It’s easy now to condemn the media of the 2000s as a theater of humiliation. At the time, though, the prevailing concern was that everyone had become too soft. A generation that had been coddled by an “all-must-have-prizes” mentality had grown up entitled, lazy and egotistical. “In today’s celebrity-obsessed world, every youngster wants to be famous,” as Cowell sneered in his 2003 autobiography — called, in an impeccable piece of branding — I Don’t Mean to Be Rude, But… Cowell’s job, as he saw it, was to “prick the bubble of what I regard as this self-absorbed egotism” on behalf of an audience that was sick of the tyranny of talentless wannabes. 

But times change and so, apparently, does Cowell. Simon Cowell: The Next Act, which launches on Netflix this week, is yet another talent show format. We watch Cowell, now 66, as he attempts to create a new boyband to follow in the footsteps of One Direction, the X Factor-forged five piece whose global success marked the pinnacle of his starmaking powers. Since the death of ex-member Liam Payne in a drugs-related balcony fall last year, the band has also become a cautionary tale of fame’s savagery. Shortly before he died, Payne reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” 

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Which helps to explain why Cowell is so keen to be seen to be reinventing himself. The Cowell of 2025 is still tough (“You’ve got to be sort of ruthless,” he says in the trailer), but this is a kinder, gentler kind of entertainment. As he told The New York Times in an interview to promote the new series: “I changed over time. I did realize I’ve probably gone too far… I got that. What can I say? I’m sorry.” To further underline his newfound vulnerability, the series even features his partner Lauren Silverman, with whom he has an 11-year-old son.

The show’s drama rests on the idea that Cowell is putting everything on the line for one more shot at svengali success, but the stakes really are high. The pop culture world that made Cowell has imploded in the past 10 years. He became famous the old-fashioned way: on prime-time TV, with the backing of the tabloids, and the help of disgraced publicist Max Clifford, who had a talent for keeping his clients in the spotlight while squashing stories that might harm their image. In his autobiography, Cowell — playing up the part of the cynical impresario — wrote that “hiring Max was one of the best decisions I ever made”. 

At its peak in 2010, The X Factor was watched by over 14 million. That year, The Sun and The Mirror had a combined readership of over 4 million. Today, the red tops probably have a circulation of less than a million — and more people watch YouTube than ITV. In an effort to grasp the elusive younger audience, the next series is introducing the YouTuber KSI as a judge – a sign of where the real power lies in entertainment. The most recent series of Britain’s Got Talent averaged just over 5.5 million viewers and the last big act to come from a Cowell show was Little Mix, who won The X Factor in 2011.

Meanwhile, the less said about Clifford the better. In 2014, he became the first man to be convicted of historic sexual offenses under Operation Yewtree, and died in 2017 while serving an eight year sentence for indecent assault. The schtick of Cowell’s shows was that they were laying bare the mechanics of the entertainment business, and turning the public into entertainment insiders. While there is no suggestion whatsoever that Cowell has ever been involved in sexual impropriety, cases like Clifford’s revealed a depravity that had been concealed beneath the glitz all along. 

The market has changed, too. South Korea took the manufactured pop model embraced by Cowell and turned it into something even more ferociously disciplined and even more successful. Now, K-pop rules the world when it comes to manufactured bands. In Britain and America, the charts belong to solo girl auteurs such as Chappelle Roan and Charli XCX — artists whose fans love them precisely because they write, record, perform and create their own image with no need for a puppet master like Cowell. 

Even his own creations have turned against him. Jade, formerly of Little Mix, launched her solo career last year with the song “Angel of My Dreams”, a delirious satire of the pop industry, including the line: “sellin’ my soul to a psycho.” Cowell had signed Little Mix to his own label, Syco, so it was pretty obvious who she was referring to. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child, Cowell might have thought, if he were given to quoting King Lear, which he probably isn’t. But how apt it is for an aging ruler of a fallen kingdom.

Meanwhile, the tongue-lashing style Cowell perfected is now sorely out of step with contemporary concerns about mental health. In 2019, the TV presenter Caroline Flack — who, among other gigs, had once hosted The X Factor — killed herself in the midst of being prosecuted for assaulting her boyfriend, a case that had captured ferocious and, according to her family, unfair press attention. Her final Instagram post read: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” #Bekind has since been adopted as a social media watchword. It’s an injunction that would preclude making teenagers cry for entertainment. 

And then there was Payne’s death, which happened during the filming of Simon Cowell: The Next Act. In his New York Times interview, Cowell talks about his shock and sadness — “It was just awful, awful.” But when the interviewer presses him on whether what happened to Payne is a sign of the inherent toxicity of fame, Cowell does something curious. He starts discussing his own relationship with celebrity. “I honestly don’t know what is harder: trying to be famous or managing your fame,” he says. 

“Not every day has been amazing, but I’m glad I did what I did,” he continues. “I signed up for it because obviously there was something inside of me saying, I want to be well known. And I would do it all over again.” Is this the self-exculpation of a deeply cynical man? Cowell got to make his choices as an adult with a successful career in the music business behind him. One Direction were still children when they first came into contact with Cowell’s empire. Payne was just 14 when he first auditioned, and 16 when he returned to the show and was cast in 1D. 

No one so young could have known what he was letting himself in for. But even so, Cowell is telling an awkward truth about fame. We tend to talk about it now as a kind of violence done to its subjects, which it is, but it’s a kind of violence that almost never happens to people by accident. To become famous you have to want it, and want it painfully. Want it enough to sacrifice anything — including, most of all, the possibility of ever having a normal life. Want it as much as Cowell wanted it.

Cowell knew precisely how to pierce the souls of his auditioners because he was, like them, hungry for fame. He could be sublimely cruel, because he could sympathize completely with the hopefuls before him. Maybe time has softened him. Maybe fatherhood has blunted his edges. Maybe the death of Payne has given him a reckoning. But he’s still on TV because he still wants fame, and for the aspirants on Simon Cowell: The Next Act, that means he can still be a dangerous man.

It was a fitting finale for America’s first reality TV family, and a preview of our current predicament. Long before Facebook collected our data or TikTok monetized our confessions, the Louds were at the vanguard of an industry that would ultimately spawn Big Brother, the Kardashians, and a whole raft of reality TV shows obsessed with domestic spectacle.

But, more importantly, the Louds revealed a cultural transformation already underway — one where we, the public, would willingly and enthusiastically invade our own privacy, turning intimate life into public performance.

On 11 January 1973, millions of viewers gathered at 9pm: to witness a household unraveling in real time. That evening, PBS began broadcasting An American Family, a 12-hour documentary series with a difference.

The Loud family seemed ideal subjects for the experiment. William C. Loud, 51, and his wife Pat, 47, lived with their five children on a mountain drive in Santa Barbara, California. Their lifestyle embodied the American Dream that family sitcoms like The Brady Bunch had idealized: affluent, attractive, seemingly stable. Producer Craig Gilbert had chosen them from hundreds of volunteers precisely because they appeared to represent the ideal.

But Gilbert’s revolutionary vision was to disrupt the model. An American Family would get beneath the veneer and offer “a real view of middle-class life”. Unlike traditional documentaries, with scripts and a presenter controlling the story, the cameras would simply roll and capture whatever happened.

Gilbert’s 300 hours of raw footage, filmed over seven months, revealed the dirty laundry behind the facade. In one episode, Pat demanded her philandering husband leave; they went on to divorce. Their eldest son Lance, 20, was living a hedonistic lifestyle in New York’s Chelsea district, becoming the first openly gay person portrayed in a family context on American television.

The media responded swiftly and brutally. Newsweek‘s cover featured a group shot of the family with the strap line “Broken Family”. Inside, the magazine branded them “affluent zombies” whose “shopping carts overflow, but their minds are empty.” The New York Times dissected each member with surgical precision. It called Lance an “evil flower”, “camping and queening about like a pathetic court jester,” and described him as “a Goyaesque emotional dwarf.” It condemned Delilah, just 16, for never grieving “for the migrant workers, the lettuce pickers, the war dead,” and for lacking an interest in “philosophy or poetry” or any “adolescent idealism.”

