Popstars: Who do they think they are?

Feature article by Caroline Puntis

Myleene, Danny, Kym, Suzanne and Noel were born into the pop music world in a similar way to the Spice Girls. They too were the product of a lengthy audition process to find five young people who could sing, dance and look good. The crucial difference was that their primary market was not simply made up of the teenagers who would eventually buy the single, but rather the millions who stay in to watch TV on a Saturday night. Their story, from audition hopefuls to celebrity pop stars, was packaged into edited highlights and shown on television early this year. By the time the chosen five had decided to call themselves Hear'Say, they were already famous. When the series caught up with real time, we even watched Hear'Say watching themselves on Popstars. The last episode showed them receiving the news that Pure and Simple had gone straight to the top of the charts - it was the fastest selling first single of all time.

Appearing on television is the easiest way to become well known. Beaming yourself simultaneously into millions of homes week after week guarantees fame - at the very least, all you have to do is be 'real'. Portraying ordinary people in so-called real situations is the essence of 'Reality TV'. Broadcast in the wake of last year's Reality TV hit, Big Brother, the Popstars series has evidently given the public more of what they wanted - ordinary people on the box.

In a lecture given at Leeds University, Melvyn Bragg described how throughout history the elite has always wanted to see itself in its culture - in monuments, philosophy and drama. Working-class people, ordinary people, were largely underrepresented:

It is important, however, not to confuse ordinariness with reality. Certainly there appears to be very little artifice about Hear'Say (perhaps only their families would be able to confirm this), which may have accounted for their popularity with the judges and the consuming audience. They have strong personalities and are not afraid to say what they think. Rather than conforming to a pre-packaged image decided by industry executives they have developed a style that suits them - or at least, this is what the programs led us to believe. Perhaps this independence was contrived by the producers and is nothing more than another facet of the image being sold. It is impossible to know the truth since the join between reality and what we see on our televisions is seamless. What we see is not an unbiased record of events - as the Big Brother contestants discovered, the editing process can be very creative. Moreover, the mere presence of the cameras elicits a performance from the subjects of the film.

So what are we actually watching? The French sociologist Jean Baudrillard calls it hyperreality - a mediated version of events that is an entity in itself and which effectively replaces reality. As far as the public is concerned, the band only exists as a collection of images - few people actually see them in person. The interaction of the band with their own image no doubt affected how they behaved in subsequent episodes, bolstering the hyperreal creation.

The real Hear'Say are now enshrined in the hype created by the media's response to the Popstars series. The band are philosophical about the press, aware that the existence of Hear'Say is due to its willingness to direct the public's attention towards them. However, they maintain that there is something behind the image. Their biographer, Maria Malone, held that

Whatever Hear'Say become now that they are famous, five real individuals with real lives will remain. Myleene is optimistic:

An edited extract of Melvyn Bragg's Edward Boyle Memorial Lecture given at Leeds University appeared in The Observer Review, 1st April 2001

Myleene and Maria Malone are quoted from web chats found on the Popstars web site, www.popstarsonline.net