How can we engage young people to make good choices when contemporary culture promote celebrity and warped sense and beauty?
Speaker 1: In terms of what we were just talking
about, you learned to ask that question.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And not be scared of yeah, difference.
Speaker 3: And not to be told “Don’t do drugs” but
actually to see why not to do drugs.
Speaker 4: You really are a very good cook,
Rebecca.
Speaker 1: Thank you. My dad’s family are all
chefs and my parents are quite, on the scale of things, they’re old, like in
their 40’s when I was born. And my mum used to do this thing where she’d say,
“Come on, let me teach you to cook because we’re going to die and you need to
fend for yourself.”
Speaker 2: It’s like a lioness teaching her cub.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I was going to ask you that that
isn’t something that is genetically passed on.
Speaker 1: Yeah,I remember it quite vividly,
very, very clear.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you know, they’re still
going strong.
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, touch wood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my head my head my head.
Speaker 1: Yeah. They’re still going strong. But
actually, yeah, I’ve become a bit of an obsessive cook, so…
Speaker 5: Cheers!
Speaker 6: How many of these have you done now
then?
Speaker 1: This is the second one.
Speaker 6: Oh, wow, really?
Speaker 1: Yeah. The next one is in Leeds because
it’s going to start going on tour.
Speaker 6: Oh, exciting! How are you going to do
that?
Speaker 1: Well, I’m working with arts
organizations and public access organizations and if they’ve got a kitchen and
a table—
Speaker 6: That’s what you’re going to need.
Speaker 1: That’ll do. And although the next one
is really…because there’s an Aga which apparently is temperamental. I’ve never
cooked on an Aga. And I have no, idea what I’m going to cook, but we shall see.
They were like “We’ve got a tea urn” and I’m like, “That’s wonderful. But what…
A Pot noodle? What can I cook with a tea urn?” So yeah, it is a challenge. It’s
fun. Okay, shall we choose the next question.
Speaker 6: How can we engage young people to make
good choices when contemporary culture promote celebrity and warped sense and
beauty? So this is my question. Possibly kind of a few questions in one, I
guess. But I think there’s something really interesting about…when I was
growing up, you wouldn’t really see celebrities everywhere. You’d probably get
your Top of the Pops magazine once a week and that was where you would read
about New Kids on the Block—
Speaker 1: Smash Hits, yeah.
Speaker 6: Smash Hits, exactly, and what they
were up to. And it seems like kind of influenced, I don’t think, particularly for
a girl in terms of how you look by a lot of this stuff. And I think there’s so
many trends at the moment in terms of these thigh-gap selfies where people are
taking pictures of how big the gap is between their thighs. And young girls
aren’t eating properly, as they try and emulate that. And I just don’t know, I
don’t know what the question really is. It’s kind of like is there any
positivity that comes out of that? How can it be used in a better way? How can
we teach young people that that’s not necessarily the kind of—
Speaker 4: Where the value lies.
Speaker 6: Exactly. And I think that’s some of
the biggest things and I think particularly with the generation coming through
now where jobs are scarce and it feels a bit harder, I guess, to have
self-worth in other areas. People are doing all sorts of things to stop having
to stack shelves at Tescos and calling the X-factor seems to be the way out.
And I just think it’s such a different thing to when I was young and growing
up. It’s something that we probably need to be much more aware of and mindful
of and we’re kind of thinking about young people and the stuff they’re going
through. So it’s not much of a question, I guess, but it’s a topic.
Speaker 1: It kind of is, though, isn’t it?
Because how can it be because—
Speaker 2: Can we turn back?
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, that input, it’s so
massive, just the millions of images that you see every day.
Speaker 6: We have access to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: But it’s an interesting statement.