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The Louds had unwittingly become harbingers of a far broader social transformation. Private life — that bourgeois creation of separate spheres, domestic sanctity, and clear boundaries between public and personal — had taken centuries to establish. The idea of privacy as “the right to be let alone” was 100 years old, immortalized in a famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article. Yet by the Seventies, this carefully constructed edifice was crumbling. The collapse of the public-private divide that would later characterize our digital age had already begun, before Mark Zuckerberg was even born.

Instead of retreating from the limelight that had so wounded them, the Louds embraced it entirely. They were among the first to become famous simply for being themselves, and the experience changed them forever. Pat Loud wrote an autobiography, prefiguring the “warts and all” memoir boom of the Nineties; Bill modeled in his bathrobe for Esquire. Delilah appeared as a “bachelorette” on The Dating Game, and all five children performed as a rock band on The Dick Cavett Show. Lance posed naked for Screw magazine.

“Television ate my family”, Lance proclaimed in the aftermath, and certainly the cameras never really turned off. When he was dying from an AIDS-related disease, filmmakers Susan and Alan Raymond dropped everything to capture his last two months in Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family. Lance wanted to be filmed one last time to show the bonds of affection that survived in his family. His dying wish was to prove to the American people that the Louds were not broken.

Pat Loud always stood by the family’s decision to take part. She pushed for greater openness in everyday life: the therapeutic mantra of the moment. “We opened the doors in a lot of houses and blew out a lot of dust,” she said. “If families are going to make it, that’s how. Not with secrets, or little slots to fit into, or a lot of propaganda from parents.”

She was articulating what had become the dominant cultural orthodoxy: that secrecy was pathological, that privacy enabled dysfunction, and that psychological health demanded full disclosure. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man, published the same year the documentary aired, satirized the spirit of the age. Its antihero, Howard Kirk, a radical sociology lecturer, sits with his lover Myra and his wife Barbara, with whom he has an open marriage. “It is called The Defeat of Privacy,” Kirk tells them of his new book. “It’s about the fact that there are no more private selves, no more private corners in society, no more private properties, no more private acts.”

These ideas went back decades. In 1950, sociologist David Riesman had prophetically announced from the pages of Time magazine that the “character” of Americans was fundamentally changing, a thesis that dominated cocktail party conversations throughout the decade.

In his bestselling follow up The Lonely Crowd, Riesman revealed how foundational sources of meaning were crumbling. Traditional authorities — church, family, and established social hierarchies — were giving way to mass education and the emerging media landscape of radio and television. Simultaneously, the economy was shifting from agriculture and industry toward services and sales, demanding fewer risk-taking entrepreneurs and more gray-suited conformists who could work and play well with others.

Riesman predicted that these forces were creating a move from “inner-directed” to “other-directed” personalities. Rather than drawing guidance from traditional authorities or cultivating rich inner lives, Americans were developing a social radar, constantly attuned to peer expectations and seeking approval from those around them. As Riesman observed: “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed.”

Riesman, then, had anticipated the “narcissistic” self, immortalized in Christopher Lasch’s 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism, one that would become increasingly comfortable with the self-invasion of privacy and indeed actively require it: all in search of an approving audience. The ancient maxim “know yourself” became “recognize me.”

Riesman’s study was also formative for the American sociologist Todd Gitlin, one-time leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Teaching his Berkeley students in the Eighties, who themselves were surrounded by confessional talk-show hosts like Phil Donahue and Oprah, Gitlin found that his students struggled to understand the distinction between private and public lives. The idea of being inwardly focused made no intuitive sense to them. These students had been born into a world that was fundamentally other-directed at every level.

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But Gitlin himself had helped create this world. Throughout the Sixties, the SDS, which grew from 30,000 recorded supporters to an estimated 100,000 members across over 300 chapters, played a crucial part in the turn towards the narcissistic self: by politicizing authenticity. SDS became a core component of the counterculture movements that dominated student activism, helping to reshape how an entire generation understood the relationship between personal experience and political action.

“The time has come for a reassertion of the personal,” announced Tom Hayden in the infamous “Port Huron Statement” of 1962, the SDS’s founding manifesto. Students once believed in American values, it said, but that belief was now shattered, and they were looking “uncomfortably at the world we inherit.” The new goal would be finding meaning in a life that is “personally authentic”, an agenda that marked a highly individualistic turn for a Left politics with roots in class solidarity.

Indeed, the New Left turned away from class struggle and drew on existentialist currents to advocate for politics rooted in individual experience and personal growth. As Gitlin recalled in his memoir, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, the decade was fueled by a passion to “bring political commitment into private life, and make private values count in public.” The aim was to overcome the “treacherous” liberal schism between public postures and private evasions. This shift was influenced by popularized psychoanalytic theories of unconscious repression, developed by Sigmund Freud at the turn of the century. Later interpretations of his work, particularly by the German-born social critic Herbert Marcuse, recast psychoanalysis as a manual for liberation.

But it was a particular strain of feminists who put the boot into private life far more forcefully than any tech giant ever could. Organizations like New York Radical Women and Radical Mothers rejected the feminism of Betty Friedan. Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) had awakened millions of women to “the problem that has no name” — the stifling boredom and unfulfillment of suburban domesticity — and launched the modern women’s movement. But while Friedan sought equality through legislation and workplace reform, believing women could balance careers with traditional roles like marriage and motherhood, radical feminists wanted to change things from the inside out.

An early rule of the New York Radical Women was that members couldn’t generalize about oppression unless they first shared testimony from their own lives; political positions had to be forged in personal experience. Gatherings often began by going around the room listening to women’s day-to-day problems. These “consciousness-raising groups” spread like wildfire. In 1973, at their peak, 100,000 American women belonged to them. Their aim was to analyze society from personal experience. “Feelings are Facts” rallied one woman at a so-called abortion “speakout” in New York.

This thinking crystallized in Carol Hanisch’s influential 1970 essay “The Personal is Political”, a phrase that would shape how entire generations understood the boundary between public and private life. For centuries, the liberal tradition had maintained a clear distinction: public life was the realm of politics, economics, and civic engagement, while private life remained a sanctuary, free from public interference. But “the personal is political” obliterated this distinction.

Kate Millett, also immortalized in 1970 as Time’s “Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation”, turned her fire on the private domain. Women’s oppression couldn’t be addressed solely through public changes, she argued; it stemmed from private relations and even the language that culture reinforced. The struggle had to move away from the narrow world of chairmen and parties and expand to include “power-structured” relationships.

In the end, Millett was rejected by the movement she helped found, as it collapsed into factionalism. Yet the die had been cast: and indeed the social trends embodied in Louds have only grown in speed and scale over the intervening decades. From the late Nineties, for instance, The Real World and Survivor, later mirrored by Naked Attraction and Love Island, have dominated TV screens and then our laptops. Intimate confession and recognition of the “true” self is now a mainstay of contemporary discourse. Being “false”, or worse a hypocrite, is a deadly modern sin. Social media platforms would later accelerate and monetize these trends, of course, but they surely didn’t invent them.

All the while, our public life has incorporated things that were once reserved for the private sphere — crying, confessing to crimes, follies, and misdemeanors — while the civil discourse of politics and formal manners have fallen away. Think of Queen Elizabeth II being criticized for her lack of emotion when Princess Diana died, or Meghan and Harry broadcasting their private woes to the world. Even substantive policy debates about literally life-and-death matters like assisted suicide or abortion have become entirely about feelings: caring, being kind, or expressing anger. Personal experience trumps evidence. Cool reasoning has no place.

For their part, the private lives of public figures are scrutinized 24 hours a day. The public person, whether an artist, professional, or politician, cannot be separated from the private, and the private is deemed what truly matters. This shift extends to political combat itself. The current modus operandi, from the exposure of Trump’s locker room bragging to the recent Labour casualty Paul Ovenden, who lost his job when someone leaked old WhatsApp messages, sees the exposure of private conversations as a weapon to take down political opponents.

