  The entertainment industry is as much a religion as it is a business; so it’s only natural that we’ve come, over the years, to take it undeservedly seriously.

Obviously, there’s a culture of celebrity in Britain, too–and if ever there was a nation that had perfected the art of tabloid journalism, this is it.  The difference is that there’s also a culture of entertainment which hasn’t been lost somewhere in the CSI footage of dead bodies and unlikely lab experiments.  We’ve forgotten how to be merely amused–now we demand that we’re actually (in the truest sense of the word) awed when we look at a screen.

There are exceptions to this on both sides of the Atlantic, of course.  And it doesn’t exactly explain the cheesiness factor of Eurovision; but Eurovison is, I suspect, a beast so unique that it will defy any categorization, any sociological explanations that we try to attribute to it.  The only thing left to say about the song contest, then, is this: it all has to do with Graham Norton’s commentary catchphrase.  “He’s huge,” Graham said so many times over the course of the evening that I lost count, “in the Balkan states.” Greece’s Ricky-Martin lookalike?  Huge in the Balkan states.  Azerbaijan’s entrant?  Huge, I’ve heard, in the Balkan states.  Meaning that we should all look Balkans-ward to find the secret to that amazing Euro-pop sound.

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I hear this in my head. I hear, I’m too young. I want to say, how can you be too young, but I don’t say anything at all in response. I think, well, maybe I am. I look for evidence of it. Who got published at 22? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23 that was healthy and beautiful and went on and on and on? Who did anything meaningful at all at 22, except die, maybe. There were a lot of 22-year-olds, a lot of 20-year-olds even, who died in wars.

We live in such a perverse world. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. Opposition, contradiction. We value youth, we say. We want our Hollywood stars fresh-faced, wrinkle-free. But real youth–the youth measured not by lines on a forehead but by years, by how much we’ve done, by how much we haven’t done–we disregard. We call it cute, we call it charming. We want our fashion models that way because we don’t want our fashion models to be anything we respect. Then we draw a line.

All we’ve done is extend adolescence. When I was a teenager I used to think that the ideal age to be was somewhere in one’s 20s. I used to think that that’s what everyone craved. Teenagers wanted to be older, everyone else wanted to be younger. And now I find I’ve reached what I thought was the golden era, the time-of-all-times, only to learn that I’m still in the teenage-hood of society. Nobody thinks a 20-something can do anything worthwhile, because we’re, as they say, still learning.

This has turned into more of a diatribe than I meant it to be. All I meant it to be was a thought: that here I am, paying my own rent, expected to make a fool of myself. I know what I write now will, in ten year’s time, be irrelevant; I know my tone will change, my voice, my point of view. But still, I’d like to think that if I’m old enough to support myself, I’m old enough to be trusted with my own heart, my own soul.

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