There’s really just sometimes things seem inevitable. It’s inevitable that eventually
everything will be marketised, it’s inevitable that eventually all photographs
will be porn. But I don’t think it is that way. You know what I mean? And
sometimes it can feel like its an unstoppable tide but it’s not because even a
year ago, people didn’t know about, you know, Everyday Sexism wasn’t a thing
and people follow on twitter. Then No More Page Three was Clare Short and a
couple of angry people and now it’s a much more main stream thing.
Speaker 4: It’s a cultural shift, isn’t it?
Speaker 5: And I think probably—oh Rebecca, you’ll
know that Briony Kimmings show, Credible, Likeable, Superstar Role Model. I
think it’s a brilliant project that kind of—do you know about that? So that
directly addresses, I guess, the issue. So Briony is this performance artist
and Briony and her niece Taylor, who’s nine. Briony went to her niece Taylor and
said, “I want you to create a role model that you will look up to,” because
Taylor was just confused because she’s nine, she’s watching pop stars and the
level of sexuality was just really bewildering when you’re nine because you
don’t understand why the girls that you are watching on the telly kind of take
their clothes off and twerking and stuff—
Speaker 1: While men in suits stand and watch
them.
Speaker 5: Yeah. And Blurred Lines is a perfect
example of that, which was a mainstream thing that nine year olds would sing.
And Taylor was finding it bewildering. So Briony said to Taylor, “Right. We’re
going to make a woman who is a role model for you.” And they invented a character
called Catherine Bennett and Catherine is a paleontologist pop star who liked
pizza and bicycles and wears big glasses and has curly hair. So there’s two
shows, one of which is the show about the project, which is called Credible,
Likeable, Superstar, Role Model and thats about the project and it’s about
Briony’s investigation of culture and that sexualisation and commercialization
of everything, the pornification of everything, I guess, and then the other is
the Catherine Bennett show where Briony performs as Catherine Bennett and tours
schools and theatres, and now stadiums and is on the Top of the Pops. Well, not
Top of the Pops because that doesn’t exist anymore. But she’d been on Going
Live or whatever the equivalent is now…
Speaker 2: You’re a man of your generation.
Speaker 5: [Inaudible][06:52]
Speaker 2: Yeah, she got into interviewed by Ed
the Duck, in the Broom cupboard! Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking
about, yeah.
Speaker 5: Wherever you go, if you’re a pop star
now, she’s done. But I think that it feels like that was a really positive,
genuine, someone saying ‘Let’s do something about this’ and Catherine Bennett
is now a kind of a genuine star in her own right to that generation. Now what’s
interesting, I think, Briony’s very aware that she’s fighting celebrity by
creating a celebrity and it’s a weird kind of ironic feedback loop that you
create after that. But I think what’s exciting is it is saying this is not
inevitable. It isn’t tied to this. You can stop or at least stand up against.
Speaker 1: And I mean actually, because all of
those come from the commodfication of those people and it’s mostly women, but
it is men as well. And as consumers, I guess we do have the power if enough of
us say no, to stop that being how things are marketed, just like they don’t
market vacuum cleaners now to men saying your wife will be so pleased with you
if you take this home because all women are like ‘fuck off!’.
And
so yeah, I think there is such potential to make it better, but I think for me,
one of the key issues is that…I mean, we’re all based in or within shooting
distance of London. We’re all of similar age. I think we probably all exist in
certain social-political boundaries, right? And I can look at, for example, I
look at my sisters who are really clever, bright people in their own fields,
who don’t live in London, who aren’t academic, who aren’t artistic, who aren’t
necessarily particularly culturally engaged beyond on what’s on ITV on a
Saturday night, and this isn’t in their cultural dialogue. So they’re not
equipped to tell their kids that.
Speaker 6: And I think this is the problem, that
no one going to get rid of the, well, apart from the commissioners, no one’s
going to get rid of the X-factor because even if that happens, they’ll come up
with the next thing again where it’s, you know, celebrities naked jumping from
planes or whatever they come up with next.
Speaker 5: That’s genius pitch. Celebrity Naked
Air Jump, you know, 7 PM after they jump.