Today, there is little distinction between the public and private world. Intimacy floods the public realm while light shines on the private. Instead, we have embraced a narrow, impoverished conception of privacy, always a protean concept, not as protection from authority and public scrutiny, and as a sanctuary for the inner self and a shelter for intimacy — but merely as data protection.

Through it all, we blame the convenient scapegoat of the moment: the internet. But this gets the timeline wrong. By the time social media arrived, we were already living in a post-private world. The digital revolution simply gave us more efficient tools to do what we were already doing: performing our identities, seeking validation through revelation, and treating intimacy as a public commodity.

This matters, because if we misdiagnose the problem, we’ll never find the cure. All the digital detoxing and platform regulation in the world won’t restore what was lost long before the internet was ever invented. Far better, then, to face up to how we voluntarily dismantled the very idea that some things should remain hidden, that mystery and restraint might be virtues, and that not everything must be shared.

The business models of technology giants like Google and Facebook clearly violate people’s privacy, as does state surveillance. But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought that technology alone has undermined the moral status of privacy and private life. The cameras that Lance Loud invited into his hospice room were not smartphones or CCTV cameras. They were the logical endpoint of a cultural revolution that began decades earlier. And we let them in ourselves.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
Yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse
Of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

It’s a beautiful sentiment, a message of welcome to the immigrants who sailed past the statue on their way to queue for entry at Ellis Island. But the placement of these lines at the metaphorical golden door to America also carried a crucial subtext: by the time you were standing on that threshold, you had definitely — to put it in less poetic terms — been through some shit. Not just whatever tragic circumstances caused you to flee your home country — oppression, catastrophe, poverty, war — but the journey itself. Your arrival on American soil was the culmination of weeks or months of arduous travel, including the storied transatlantic crossing; probably, you were catching your first glimpse of Lady Liberty from the steerage compartment of some filthy ship where you had spent the past week defecating into a bucket, sleeping six to a berth, and being gnawed on by lice, rats, and possibly your fellow passengers.

Indeed, the transformative promise of a life in this country was predicated on the inherent difficulty of getting here: you could make it in America, but first you had to make it to America.

Keeping in mind that the hero’s journey of the American immigrant was already the stuff of legend, we may be less than shocked by the recent news — first reported by the Daily Mail — that the US Department of Homeland Security is considering participating in a Survivor-style reality TV show centered on immigration, with contestants competing for coveted citizenship via “regionally specific ‘cultural’ contests”. The show is the brainchild of producer Rob Worsoff, best known for his work on Duck Dynasty, who has been pitching it to DHS since the Obama administration, but without success — or attention, for that matter. (I believe I speak for the majority of my countrymen when I say I had no idea that our national security apparatus was also in the business of doing reality shows.)

Initially, rumor had it that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was already backing the project — but a DHS spokesman clarified that the idea had not yet reached Noem and was merely under review, and Noem herself told a Senate committee earlier this week that she’d never heard of the project and had no plans to participate in it. Which perhaps makes the media imbroglio a bit premature, but honestly, can you blame them? An immigration reality show is so perfectly on-brand for Donald Trump that the most surprising thing is that he didn’t come up with the idea himself, somewhere in between the campaign-era fearmongering about Haitian migrants barbecuing pets in Ohio, and his administration’s mass deportation of thousands of people. (These people are illegal aliens and gang members, supposedly, except that it’s increasingly looking like that number includes a significant contingent of innocent people who were scooped up and sent to foreign prisons by mistake). A Hunger Games-style competition for citizenship would just be the cherry on top of the already-grotesque spectacle that is the Trump 2.0 immigration policy.

Except, unlike the bulk of the current administration’s efforts to manage immigration, this might… actually be kind of a good idea?

To see why, one must first understand how the American immigration narrative has changed since the days when Ronald Reagan celebrated the US as a beacon of hope, the “shining city on a hill”, “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here”. But the comparative ease of border-crossing in the age of the global economy, combined with the fact that today’s migrants are mostly coming from South and Central America rather than across the Atlantic, has badly undermined the romantic narrative that defined immigration in the Reagan era. The image of the immigrant as heroic traveler has been replaced by a Trumpian boogeyman: the scary, seedy bad hombre sauntering across the southern border with a gun in one hand and a bag of fentanyl in the other. These aren’t your huddled masses but your invading hordes, sneaking in to steal your job, your security, your hard-won American dream.

That narrative may not be accurate, but it is certainly politically effective. For a long time, the only response the Left could muster was the comparatively ineffective tactic of calling anyone who believed it a racist, resulting in zero progress or cooperation and a whole lot of ill will — a state of affairs which has not improved in the wake of Trump’s return to the White House. But this is why the idea of an immigration reality show is so intriguing: this is a chance to tell a different kind of story, one that is pro-immigrant without being anti-American. It’s a narrative that offers something to people of all political stripes: a wholesome story about people who believe in this country, and love what it stands for, all yearning to prove themselves worthy of the privilege of being your neighbor, your friend, your fellow American.

A bit exploitative and gauche? Maybe, but that’s show business, baby. And it’s also fully in keeping with the proud American tradition of disguising as a glittering spectacle what is, at base, a good and charitable cause. Much like beauty pageants promote community engagement and civic pride through the strategic use of tiaras and bikinis, a reality show featuring aspiring Americans dressed up as cowboy cosplayers trying to lasso their way to citizenship is a good way to make people care about the immigrant experience where they might have been otherwise indifferent.

Obviously, there are also ways in which this could all go terribly wrong, particularly given that the current administration seems to take a certain malicious delight in not just ejecting people from the country but making the process hurt. Although Worsoff says that being on the show would not harm the contestants’ immigration prospects in any way, one could still be forgiven for worrying that those eliminated from the competition might find themselves walking off the set into ICE custody, or worse.

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But that is a potential flaw in the execution, not the concept. And as for the concept, it’s really nothing new — even in the realm of pop culture. The preciousness of citizenship is something storytellers have long pointed at, often through the lens of science fiction, imagining a future United States in which it has become a privilege of the ruling class rather than a right for all. The Hunger Games, The Running Man, The Handmaid’s Tale, Starship Troopers, Gattaca: each in their own way present a dystopian warning of what the future might hold. But they are also, quietly, a nod to the unfathomable value of what we have right here, right now — and to the sense that to be an American requires not just having a dream, but having the ferocity to chase it.

And if turning that experience into a televised competition seems a bit distasteful, perhaps that’s only because it makes too explicit, too real, the understanding that has always lurked beneath the surface of American culture: that to live in this country is a blessing. One most of us take for granted because we were born to it rather than having to earn it; one that grants us the kind of freedom and opportunity that other people would cross an ocean just to have a shot at.

This is an easy thing to forget in the era of the border crisis, with our vast, impersonal bureaucracy that renders individual immigrant stories invisible. Whatever the dangers of a show like this, it would at least replace the boogeyman of the invading horde with the names and faces and stories of individual human beings. People with dreams, people with families; people we’ll want to root for. Why? For the same reasons we’ve always celebrated the archetypal immigrant, who would sacrifice anything to get to America: because he is possessed of the same strength, the same hunger, the same pioneer spirit as the ones who built the country in the first place — through revolution, or Manifest Destiny, or simply reckless, relentless persistence in pursuit of a free and beautiful life. He believes in America. He belongs in America.

And if that journey once began with a welcome from Lady Liberty at the golden door, maybe today it could begin in primetime — in the flickering blue light of the television, in the privacy and comfort of our living rooms.

Nigel Farage, the most influential British politician never to have served as MP, is the controversial star turn on this year’s I’m A Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here!: an appearance that will, reportedly, net him £1.5m. Albeit somewhat muffled by Suella-related screeching, the press is already excitedly feasting: fans will reportedly “boycott” the series, friends worry it will “haunt” him, and haters grumble that the opposite might happen. After all, in the wake of his appearance in the last series, there are now people with a celebrity crush on Matt Hancock.

