It’s scandal time over at Idols – and all because of a daft and inept attempt at a publicity stunt. Pity, because the season seemed to be doing pretty well without it. Blogs and websites have been spinning for days.
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The entire and only joy of the early stages of Idols (for me by far the most interesting part of it) is to watch the stream of hopeful, but dreadfully deluded entrants in the mass auditions. The holy innocence of the tone deaf has charm and can be remarkably entertaining.
But someone decided it needed to be juiced up. An actor was hired to pretend to be a contestant, to sing badly but persistently at each audition, and to insistently plug his little website. And because viewers accepted him as a genuinely deluded contestant, the annoyingly persistent, passive-aggressive "Cliff Jennings" became something of a minor cult figure. Very, very minor.
Unreality TV
I commented on his first dull appearance, accompanied by a tiny nerdy guy with a video-cam clamped against his face. By his second appearance, the whole thing seemed unlikely, and by his third, just not credible. But I didn't have the time to investigate. A colleague, Bruinman, did investigate, however, and outed "Cliff".
We discovered that rather than deal with any possible weaknesses within the show, the production apparently got their ad agency to recruit an actor to portray a fake contestant. Cliff turned up at the Joburg auditions, then Cape Town, then Margate, then Centurion. But because the ad agency seemingly couldn’t resist bragging about it, they were outed, and the scam revealed. His real name appears to be Eduan van Jaarsveldt, a minor actor and video maker.
They thought the series wasn't unreal enough, without adding a genuine phoney to it. So we watched a fat white guy who couldn't sing, pretending to be a fat white guy who couldn't sing?
Living the nightmare
The reactions have been interesting. Some of the gormless folks who swallow anything advertising tells them, have complained that the guy was exposed, insisting that this somehow spoiled the inspiring message he conveyed about "living the dream:". But he wasn't living any dream at all, only pretending.
At least it got them headlines, which they weren't earning in their own right. "Idols gets sunk by a con", said the Star ; "Another nail in the coffin of Idols" said another, while a third called it " The most pathetic promo stunt ever".
It advertises nothing whatever, but strongly suggests that the "reality" is not real, and that the producers thought their own material was so feeble that it needed to be juiced up with something fake - such as adding soya protein "meat extender" to mince, so save money on real meat. Cliff became a weird form of "reality extender”.
Denial and then excuses
At first, official denial abounded. The ad agency apparently removed the web page that had boasted of the stunt, but had to admit what they had done. From MNet and the production team there was a deafening silence. We were told to watch the Sunday Idols broadcast, but it shed no useful light on the matter either.
Then I received two press releases one after the other. The first was a carefully concocted statement from Afrokaans, the guys handling publicity for Idols. It bragged that Cliff was "Living the Dream". No he wasn't - he was acting the act. If you can't tell the difference, that's really sad. If you think we can't tell the difference, that's insulting.
Damage control
But then damage control was in full swing. MNet is said to have confirmed that they "offered a platform for Idols contestant Cliff Jennings to create an ingenious below-the-line word-of-mouth viral campaign to support Idols Season 4". But he wasn't a contestant who decided to create anything - he was hired to play a part in a stunt.
MNet has a brand manager who is quoted as insisting that Cliff as real "to us" as any other contestant, and used "the unique power of Idols" to promote the season. How and why do you promote the season to people who are already watching it? Apparently his "phenomenal success on web-based social communities such as MySpace and Facebook proves how successfully he embodies the ideals of Idols."
Did it not occur to them that such cynical manipulation could rebound, and that viewers might resent being duped?
He insisted that only a few executives at MNet and its ad agency knew of this stunt, and nobody on the Idols crew, its director, Colin Moss, the crew or the judges, knew anything about it. I wonder how they all feel about having been deceived?
Then we received an urgent statement from the Idols judges, Dave Thompson, Mara Louw, Gareth Cliff and Randall Abrahams. They emphasise that they had " absolutely no prior knowledge of the genesis" of the campaign, nor did they know that the MNet marketing department was involved. They had no idea that he was a "plant". They emphasise that their aim is to provide a range of singers for the public to vote for in choosing a winner. "As this is our chief concern in all honesty we paid little attention to the antics of Cliff Jennings", they said. And they hope that the public will now focus on the traditional task of finding a talented singer.
It's rare to see a normally intelligent production waste money deliberately damaging its brand and its public integrity.
So what else is fake?
And of course it then throws all these shows into question. Who and what else is fake within these series? Is BBA's Lerato actually the three small boys fighting under a blanket that she appears to be? Is Big Brother actually Big Sista, with laryngitis? How many of the Survivor group are actors or actually members of a military task-force?
Surely the very point is that we should be seeing real people reacting spontaneously to real, if somewhat contrived, situations?
Now that illusion is forever shattered. Everything we see must henceforth be questioned and doubted. Are there any other stooges in the Big Brother House, or on Survivor?
Is this a new trend at MNet? Unreal reality TV?
(Professor M. A. Simpson, aka CyberShrink September 2007)
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