Speaker 6: The example which is given, I was just
thinking of her best example, you know, as you were speaking, Miley Cyrus. You
know, even today, there are young children who are being shown Hannah Montana
and they think that she’s the most wonderful thing and stuff that she says,
stuff that her father says is stuff that young children are growing up with and
thinking that is the way to approach life. And then you see her today and she
is literally rebelling against her own, against the persona she’s built for
herself. Like this is something I just hate and I want to break out of it and
you just wonder how confusing is that?
Speaker 1: But it’s because at that age she was
commodified as this uber vanilla, wholesome American girl. Her dad’s Billy Ray
Cyrus, she’s never been the all American kid.
Speaker 2: But is it because she was actually
something you could never be. As an ordinary person, you could never be like
that perfect and also as an ordinary person, you could never be what Miley
Cyrus is today.
Speaker 4: That’s true. She’s gone from one
extreme to the other. She was playing a role. It wasn’t like it was her name.
Hannah Montana was Disney who then she got the job and she did it. It was a
job. See it as a job not the whole person.
Speaker 1: It’s like getting pissed off at Jennifer
Aniston for not being a ditz, right?
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. But it’s like that thing
of individuality, it’s just hyper now, it’s just really harmful. Everything’s
about how many likes you had, how many followers have you got. So whatever,
even if you say “I want to be a female scientist,” you think brilliant, but probably
then your next thing as a young person is to be the most famous female scientist.
And that’s where I get my value. Not from the skill involved and not from being
part of the team or being part of society—
Speaker 1: Because that’s the problem, isn’t it?
It’s nothing to do with skill or quality or excellence …
Speaker 4: But then that skill is going on the
competitive side. Do you need to be excellent or do you need to see a need and
say I could be useful in that and actually you don’t need your name on it. You
just need to know you’re actually…on your deathbed, you think yeah, I’ve
actually done something positive.
Speaker 5: I think that’s the problem. I think
we’ve created this culture where unless your name is out there and that people
like you on Facebook, unless you’ve got 17,000 followers, you’re not worth
anything. It’s that worth.
Speaker 2: I don’t know how I came across this,
but for some reason I wound up watching a high school graduation speech by a
guy named David McCullough Jr. who was just at some school, some random school
at some random town—
Speaker 5: Is this on YouTube?
Speaker 2: It was on YouTube, yes. Have you seen
this?
Speaker 5: No. When you can just watch YouTube
for hours on end—
Speaker 2: Yes. I don’t know how—
Speaker 5: You end up watching a fair amount. Going
“How did I get here?”
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So I don’t know how it
happened, but I was watching an 18-minute high school graduation speech and the
next one I watched was J.K. Rowling—
Speaker 5: Of course at Harvard?
Speaker 2: At Harvard. That’s the one that led me
to it. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Steve Jobs was next.
Speaker 2: Okay. So David McCullough Jr., whose
dad, I think, David McCullough Sr.—I don’t know if they are really, but I think
they probably are. David McCullough Sr. is this fabulous biographer who did
this biography on Harry Truman and he did a huge biography on the Brooklyn
Bridge. Biography of the Brooklyn Bridge! It was comfortably a thousand pages
long and I bought it for my mother going like, “You have a crack at that one
here.” His son, I think, is a teacher but his speech was called You Are Not
Amazing and You Are Not Special. That’s what it was called. You Are Not
Special. And he said you are one of the graduating class today of 65 very
talented people. If you were the valedictorian, if you were the one person who
came out top on this, let me just say that there are 37,000 high schools in the
United States and today they’re all graduating, so you’re one of 37,000
valedictorians this year and there was a valedictorian last year and the year
before, the year before, and the year before that, and that you have been told
that you have grown up in a culture where—his relationship to it, he said it’s
because we, as parents, were told to tell you that you’re amazing, you’re
special, you’re wonderful. Look at the way you crapped on that, you know, like
from potty training upwards you’re so special. So I don’t know. It was a
fascinating thing to watch.