What may be less obvious, though, is that the latest round of Westminster court drama and reality-TV drama are the same story. And what they reveal is that far from being a failure, the much-hailed post-Brexit realignment has been a roaring success. It’s just not the realignment we wanted.

Since its advent with Big Brother in 2000, modern competitive reality TV has (perhaps unintentionally) existed as ironic comment on the official political process. Just like politics junkies (and in far greater numbers), reality TV enthusiasts follow the contestants’ ups and downs with the utmost devotion, argue over their merits, and cast votes with enthusiasm. The results are watched and debated. Reality TV is now even as dynastic as politics: Bobby Brazier, son of Big Brother’s most notorious superstar, the late Jade Goody, is riding as high in this year’s Strictly as Stephen Kinnock briefly was when elected in 2015.

The other comparison, as has grown increasingly apparent since Big Brother, is less cheerful. The net impact on audience lives of voting for or against Nigel Farage on I’m A Celebrity will be nil, beyond a measure of entertainment and something to discuss with colleagues at work. By contrast, what was the net impact of voting for Brexit, seven years later? Two dominant themes in Brexiteers’ arguments for leaving were: first, a desire to reclaim democratic self-governance from the stultifying effect of EU treaties and the unelected Commission; and second, lower immigration. Did it work? The judges’ scores, as they say on Strictly, are in — no, it didn’t.

After a brief post-Brexit dip, immigration is at its highest level ever. And after a landslide Tory majority in 2019, won for an expressed willingness to follow through on a decision made by British voters, today the second unelected Tory Prime Minister since that Johnson victory now enjoys an EU Commission-like appointee status without even his party’s mandate. This man has, in turn, appointed to his Cabinet an even less-elected Foreign Secretary: a man who isn’t even an MP. I can see how some would conclude that the main difference between voting in an election, and voting for your favourite couple on Strictly, is that the latter will cost you 15p from a BT landline.

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Meanwhile, if voting is now largely unrelated to the terrain in which politics happens, what exactly is the nature of that terrain? It’s not a new observation that — with considerable historic help from the Tory Party — what is considered acceptable material for electoral politics is shaped some way upstream of voting, by an insider network of “statutory bodies”, watchdogs, czars, courts and the like. This blends seamlessly into a professionalised, often murkily-funded archipelago of NGOs that propagates guidelines, lobbies for pet causes, and either provides or withholds the moral imprimatur for official electoral politics. And the political outlook of this cadre, which exists in symbiotic relationship with official state institutions, is hostile to every form of Toryism except (at a pinch) the Cameroon variety.

It’s possible, up to a point, to intervene in this ecosystem by forming and funding your own NGOs. But in underwhelming contrast with the American Republican Party, whose institutional artillery is now laser-focused on preparing for a future programme of attack on the US version of this perceived hostile hegemony, the Tory-led “realignment” left its British analogue almost entirely intact. The clear inference is that a majority prefer it that way.  And even accepting that this is now the key battlefield has a grim corollary: that contra optimists’ hopes, especially after 2019, the real political realignment has not been toward democratic accountability, but decisively in the other direction.

Meanwhile, for those without the social or financial table-stakes required to help shape the field of acceptable Westminster discourse — which is to say, ordinary voters — this leaves few avenues for expressing views discordant with the acceptable range of politics, as defined by this unelected consensus-formation machine. But here, too, the realignment we got isn’t the one we hoped for. Some imagined Brexit might usher in a new politics of belonging, with people brought together by love of locality, the givens of our life in common, and a shared effort to improve our social fabric together. Such hopes were, however briefly, raised by Johnson’s promised “levelling-up” agenda.

What we got instead, especially since Covid has tipped us decisively from a print-first to a digital-first culture, has been a radically unequal, deracinated, dematerialised, transnational public discourse of politics as overlapping fandoms. In digital form, such fandoms manifest as political firestorms, “dogpiling” opponents, or pushing pet causes via clicktivism and online petitions. Offline, it coalesces as “phatic protest”: street demonstrations oriented less toward actual policy, than a form of self-expression and group identity-formation.

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The results are often jarringly transcultural: for example the protesters mimicking American ones by calling “hands up don’t shoot” at Britain’s police officers during the (transnational) BLM riots, despite the fact that only around 5% of British officers carry guns. The recent, global “Palestine” protests also fit this template, bringing together assorted far-Left and Islamist fandoms in a coalition that seems to presage previously unimaginable forms of transnational neo-polity.

How such pressure groups and seemingly decentralised memetic tides interact with real-world power and money is ambiguous. But one thing these phenomena resoundingly are not is a newly resurgent politics of place. Quite the opposite: if the globalisation of meme-driven street protest signals anything, it’s the ascendancy of a new politics of placelessness: the very phenomenon the Tories’ abortive “realignment” promised to end.

None of this is to say that elected politicians have no power, or that we’re all governed in perpetuity by a shadowy conspiracy. The truth is, as ever, more banal than the conspiracies. The actually existing realignment may be post-democratic, but it is far from being a closed shop. The tendency shown by the now-deposed Suella Braverman to speak and tweet as though already in Opposition implied that the position of Home Secretary did not, in fact, command the level of power over home affairs a naïve outsider might imagine it to afford. Even so, were the role completely toothless it would hardly have been worth anyone’s while to sack her for proposing (or so she argues) to enact actual policies in line with the wishes of Conservative voters.

Nonetheless, her expulsion, as with that of Liz Truss before her, illustrates the fate that awaits those who batter too noisily against the boundaries imposed by the symbiotic civil service and NGO-cracy, the combustible online rent-a-mob, or who knows what other extra-political interests. Where such actors align against a policy, however well-supported it nominally is electorally or by polling, that policy will be strangled at birth. In turn, this leaves no avenues for high-profile dissidents save abandoning “reality” altogether, and leaning into “TV”. That is: embracing a new status as influencers within the digital domain of politics fandom.

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We might call this “politainment”, and its stars wield non-trivial levels of power over their political fandoms, much as online influencers in any other type of fandom. Here, too, you can flourish (after a fashion) whether or not you’re an insider. And being obnoxious or notorious is often an advantage. Consider the iconic “Q Shaman”, Jacob Chansley, who made photo headlines across the world after the January 6 Capitol riot. After a stint in jail, he is now, reportedly, running for Congress. This makes sense: the logic of internet celebrity is such that it doesn’t really matter whether the clout you acquire is generated by love or hate — a click is a click.

While Farage has played at the edges of politics since Brexit with his chat show on GB News and Reform party, could he now be garnering the energy needed for a comeback by re-inserting himself into the national consciousness via reality TV? His legions of haters will love watching him eat insects; meanwhile he’ll be on every tabloid front page for weeks on end. Who knows where a re-injection of publicity (not to mention hard cash) will take him. No surprise, then, to find him leaning hard into the collapse of dissident politics into entertainment, by hijacking the Reform Party mailing list to shill for I’m A Celeb votes.

But the flip side of this eruption of influencer politainment is its bleak corollary: the only way to be an insider, with access to real power, is by hewing to an increasingly narrowly defined consensus. The Overton window has been nailed shut.

Instead of rescuing 20th-century style democracy, the realignment buried it. Farage’s move simply attests that what is reported in the press as the political process is more accurately understood as a subset of reality TV, with at best an oblique relation to how decisions are actually taken.

Where Brexiteers dreamed of greater democratic accountability, the tumult their victory set in motion has entrenched financiers and insiders, even as it has made the views of voters ever more obviously irrelevant. And shifts that some hoped would widen the Overton window have produced, instead, a politics in which the only outlet for dissidents is as defanged internet celebrities.

So we got the realignment. It just wasn’t the one we ordered. The urgent project for every disappointed optimist of 2016 and 2019 is now to stop complaining about promises betrayed, drag our eyes from the TV, and lean into post-democratic reality.

