Читать книгу The Nineties: When Surface was Depth - Michael Bracewell - Страница 6

The surface of the water in the plastic cup had been perfectly still just a second ago. Now, though, was it your imagination or tired eyes, or had the faintest ripple, a tiny freak outbreak of miniature choppiness, disturbed its earlier calm? In this light – iron-grey storm clouds pressing down, dusk falling fast – it was difficult to tell.

No – look! There it is again! That sudden shimmer on the surface of the water, as if someone were gently tapping the cup from underneath. A distinct jolt, like a kind of sonic boom reaction to some …

With claw prints the size of parking spaces, the Tyrannosaurus Rex slammed his way through the tense, electrical air of the lowering tropical storm. Hard in his sights was that gleaming symbol of contemporary urban person’s assertion of the backwoods-roaming, paragliding, authenticity-boosting, camp fire, free spirit, white-water lifestyle: an off-road 4×4 land cruiser – of the sort that could be seen almost any day of the week, being loaded with ciabatta croutons, bagged salad and Chilean Merlot outside any number of edge-city retail park, twenty-four-hour, thirty-two-checkout, Mothership supermarkets.

Back in the early 1990s, dinosaurs loved the Mothership. The blockbusting success of the raised-awareness action movie Jurassic Park had let loose its computer-generated cast of prehistoric monsters to endorse any number of pre-teen products with their rearing, charging, hissy-fit forms, as well as the film’s eye-catching dinosaur skeleton logo. Which was about as popular as popular culture can get. Cereals and lunch boxes, birthday cakes and pasta shapes – along the shining aisles of the Mothership the dinosaurs ruled again.

And, somehow, dinosaurs were right for the early 1990s. A creature whose brain was its smallest part was unlikely to be wounded by irony. Also, the movie considered the needs of its audience from every angle, thus pre-empting a confusion of intentionality: here, for instance, was a guy being plucked out of a portaloo and having his legs ripped off; on the other hand, here were lots of he-might-be-right-you-know Chaos Theory pronouncements, delivered with seductive fox-like elegance by leather-jacketed sexy scientist Jeff Goldblum. And then there was the eco-message, summed up in breathtaking long-shots of peaceful, pro-organic, Natural Shoe Store, liberal bourgeois vegetarian dinosaurs, grazing en famille on prairies of willowy waving prehistoric pampas grasses.

By the by, the film had introduced the hitherto underused term ‘cloning’ into the broader cultural discourse, which turned out to be absolutely on-the-button to define a general trend. As the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park had been cloned from preserved DNA to provide sensational infotainment – reactivating a history in suspension, so to speak – so many of the cultural products of the 1990s, from TV programmes to graphic design, would turn out to be cloned from, as it were, cultural DNA. Here was classic post-modernism in action – authorless signs transmitted through filters of meaning, brought to life in the labs of logo and cultural production.

Cultural cloning … now there was a thought. If you could just identify the most efficient little gobbets of an image or an idea – well, you could simply think of it as sampling, taking out the best bits and doing them like mad. Fads such as these were as old as the hills, of course (Hollywood cloning its stars, England its Beat groups) but the sheer extent of media in the 1990s – when the ‘mass’ in ‘mass media’ appeared to amplify a thousandfold on endlessly replicating channels, added to a burgeoning cultural conservatism – would make for an especially arid monoculture, based largely on promotability and marketing. The trick, for cultural practitioners, was to identify which of the principal species they were cloned from, and not try anything surprising. Culture could be led by market research, and very often was.

(Also, in the Nineties, the culture of superlatives demanded the most popular bits – the fondant centres, the strawberry cream, garlic butter – were simply lifted out of their context, so they became little more than a gooey mass. A diet of fondant centre …)

An example would be the extraordinary success of Helen Fielding’s romantic comedy, Bridget Jones’s Diary: the success of her idea was multi-cloned across fiction, film, advertising and print media, established as an entire demographic model and then used to sell the idea of Bridget Jonesness back to people who’d bought it in the first place. At the wallet end of marketing the proof of the cloning would be found in a multi-million-pound cosmetics promotion which offered ‘a Bridget Jones-style Diary’.

On terms such as these the idea of originality per se had become subordinate to the cloning process, and the baby dinosaurs crept out of their broken shells to rule the Earth again.

Cloned Media

Prior to the latest cloning boom in ‘zoo media’ (Chris Evans et al. to ‘The Girlie Show’) and ‘reality TV’, the process has perhaps reached its apotheosis with the phenomenal, pan-media, super-cloned success of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. What began as a neo-realistic account of life and living death among Edinburgh drug addicts – couched in the vernacular tradition of James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel, How Late It was, How Late – has become, by way of the movie, the soundtrack CD, the t-shirt and the advertising campaign, a form of media shorthand to signify Youth in general.

The greatest irony, perhaps, of this conversion of a novel into a free-floating logo for youthfulness was the appropriation of the orange and white graphics, made famous by the film of Trainspotting, to advertise the winter sale in French Connection’s chain of high street boutiques. There is a somewhat spooky connection between the desire to buy a ribbed brown cardigan and the need to identify, as a consumer, with the desperation of a heroin addict. And the proof of the cloning process would be inadvertently sealed by Sarah Champion, in her introduction to Disco Biscuits: New Fictions for the Chemical Generation, where she wrote, ‘we now have Trainspotting, the attitude’.

The cloning process, by converting issues and substance into the short-term safe harbour of provenly marketable ‘attitude’, has created a tendency within contemporary media – and even the broader span of contemporary culture – to fear any innovation that does not correspond to whatever attitude happens to be riding high. And at this point, cultural phenomena become merely vessels – the medium is the message, after all. Too true, Marshall!