Speaker 5: I think the French—I remember reading
an article and it was a French mum, an English mum, and the French mum was
saying, “We do not say well done, you’re special, congratulations, you’re the
best or you’ll be the next something, you’re going to be a superstar, because
it’s not helpful for anyone, be you a parent, a child, or whatever. Yeah, we
need to get away from that, like, standing on people’s heads to feel value.
Speaker 2: This is a cultural thing, like my mum
went to see—I went to see Testament of Mary on Friday. Fiona Shaw acting as the
mother of Jesus, telling the story of how the crucifixion sounded, when it was
your son being crucified, right?
Speaker 5: Well, he was quite special. I mean
that was probably okay!
Speaker 2: But what was interesting about it was
that she was saying rather like…I mean, it was sort of like that moment in
Monty Python: “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!”. “He’s my son”. And
so it was by Colm Toibin. It’s based on this very short book. Her point was
he’s just my son and there is…an organization was created and been created around
him and he’s been forced up as this sacrificial lamb in order for whatever.
There was a whole political thing.
But
the point of it was—and Fiona Shaw is Irish, from Cork and my mother is Irish
and went to see it with some Irish friends of ours and I came out, I called my
mother, who’d been to see it the night before, and she said that at the end
there as a conversation, there was a Q&A with the director. By the way, the
director was her former, like Fiona Shaw and the director—you know Deborah
Warner? Yeah, they used to go out and now she directs her? Can you imagine
that? Stand over there. Fuck off! Ex-girlfriend over here. Standoff. That’s
amazing!
Speaker 6: Fiona Shaw? Isn’t this the person who
was in Harry Potter?
Speaker 1: Yeah. She plays Dudley’s mum.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. So anyway, there was a
Q&A afterwards and they were talking about—“I played it,” she said. My
mother sort of reported this was that she said, you know, it’s a very Irish
thing to say you’re nothing, young one. And that’s a very—I would have heard
that a lot now, you’r nothing but [Inaudible][16:32] and don’t you forget it.
It’s a very helpful way of keeping you grounded and don’t forget where you came
from, boy, and these kinds of things. It certainly makes it sound very harsh.
Speaker 4: They have a saying in Liverpool like
that
Speaker 2: Yeah! And so this Jewish woman, this
old Jewish lady was sitting beside my mother and they began to have a
conversation about it. My mother was talking about this is a very Irish thing—her
mother would have been like this and Fiona Shaw’s mother would have been like
this, and the Jewish lady said, ‘This isn’t how we are at all. In our house, my
son can do no wrong.” And that was the cultural, like that’s a cultural
difference, like the manner in which we teach our children.
Speaker 6: Will it be the same with their
daughters or will it be just the son?
Speaker 2: I don’t know. But is it just that
there has been…because America has done enough?
Speaker 5: Well even if your parents say it,
because I’m in London. I’ve just got to say I definitely have a little Scouse
person on my shoulder going “Don’t get to big for your boots” and you say
anything that’s about you and you then self-deprecate and be like ‘oh it was
nothing’. Because otherwise the little Scouser will be like “who do you think
you are, living in London? Knowing all this?” And you go back to Liverpool, it’s
a similar thing. Oh, you’re back home. Who do you think you are? But I think
it’s a helpful thing but it can be…it’s a balance, isn’t it? But it is that
thing now, even if your family or your culture said it, the fact that the rest
of the world that we perceive says who you- if you wanted that, how many people
have you got, like what makes you unique rather than…yeah. How do you fit into
this cog?