It is perhaps an anecdotal measure of cultural decline that Alastair Campbell, along with fellow “political heavyweight” Baroness Warsi, is now playing the role of scowling mentor in Channel 4’s new reality show, Make Me Prime Minister. Twelve “ordinary yet opinionated Brits” compete to see if any of them “has what it takes” to “do the top job better”. They are faced with wildly under-specified tasks — week one: “totally reform primary school education”; week two: solve “the obesity epidemic” — with rather uncertain standards as to what might count as success. Presumably, next week it will be “broker a multi-lateral peace treaty in the Middle East”, or “restructure the UK’s long-term government debt”. If that kind of geopolitical cosplay doesn’t send them hurtling for the fire escape, the candidates should perhaps ask themselves if anything would.

The candidates grandstand, argue, blame and bullshit one another — ungrammatically and at length — in a tour de force of charmless self-assertion. They stumble around boardrooms in a fake Downing Street, draw randomly on whiteboards, and loosely translate the vapid, self-affirming dialect of reality-TV cliché into the terms of the mad fantasy the show insists on: “As Prime Minister, I have to stay true to myself”; “I don’t want to be like the Prime Ministers that we’ve had previously”. Warsi and Campbell — one can only hope in return for a large fee — are made to debase themselves by pretending the exercise has some halfway credible purpose. “I hope what this competition will do is find a new generation of political leaders,” says Warsi flatly, like a hostage to camera. “It would be quite extraordinary”, Campbell agrees, “if one or more of the people who go through this process actually do end up as elected politicians.” True enough.

Why insist on this deranged understanding of the show’s purpose? There is, I take it, something more to it than the usual time-filling promotional bluster.

At the heart of the show is an oddly exceptionalist view of politics as a locus of human thought and action. It is the view that politics, unlike any other intellectually-demanding discipline you care to name, admits no refinement of judgement: that there is no such thing as political wisdom or expertise. This bedrock conviction provides a firm basis for various kinds of populist sentiment. If there are no standards of political judgement, any “ordinary Brit” with enough of a can-do attitude should be able to do it. The apparent existence of subtle, structural or technically-demanding political problems turns out to be an illusion, one no doubt sustained by a political class who gain by it. Actually, the view says, there are no persistent or recalcitrant political problems, no perennial challenges of conflict or co-ordination: politics is nothing but a realm of pseudo-problems. What is needed, as one of the contestants puts it, is to “just apply some common sense to what we were told was a very complex situation”.

The show ministers to a strand of common-sense supremacism that plays a recognisable role in more and less sophisticated styles of political cynicism. Make Me Prime Minister is the kind of show you can imagine appealing to someone who reckons Hugh Grant should definitely be made Prime Minister on the basis of the terribly amusing dance he does in Love Actually, or who tweets terrifying lists of the various celebrities who would appear in their “fantasy cabinets”. It is a position that operates in a purposefully unstable rhetorical ground — at once reflexively sanctimonious and deeply unserious. The show’s embrace of this kind of thought makes for a haywire tone. One moment Campbell and Warsi talk disapprovingly about politics “being in a mess” and the urgent search for “new talent and energy”; the next, parish-council tactical-Zoom-defenestrator Jackie Weaver is introduced as one of the contestants. One minute, we’re told “parliament ought to sit up and take notice” of the fine example the contestants are setting; the next, we have to watch as they stumble around, asserting themselves mindlessly like a round-the-clock tribute act to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Of course, to the owners of the reductive theory that politics consists in the straightforward application of common sense, the solutions to all our problems can look frustratingly close to hand. All we have to do, as various candidates suggest in their turn, is to put “any differences aside”, agree to “take a more progressive approach”, and try to be “a lot more forgiving and a lot more open”. “I believe in doing the right thing,” insists one candidate, contentiously; another informs us that in politics all “you need [is] integrity and principles”. “I try not to take an argumentative stance when I debate” reveals one, apparently without irony. “I don’t like to be confrontational”, insists another at a decisive moment of conflict. “It’s one of the things I dislike about politics.” (What exactly there is left of politics, let alone left to like about it, once conflict has been disposed of, is not explained.)

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You might think it would be quite tricky for someone who believes that all political disagreement dissolves in the universal acid of common sense to explain the manifest character of the world around them. Cynicism about the political process can be a helpful crutch here, though it can easily modulate into something with a more wide-eyed, conspiracist aspect to it. Because there cannot be any real political problems, the theory might go, anyone — in particular, any politician — pretending that there are must be somehow compromised: a liar, ill-intentioned or in someone else’s pocket.

For common-sense supremacists, being alienated from a sclerotic and corrupted political process can therefore only bolster one’s credentials. The “ordinary Brit”, with her brutal logic of common sense, wouldn’t do the “top job” just as well as the career politician; she would do it a damn sight better! She is, after all, free from all that unhelpful political baggage — you know, all that dreadful cumbersome stuff like understanding, loyalty, experience or commitment.

All the contestants on Make Me Prime Minister seem to credit some version of this account of the pure and indefeasible claim of free-floating common sense. In fact, it is perhaps this that accounts for the strangely unstable set of attitudes they seem to hold with regard to extant political life: a mixture of global contempt, wild self-belief, and shameless ignorance. At the limit — as the show’s candidates express with an unguarded clarity — even a standing interest in politics might be a possession of doubtful value. “I don’t know that I am interested in politics,” Jackie Weaver boasts; a second contestant suggests his “greatest attribute” is his lack of party-political solidarity (“I would just weigh up the policies as I see them”); another boasts of his “outsider status”; “what you need to do is think: I’m sick of these politicians, I can do this better”.

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The anti-democratic argument that rule-by-experts would be best for society and the soul is, of course, as old as political philosophy itself. At first sight, the implied political vision of Make Me Prime Minister is a terrifying inversion of its Platonic relation — it shows us a vision of society ruled, not by philosopher kings, but by an untrained council of reality TV contestants who also happen to be apolitical imbeciles. But in a way, the opposed visions have more in common than is first apparent. Both are ways not so much of advancing political life, but of disposing of it altogether. They are both expressions of the belief, or perhaps the consoling aspiration, that politics, with all its constitutive disharmony and antagonism, should cease to exist. Of course, as a solution to the perennial problem of reaching political decisions, the resolution comes, inevitably, one decision too late. And it is one of the fleeting pleasures of watching Make Me Prime Minister to see its contestants’ belief in the obliterating power of common sense and worthy intentions disintegrate as they struggle, argue and disagree in the course of making even the most elementary decisions.  

Surely this show has backfired on its creators? If I didn’t know better, I would say the whole thing was the result of a hasty backroom deal between television executives and the government designed to make members of the current administration look sane, witty, intelligent, urbane, self-effacing and capable by comparison. It is no small irony that the show falls flat in this way, much like the contestants’ attempts to “prove themselves” do: collapsing without generating intelligent reflection or insight, the hollowness of their shared and complacent vision of politics exposed. There are, needless to say, insightful and unsettling criticisms to be made of the political institutions in this country; but the claim that we would all be better off if very simple-minded people were running them is not one of them.

But everyone else in Britain must have. He’s now sold five million copies of them, and at moments has enjoyed an almost Beatles-esque literary ubiquity, topping the hardback and paperback bestseller charts simultaneously. And like the early Beatles’ albums, he’s cranked them out at a prolific (and commercially auspicious) rate. The first of The Thursday Murder Club mysteries came out in September 2020, and the second almost a year later to the day. Right on cue, the third, The Bullet that Missed is out this week. And like its predecessors, it is set to be one of the bestselling books in British history.

The famous novelist who is famous for being something else — a newscaster, cook, or dress-designer — is no great novelty. And though he’s clear that he didn’t want to be seen as having “dashed out a celebrity novel”, Osman is clearly not in the writing game for the garret and the overdraft: his first two books went for a seven-figure advance. But while Graham Norton, Jeremy Vine and Richard Coles bashed it out, took the cheque, and returned to the loftier heights of their primary career, Osman has refused to stop writing.

If you’ve been entertained in Britain over the last 25 years, you’ll be familiar with Osman, whether you realise it or not. If, in the Noughties, you saw a deal-broking, sombre-talking Noel Edmonds conjuring numbers out of red boxes — Osman was behind the camera, as a producer. Or, if you only caught the aquatic soft-play of Total Wipeout or the “anarchic” nastiness of 8 Out of 10 Cats, go back and check the credits. Executive producer: Richard Osman.

But this was all mere preludial before Osman’s imperial, front-of-house period. First, still behind a desk if not behind the scenes, as Pointless’s toothy sage of arcane trivia, before spinning off solo with Richard Osman’s House of Games. And in the past few years, the written word has also become an integrated province of Greater Osmania. If you can clamber past the cardboard Osman display set in the Waterstones window, the life-size Osman cut-out in the doorway, you’ll find only pyramids of Osman hardbacks, themselves overshadowed by the broader Teotihuacans of shiny Osman paperbacks.

He was already on television every single day. The face and the name, every night of the week just around teatime — flick on the old crystal bucket and there he is, in the slot of warm, cuddly, wisecracking nerd. Like Stephen Fry, a camera-loving Cantab whose intelligence is attractive rather than intimidating — indeed, Osman is seriously fanciable according to various samples of “which celebrity d’you wanna shag” psephology.

Heat magazine’s weirdest crush (2011) has also been aided by a campaign of epic salesmanship. First the Tube posters, the chat show slots, the free books given away to NHS workers, and the personal “brand manager” appointed to Osman by his publisher. And then the blurbing splurge and the endorsements from Britain’s popular intelligentsia which gush across the covers of Osman’s books. Adam Kay (“achingly British”), Marian Keyes (“VERY funny”) and this slightly scary recommendation from Philippa Perry: “I didn’t ever want to finish this book!” It would be too easy to envy such a spectacle, and several reviewers have given into the temptation. But Osman’s success has rippled overseas (number two in Japan). He can’t be written off as some self-inflating industry balloon.

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So what of the books? Like the rest of Osman’s oeuvre, they’re very entertaining, and make smart use of the winning ingredients of British popular fiction. The setting, Osman’s Hogwarts or Malory Towers, is one of Britain’s few remaining growth industries: an old-age home in Kent called Coopers Chase. Living there are Osman’s Famous Five — Ron, Joyce, Elizabeth and Ibrahim — who set up the Thursday Murder Club, an extra-curricular group dedicated to solving cold murder cases. They have help from local bobbies Chris and Donna, and shadowy figures from their own pasts. The result is something like a cross between The Archers and Spooks, with Elizabeth, a kind of female James Bond in retirement, lending proceedings a touch of Cold War, gun-in-the-handbag glamour.

Osman isn’t a multifaceted or complex writer. His villains stalk the night-terrors of the middle-class imagination: a drug baroness, teenage hoodlums, tax-avoiders and, most horrifying of all, a gauche property developer. And in the background lurk the clichés of broader thrillerdom: Colombian drug smugglers, the New York mafia, dodgy Albanians. This is all smoothed under a tone of relentless comic bathos, raising the stakes of a murder before dropping you back down to quaint, twee, pensioner earth. So, meet this fearsome former Russian spy, sometime head of the Leningrad KGB, who is on the phone to a call centre trying to get Virgin Media to show this week’s Bake Off. Or: on the road, racing after our perp — but can’t we please stop for the loo, my bladder’s really not what it used to be.

These deflationary gags, honed on the panel show, are good for a half-hour, not for 400 pages. It has been labelled “cosy crime”, godless and largely un-romantic. When sex rears its head, it keeps its hat on (all of Osman’s oldsters are rather horny, but only in the manner of a wistful dotage). Even his criminals hardly swear. In place of such grandiosity or indelicacy are jokes, daytime telly references, warmth, and a steady, mellow banality.

You can’t attain such heights of popularity without trouble. And while Osman would always face aesthetic attack (most crime novelists do), some suppose his popularity comes with political responsibilities. One notable attack from the Left accused him of a kind of bourgeois sentimentality, projecting a too-tranquil provincial England where the police aren’t corrupt or violent enough and which neglects the “cruel and authoritarian” truth of Conservative rule.

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Whether or not the Kent police really need defunding, the Thursday Murder Club series is certainly not politically radical. From Agatha Christie onwards, as the historian Alison Light has argued, English crime has always contained a strand of deep conservatism, suspending a cyclical, domestic space of puzzles and resolutions at a safe remove from the anxieties of modernity. With Osman, this can be even more robustly applied. His pensioner-vigilantes are literally bubbled away from the threats of the contemporary world, even more so than Christie’s middle-class assassins. His goal is entertainment, not critique or attack. The “whip-smart” millennial novelist can angrily deconstruct online sexual politics as much as they like; in Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice, one of the inconsequential running gags is Joyce’s new Instagram account, @GreatJoy69, and the slew of unsolicited messages and pictures it attracts.

The truth is that Osman’s characters, readers and viewers are the same constituency: Britain’s comfortable gerontocrats. Everything that I associate with being and feeling modern — atomisation, digital culture, urban space, irony — is absent from these books. They’re not for me; they’re for the shrinking number of people who still reliably get their laughs and news from television. And Osman knows this is his gift. “My whole career is formats, really,” he told the Guardian, from Deal or No Deal to The Bullet that Missed.

The scale of his success tells us some things we know already: we’re getting older, we’re retelling the same stories, rehashing the same jokes. But it’s also a reminder that for the vast swell of people, a good time looks a bit like an endless panel show: inconsequential, cringey and hopelessly trite; but good-natured, and conscious of a collective national mesh of humour and sympathies which we are sometimes of in danger of forgetting.

That’s no reason to head out to mourn Western civilisation. The great hope for Osman’s books may be the news that broke soon after his first started breaking records: Steven Spielberg is to adapt it for the screen (producer: Richard Osman). In the hands of Spielberg — a technical master of his medium in a way that Osman will unfortunately never be — the true role of stories like this will become plain. Not to sermonise or uncover the economic basis of society, but to move and thrill the common heart.

That doesn’t mean I don’t adore reality TV. I’ve loved it in all its forms; the talent shows (The X Factor), the boss shows (The Apprentice), the scripted soap shows (TOWIE) and even the awful squalid ones about hoarding which seem to be the mainstay of Channel 5. I’ve never had a sex dream about an actor or pop star, but at the height of his Kitchen Nightmares I had one about Gordon Ramsay which lasted three consecutive nights. I’m hazy on the details, but it was immensely enjoyable and there was a lot of swearing.

But Britain’s talent shows ran out of talent a while ago: Simon Cowell cancelled The X Factor last year, after 17 seasons; The X Factor: Celebrity (2019) attracted fewer than 3 million viewers during its first live show — its lowest ratings ever. Compare that with the Will Young/Gareth Gates Pop Idol final, which was watched 20 years ago this month by 15 million people; I remember voting ten times for Gates before my husband hid the phone from me.

It’s never hurt that the sort of people I loathe — pretentious, pompous, right-on Lady Mucks — hate reality TV. See Annie Lennox, sneering that The X Factor is “a factory, owned and stitched up by puppet masters”. Lord forbid that people should want to watch something which amuses rather than lectures them.

Though the stories about My Gran Dying And I’m Doing This For Her got a bit much in the end, there were many beautiful moments backstage at the talent shows when a contestant’s working-class family could be seen embracing and praying, giving lie to all the snideness that the masses generally provoke from commentators.

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The kids were refreshingly down-to-earth, too; 20 years ago, reality TV was just a gap year for fit proletarian youngsters. As Saskia Howard-Clarke, from season six of Big Brother in 2005, told me while I was making a documentary called Reality TV Is Good For You: “I knew when I came out of the house there wouldn’t be a limo waiting to whisk me off to Hollywood. I got some nice clothes, a couple of nice holidays. I’ve already got a nice boyfriend out of it. And soon I’m going to get back to work.”