Speaker 1: Do you think it’s because we’re kind
of the, well, we’ve had a really, really long period of kind of
post-Thatcherite, post-Regan politics where working people, people who like made things
and dug things out of the earth and made their living in ways that are totally
commendable and you probably, a hundred years ago, you could be quite proud of
making a decent honest wage and being a decent honest person, has been
belittled and denigrated and squashed and replaced with robots, to the point
where endeavor, and graft, mean nothing. Like I mean, now even if you’re
brilliant at something, you don’t say, “Oh god, it took me six years to get
that right.” You go, oh yeah it came
Speaker 4: Naturally?
Speaker 2: The thing that crystallizes this, this
image, this whole notion for me are the two minute sections on X-factor,
whichever one it is, where there was that girl. And this is the first time I’ve
ever watched one. I’ve been overseas a lot. This is the first—which one is the
one with Abby Alton—
Speaker 4: [Inaudible][19:17]
Speaker 2: So she was a- made me in a kind of
whatever.
Speaker 4: But he loved it!
Speaker 2: Right, absolutely! [Inaudible][19:23]
but everytime she was on, she would say, “I can’t believe it. I can’t go back
to my…” and the notion was—she was on the…
Speaker 4: Staking shelves
Speaker 2: Stacking shelves… She worked behind,
she worked on the counter, and the notion that she would have to go back to
that was so repellant to the…”Oh, we musn’t get her back to there”. The notion
that she was going to get plucked from that rather than earn her wage, get a
flat, get a nicer flat, sort yourself out, like that’s completely unacceptable
and what we need to do is rescue her from this dowdy existence by plucking her
up and turning her into a coke head in three years.
Speaker 4: That Cinderella thing. That’s what’s
very, very dangerous. It’s interesting, how do you stand up against it? Part of
it probably is that, you know, I mean, I do think there’s a level to it where
celebrity doesn’t reward excellence because you can’t be on there and learn
excellence. Long-lived celebrities are
excellent and there are some well known people, like, you don’t become a famous
Novellist without being a good novelist or a famous theatre director. There is
a reward for exellence. There’s a responsibility from those people to talk
about how hard it was.
Speaker 3: They’re not the celebrities that are
posting pictures of themselves on Facebook, if that’s the case.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 3: [Inaudible][20:45]
Speaker 5: More are younger and younger, so they
haven’t had it.
Speaker 3: Like poor Miley Cyrus being asked
“What does world peace look like?” But people that are that young don’t know world
peace looks like. No. The poor girls, you know the teens, don’t be asking them those
questions, just because you’re at the top of Google doesn’t mean you know how
to fix world peace.
Speaker 1: But that’s what’s really interesting
because actually, like Elizabeth I, at 19, was one of the great statespeople.
So it isn’t the youth isn’t capable. It’s that we’re not educating it.
Speaker 5: She was born and trained in that,
lived with lots of people around her. I think that the young celebrities might
be picked at 13 or 14, but it’s still very—
Speaker 6: But they do get a lot of exposure and
frankly public office is something that comes with responsibility. Sorry to
quote Spiderman, but with great power does comes great responsibility. And at
that position, it isn’t good enough to say, you know, “I don’t know” because
you are a role model. It is a responsibility you have taken on and it becomes
something that you need to do in order to stay where you are or you can
gracefully step off and say this is a responsibility that I cannot take on. But
if you are a role model for a certain section of society, there is a certain
way you have to live, period.