But with the rise of social media, things have changed. Love Island is a springboard for smart, sexy young women (and men to a lesser degree) to monetise their youth and beauty the way a sportsman utilises his skill for that mayfly moment before wear and tear takes over. The suicides of Michael Thalassitis and Sophie Gradon were a field day for loathers of reality TV, but the idea that it was the uniquely empty and narcissistic milieu which caused these young people to take their lives doesn’t explain why, say, farmers — as far from reality stars as one can imagine — have such a high rate of suicide.

There was a great deal of self-righteous crowing when, in 2018, it was claimed that there were more applicants for Love Island — around 150,000 — than there were for Oxford and Cambridge combined. “What is happening to us?” wailed BBC Breakfast’s Dan Walker from his cushy billet. But in an age where social mobility is moving backwards, and in a country where the dull spawn of the famous pick up the few enjoyable and well-paid jobs once open to bright working-class kids — actor, pop star, model, journalist — should we be surprised? There’s also hypocrisy to all the shrieking: it’s fun and easy to be paid to be yourself — that’s what we columnists do.

So when the academic Danielle J. Lindeman, in her new book True Story, damns reality TV with faint praise as “a pop-cultural touchstone that… can help us to make sense of complex social forces”, you can’t help but feel her point is decades out-of-date. Today, reality TV has informed all parts of our culture and democratised it, adding greatly to the confusion and gaiety of nations.

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We live in a world where Margot Robbie obsesses over Love Island; where Kim Kardashian retires from her show to become a lawyer and hold meetings with The Apprentice’s President Donald Trump. Then there’s Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, who have become their very own reality TV spectacle: they are of interest only because they have us on the edge of our seats wondering who the heck they’re going to turn on next. The same is true of Boris Johnson — policy has become less important than whether Carrie Made Him Do It and his ongoing feud with Dominic Cummings.

Faced with these fantasies, both the Left and Right join in condemnation of reality TV’s hold over the youth of the nation, who should be stuck away in their bedrooms studying for Oxbridge rather than having a laugh in swimwear. But as in so many issues, politics has been left behind and the Great and Good can no more hold back the tide of populism than a Love Islander can walk past a beauty salon offering 50% off spray tans.

A recent survey found that those aged 18 to 24 are more likely (42%) than their elders (9%) to believe that “income level is the greatest indicator of someone’s class” and that a major decider of whether one is “upper class” is “going on luxury hotel holidays” and “multiple overseas holidays per year”. The mass exodus of Love Island alumni to Dubai during the first Covid lockdown so they could carry on their “work” as “influencers” personified this dream of being posh.

And in a way, it’s not as foolish as Victoria Beckham being called ‘Posh’ — chasing the sun is what the idle rich specialised in before they had to make it look like they were working. Faced with this new reality TV class, it’s interesting to see how many of the privileged, privately educated youngsters of Made In Chelsea made a reverse journey, choosing to enter the world of commerce rather than cruise on their trust funds.

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More striking, though, was how it was one of the best and brightest reality stars who brought the Dubai influences down to earth. Olivia Attwood — of Love Island, TOWIE and Olivia Meets Her Match fame — was scathing in her mockery:

“So basically being an influencer is actually really hard and I can’t create content for you guys here at home, so I am going to have to go on holiday…. People literally can’t feed their children, and are being given these sad little bags of food from the government… Your ‘hard day’ is creating content that might get nasty comments and someone else’s hard day is a 12-hour shift and zipping up body bags at the end of it.”

It proved that, at a time when real stars of screen and music increasingly scold from the same hymn sheet behind the high walls of their privately-policed gated enclosures  — capitalism is evil; transwomen are women; Palestine is real — the reality stars, unschooled in hypocrisy, can still be a breath of fresh air.

Let other critics sneer at the dreams of ordinary people reflected in reality TV — I’ll take a talent show over a Quality Drama showing the working-class being happy with their place below stairs any day.

The newsman prophet begged viewers to turn off the TV and save their souls. Thrilled by their cruelty and new agency — Beale was their broken toy — they didn’t, and Beale was murdered live on air. There could be no other ending. Network’s writer, Paddy Chayefsky, knew where we were heading. He didn’t live long enough to see the X-Factor, Pop Idol and Britain’s Got Talent but he would have recognised them.

Cowell didn’t sell music. He sold souls. Serious musicians, who hated his work,  knowing that it deprived them of attention, autonomy and the space to develop, said so. “You wouldn’t find a Joni Mitchell on X Factor,” said Annie Lennox. “It’s a factory, you know, and it’s owned and stitched-up by puppet masters”.

He collected the vulnerable and the credulous — those longing for an affirmation previously denied them — and subjected them to a public audition process he called authentic, but which was nothing of the kind. For those who tempted him, he invented the thrilling and awful concept of the personal journey, to be consumed week by week by his audience: drama, but with real people, and higher emotional stakes.

Cowell called himself honest, as much a victim as anyone of the swelling genre, but he denied his own agency in this: his own skill. I think he was devoured by greed. I met him in his pomp, and he was charming. It was business. If people would buy it, he sold it. I wondered if he was a kind man trying to escape his own creation of himself; he does a lot for charity. There are rumours, too, that he inspired a sub-genre of porn in which middle-aged men shout at people while nude, which I believe. For those seeking more “family-friendly” entertainment he offered a dog called Pudsey that walked on two legs.

There were multiple acts and softer judges than Cowell — usually doll-women, scenery that could flirt — but he was the big event, a demon in high-waisted trousers. He was the one seeking the vulnerable to raise up and cast aside according to his whim, though the audience was allowed the fantasy of control.  He was his greatest product and his greatest success; his personal journey was the most successful in the entire genre and watching the promise of fame afflict his contestants was, entirely, the game. What would they hand over for our attention? Their dignity? Their privacy? Their sanity? Could Susan Boyle hack it? That was the question.

I have been to a Reality TV open audition. It does not attract the healthy and the emotionally whole. Reality TV producers seek conflict and misery, and, 20 years on, they have both the corpses to prove it, and their own mirrored reality in cinema, which tells more stories about Reality TV, though not as well as Chayefsky. But satire can’t touch Cowell. He is surrounded by mirrors.

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He and his acolytes — he employed Piers Morgan on America’s Got Talent where he insinuated to child acts that their parents didn’t love them, for instance — abused contestants while preening. “That was just everything I hated”, Cowell would say; or “it’s just rubbish”; or “just get out, just leave”.

If he was disgusted by people who sought fame, as he did — and Morgan is the same — he used this self-knowledge cynically, for harm. He talked as people do on Twitter before Twitter. If that website has an authorial voice — a voice of god — it is his.

He does have a legacy, even as the public has lost interest in his particular form of sadism, for on social media it is even more immediate and thrilling. I credit Cowell with the consuming fashion for public cruelty, the erosion of privacy with our own consent, and the invention of the personal journey as popular entertainment. That is his legacy, in our narcissistic language and the way we demand a bogus personal narrative from everyone we can name, which feels like — and amounts to — theft.

So much public rhetoric is a collection of personal journeys, all vying to transmit. They are meaningless because they are confected for television, squeezed down to three minutes: a show-reel, not a life. Alongside this hunger for personal narrative runs a desensitisation to the very emotions we are being asked to observe.

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TV emotion is fake, because it demands nothing of you; you are imagining kinship with a mirage, or a ghost, and where that leaves your real relationships, I cannot say. Cowell’s genre was the opening act of an awful trend that has bloomed everywhere: for the charismatic; the know-nothing; the tinny sentimentalist; the preening; the cruel.

It is fitting that he leaves now, with his half a billion pounds of profit, because he is more successful than he could have imagined when he brought us Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh! He founded an entire culture. Seek his monument and it is all around you, on Twitter and Facebook and Tiktok and Instagram; in every one of the millions of pieces of dehumanisation we sink to daily. He is, in the end, a very important man, just not to music. I posit the hash tag #WeAreAllSimonCowellNow. He has earned it.