Speaker 4: And I quite admire it when every now
and then a politician says, you know what, this is too hard. I need some time
to think about it. I mean, I actually think it’s courageous—
Obama
has tried, I mean, for all his failings and he has done quite well, is he’s
consistently made speeches like look, this is really complicated. Like his
first big race speech was brilliant because he said, “Right, look everybody,
this isn’t a kind of polarized…” it’s not. It’s a big wiggly, wobbly mess—
Speaker 5: And this is the kind of people you
would be asking about this stuff or whatever and all of this stuff, you’d come
back and say, “Look, this is not a big issue for the whole of America, so I’m
not even going to tell you the answer because you need to know that we should
be focused on this paparazzi thing.” And he was really good and I do think a
lot of it and I always think this thing about people, is about its creeping up
to that selfie and aren’t we lovely and let’s nod to everything, even when
we’re secretly talking here, don’t agree with that. There isn’t a culture where
it’s encouraged to challenge each other or critiquing each other and be
critical friends and say actually Miley, maybe think about the thing before you
do it. How many people has she got around her—
Speaker 2: Like Sinead O’Connor did make genuine
effort to whether or not she should publish it on the internet or not, I don’t
know. But I think that was a genuine effort to engage her and talk about
responsibility and savageness comes back and-
Speaker 4: Yeah and if she would’ve had, but it’s
that in general, when you’re with your friends, which is sometimes you want to
say “Stop with the selfies. Love I’m bored with pictures of your cat. So you
love it but do we really need to see it?” The reason and it’s not welcomed or
encouraged by us as a society and as individuals. I mean we should, you know…
Speaker 3: To regulate it.
Speaker 4: To regulate it. We don’t regulate each
other and we need to.
Speaker 1: So what would that look like?
Speaker 4: Well, wouldn’t it just be like a little,
“You talked a lot about yourself there mate, now let’s…” Or you know.
Speaker 2: Just going to quiet down in the next
section.
Speaker 4: That thing if you’d like if you love
and you respect each other, I think you can say, like, you know, why are you
wearing that bikini in December, you know? Surely he’ll like you for your
personality…You know, that thing that we could, like parents and siblings do.
Speaker 1: Because cultural values are set
by…like my values are set by the collective values of pretty much everyone
around me plus my own desire to crusade, you know?
Speaker 4: We’ve all had times where we wanted to
say to someone, you know, oh come on, I know you can do better than that or I
did you think about that, but we don’t.
Speaker 5: So that’s really interesting because
that is a thing that you could teach, isn’t it? I mean, we work in a theatre, I
mean in theatre world, there is a very clear, like, this is kind of safe
circle, within this space we can say anything to each other.
Speaker 1: And you have to tell people if—
Speaker 5: And we have to do that. If there’s
something that can be taught in school, it is about critical thinking and
setting up the space that says look, I can critique your work or your behavior.
It doesn’t mean I’m critiquing you.
Speaker 4: And we’re doing it. We can all be
better.
Speaker 5: And I think the Arts world is quite
good at that because it’s inherent, but it didn’t happen in the finance world,
for example. It didn’t go. But “look steady on old chap.”
Speaker 1: But you know what? I sort of think
about this. I think there’s a lot of narrative about it being about
self-aggrandizement and arrogance and not giving someone critical feedback. And
actually, I have this sneaking suspicion that the root cause of it is because
everyone feels so shit about themselves. Because we’ve got much smaller nuclear
families, because we don’t have the large social support system than there were
kind of 50 years ago, like there isn’t anything reflecting back at you, telling
you what your value is. So—
Speaker 2: Except this broad narrative that gets
fed to our media.
Speaker 1: Exactly. The media. So if you look
like that, then you have value. So all of that, “Hey, look at my selfie…”
Speaker 4: And I think that’s like when you see
it, you know, a guy in a little tiny but very large sports car, I’m thinking,
“Oh, bless him. He’s highly insecure.” Someone needs to give him a hug, but
other people go “Ohh Amazing!”. I used to always think greed was the thing that
caused all the problems in the world, but now I just think it’s insecurity. Ralph
Feinnes was talking about Coriolanus and he said he did it because his main
motivation was for us to look at Coriolanus’ mum and the relationship he has
with his mum and how we need to change those types of relationships, otherwise
you end up having a dictator as a son. So okay then. But it was a good critique
saying, you know, this guy wasn’t born the devil. How did he end up in this
place? Let’s figure it out.
Speaker 1: I’m going to stop there because I let
that go on a little bit too long. Now it’s not your fault at all.
Speaker 2: Wrapped it up with Coriolanus.
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