In one already-notorious image Carolyn Maloney, a Democratic representative for New York City, sports a gown that trailed multiple banners bearing the legend EQUAL RIGHTS FOR WOMEN. Maloney smiles, unmasked, at the camera. Behind her stand serried ranks of female serving staff, dressed in black and wearing identical black Covid masks.

In the earliest days of lockdown, this class-inflected freedom from hygiene theatre was the preserve only of the ultra-rich. While ordinary people were saying goodbye to dying relatives over Zoom, Kim Kardashian flew her entire feudal entourage to a private island for a birthday party.

A year on, those Met Gala images attest that hugging-as-privilege has now trickled down to the merely upper crust: regular celebrities, politicians, the founders of Black Lives Matter. But at the same time, those benefiting from the new elite right to in-person contact are pushing the opposite for everyone else: disembodiment as liberation.

This dream has been long in the making. We should greet it with all the enthusiasm we’d muster for a gift-wrapped bouquet of scorpions.

This is easier said than done. Pretty much everyone younger than I (born at the fag-end of the ‘70s) has grown up seeing themselves animate a CGI avatar on-screen, in any one of countless computer games — just as they’ve grown up conducting much of their social lives online.

If this is your normal, it’s not a big step to imagine a ‘self’ that has nothing to do with a physical body. This idea received big-budget cinematic treatment in the 2009 fantasy Avatar, featuring a crippled ex-soldier who gains a new life in a prosthetic body. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the movie was a smash hit, triggering such an outpouring of nerd emotion it spawned a new insult: ‘Avatards’.

But the dream of freeing human consciousness from the human body isn’t an internet-age invention. Back in the chaos of the first centuries AD, long before Christianity was codified into religious orthodoxy, esoteric sects and strange rites flourished. One such was the body of thought that came to be known as ‘Gnosticism’, from gnosis or ‘knowledge’. What survives of their thinking suggests that for Gnostics, the material world was intrinsically evil and the task of humanity was to escape it.

The early gnostics were scattered by heresy-hunters, but their dream of becoming beings of pure spirit lived on, famously via the Cathar sect in Southern Europe through the 12^th to 14^th centuries. The Catholic Church was not keen: in one notorious massacre at Béziers in 1209, the papal legate Arnaud Amaury is said to have told his men: “Kill them all — God will know his own.”

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Despite such persecution, the idea of liberating the human soul from squalid materiality persisted stubbornly underground. It survived in Rosicrucianism, which in turn made its way into strands of esoteric thinking that still flourish today in weird corners of the internet. But if esotericism is now largely the preserve of Very Online cranks, the Gnostic longing to become creatures of pure consciousness has gone supernova.

Early pioneers of the internet imagined ‘cyberspace’ as a place of liberation from all the pesky constraints of the material world. I remember thrilling at this ‘cyberpunk’ vision, as imagined by authors such as William Gibson in the 1990s. As Gibson depicted it, in ‘cyberspace’ a growing proportion of human life would be wholly unmoored from physical reality: an endlessly creative zone of gods, monsters and infinite possibility. In the recent words of cult sci-fi author Zero HP Lovecraft: “We imagined ourselves as samurai sword VR pirate pioneers”.

In this worldview, as for the crippled hero of Avatar, the imperfect nature of physical bodies is little more than a drag on self-actualisation. I’ve argued previously in these pages that this opinion helps power the increasingly radioactive debate about ‘gender identity’. But this is only one of the ways that what seemed in 2009 just a fantasy for nerds, is now mainstream politics and culture.

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Witness two new reality TV shows (or perhaps more accurately unreality TV shows) whose core premise is that selves can be separated from their bodies. Like The Voice, Fox’s new show Alter Ego showcases singing talent over physical hotness. But this comes with a twist: instead of singing from behind screens, Alter Ego performers will compete via CGI avatars.

This comes hot on the heels of Sexy Beasts, where contestants don elaborate prosthetic makeup before going on a blind date. The conceit is that by concealing their actual faces, their true selves will be better able to shine through.

The common factor behind both these shows is the idea that by working a human ‘self’ loose from its embodied presence in a physical body, provides ever greater freedom to be our ‘true selves’. In a promo video for Alter Ego, one of the singers explains his desire to perform via alter ego: “There’s something about how I look behind this alter ego,” he says, “that I feel like it’s held me back”.

In 2018, Aaron Bastani promised that automation would create a world of super-abundance for everyone, leading to a socialist horn of plenty and liberation from work via ‘fully automated luxury communism’. Today, that’s morphing into a dream of emancipation not just from work, but from our very bodies: fully automated luxury Gnosticism.

But this dream has a sting in the tail. For many adolescent girls now, what holds them back isn’t their bodies but the impossibility of living up to the image they project online. Reports are emerging of teenagers so dependent on tweaking their selfies with Instagram ‘filters’ they become unable to interact with people in person.

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Even Facebook’s own research now shows that life lived through too-perfect selfies is toxic for teenage girls. Meanwhile, for those whose jobs by definition can’t be unmoored from their bodies, the push for disembodied life has still more unsettling implications. Because no matter how loudly you promise that luxury Gnosticism will be fully automated, someone still has to take out the bins, stack the dishes and care for those who can’t care for themselves,

Their existence is a painful reminder that while Covid has accelerated the rise of the robots, even prompting the launch of a robot Covid nurse, we haven’t yet managed to automate blue-collar workers out of existence. Instead they’re increasingly downplayed: there’s a new presumption of mandatory, masked facelessness for the lowest-status people whose roles regrettably require them to show up to work in person. Lockdown’s abrupt reminder of how radically we depend on manual workers did not prompt a new appreciation of the working class.

Meanwhile, the middling strata — the so-called ‘Zoom classes’ — forms the key target audience for unreality TV shows that present virtual life as liberation. And for some, the shift to remote working has indeed been a net positive. For those with space for a home office, and families already formed, going virtual can be liberating — while there are still plenty of reasons to log off and focus on real life.

But for those who are single or less professionally established, the bleak reality of ‘remote work’ is less bucolic. This is the group for whom fully automated luxury Gnosticism offers the greatest temptation: when IRL life looks like sitting on your bed in a shared house, with an incipient case of laptop burn and one of the top 10 most popular girlfriend apps for companionship, why would you ever want to log off?

“I believe we are living in the cyberpunk dystopia,” writes Zero HP Lovecraft, “and it’s way less metal than everyone thought it would be.” It’s tempting to imagine that Britain’s thus far more moderate approach to Covid restrictions — it feels like everyone has unmasked for autumn — will save us from such baroque extremes as we saw at the Met Gala. But we shouldn’t be over-confident: whether it’s quinoa or statue-smashing, what starts among the American elite has a habit of percolating out to the American imperial province that the United Kingdom now indisputably is.

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At the start of the pandemic, we imagined embodied, in-person human life might grow more valued as a result of the disruption. And indeed it has: but not for everyone. That endlessly creative world Gibson imagined is now romanticised and sold back to us by the people commissioning unreality TV. The right to remodel our ‘meat avatars’ is politicised as the new front for civil rights. The danger of taint by other physical bodies is a key public-health message. But how you experience fully automated luxury Gnosticism depends on where you sit in the class hierarchy.

At the bottom stand masked, anonymised servants, clad in face coverings and uniforms until they can be automated out of existence. In the middle sit the Zoom classes, for whom virtual life can be a perk or a nightmare. For the lucky ones, it’s a chance at family life, but for others it’s more like an endless, lonely shift as (in Zero HP Lovecraft’s bitter phrasing), “pointless argument vegetables growing in walled gardens, harvested for the benefit of robots that serve us ads”.

And even as tech and media elites sing the praises of luxury Gnosticism for the rest of us, they’re reserving unconstrained, in-person human interaction as a privilege for themselves. Whether this emerging political order comes dressed as civil rights, TV entertainment or public health, we should see it for what it is: an assault on the humanity of all but the aristocracy.