Similarly, our decade-long love affair with mass retro-culture within the poppier packaging of just about everything (the cloning of suspended styles) would prompt the suggestion (with more than just a pulse of real panic in there) that at this rate we would ‘run out past’ by 2005 – that culture was faced with a chronic ‘retro shortage’. (A further Jeff Noonism would be the idea of ‘Post-Future’, a point at which the Future – as a thing, concept, temporal or descriptive – no longer existed. Thus there would also be ‘post-future kids’, for whom the idea of fashionability, modernity or keeping-up-to-speed would be utterly – and, you imagined, blissfully – meaningless.)

The endless cycles of pop cultural revivalism – the imagery of modern culture as a database and dressing-up box – describe the extent of retro-culture. You could also throw in the importance to Interior Design in the 1990s of Mid-century Modern styling (the Fifties coming up in price), which was morphed with the brushed-metal and bleached-oak effect of shop-fitting chic to create the basic Loft Look. Out of this came a kind of ‘Pod and Spike’ approach to Lifestyle – Pod being the cocooning impulse to feed on infantilism, and Spike being the exquisite good taste of the tamed avant-garde.

At its most expensive, styling went the whole way to Minimalism: this required lots and lots of open floor space to turn your loft into a gallery (Pod) – one science-fiction exotic cut stem of some spiky flora (Spike), a couple of Whitefriars vases perhaps, and the rest was whiteness. Hence the irony of the urban very rich seeking to define their Lifestyle by vast areas of emptiness – they and their possessions becoming exhibits, an aubergine or a Diptyque perfumed candle (Pod) taking on the aura of sculpture. More often than not, any actual art in a minimalist barn would be screaming how fucked-up it and everything around it was (Spike), or, at the very least, pronouncing an exquisite conundrum of neurotic self-concept.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Visceral yet lumpen, lurid yet delicate, the art of Tim Noble and Sue Webster is filled with contradictions. Encountering their work for the first time, a viewer will be struck by its mixture of vivacity and savagery. Mixed messages of love and death, ambition and nihilism, are carried on a style that alternates between cartoon delinquency and a kind of modern baroque.

Sue Webster was born in Leicester, in 1967, and Tim Noble in Gloucester, in 1966. The couple first met at Nottingham Polytechnic, in 1986, where they were both studying Fine Art. Their personal relationship, from this initial meeting, has become a major informant of their creative partnership as artists. The couple do not claim to be two people working as one artist; rather, the direction of their work is dictated and considered by the conflation of their separate ideas, enthusiasms and acquired skills. As Tim Noble remarks, ‘We are consistently inconsistent; that’s one of our greatest strengths.’

Over the course of their career, Tim Noble and Sue Webster have worked in many different artistic media: they make paintings, sculptures and assemblages of lights and neon. The couple have also turned their hands to fly-posting montaged pictures of themselves, and once held their own street tattoo parlour during the ‘Livestock Market’ art fair held in Rivington Street, east London, in 1997.

Above all, however, Tim Noble and Sue Webster have worked with the idea of themselves, as artists who are making works within the somewhat febrile climate of contemporary British culture. Their intentions are maybe explained by a work they made in 1998, called ‘Dirty White Trash (with gulls)’. In this piece, ‘six months’ worth of artists’ rubbish’ has been meticulously assembled and crafted – itself a contradictory act – in such a way that when light is projected upon the seemingly chaotic heap, it casts the shadow of the artists in perfect profile.

Caught with the accuracy of a silhouette, this shadow piece shows the couple relaxing back to back, the one sipping a glass of wine, the other enjoying a cigarette. Meanwhile, two stuffed seagulls are picking at a few discarded chips on the edge of the dumped rubbish. What could this tell the viewer about Tim Noble and Sue Webster as both a couple – they live together as well as work together, and they have an uncanny physical similarity, which makes them look like brother and sister – and as artists?

One answer might be that they regard themselves as determinedly careerist, within a line of work – the art world – that they regard as a complex game, and one in which cheats, short cuts or open ridicule of the prevailing mainstream can all be taken as valid moves. Following hard on the heels of this assessment of the pair, however, is the fact that their work can be divided into that which is extremely simple to make – little more than the cut-and-paste techniques of ersatz punk montage – and that which is painstakingly crafted. Taken all together, the different strands of their art entwine to make a coded polemical commentary on cycles of life and decay – the mortality of species and the deliquescence of cultural movements or individual careers. In this sense, Noble and Webster could be described, with accuracy, as ‘decadent’ artists.

On leaving Nottingham, the couple took up a residency, in 1989, in the sculpture studios at Dean Clough, in Halifax. It might be taken as eloquent of their artistic temperament – or of the recurring motifs within their later work, suggesting a desire to keep themselves at arm’s length from their peers – that Noble and Webster headed north just as the movement that would become mediated as Young British Art was beginning to gather momentum in London.

As Damien Hirst had curated his influential ‘Freeze’ show at the PLA building in London’s Docklands the previous year, so within two years the mere idea of ‘young British art’ would have become a usefully malleable phenomenon. Taken up by the media, as much as the patrons, galleries and collectors, this new direction in British art – as it merged with other pop cultural strands – would be taken to represent the temper of the zeitgeist.

In 1992, Tim Noble came to London to study on the sculpture MA course at the Royal College of Art. By this time, the whole phenomenon of Young British Art was following, point for point, the route between a fledgling metropolitan bohemia (those former urban badlands, colonized by artists) and ‘uptown patronage’ which the American cultural commentator, Tom Wolfe, had defined in his book The Painted Word nearly two decades earlier.

Cutting-edge contemporary art, ‘warm and wet from the Loft’ – as Wolfe describes it – can enjoy a relationship with its patrons that benefits both parties. The ensuing social and cultural milieu created by this relationship – and as seen, in Britain, to have been achieved through the mediated phenomenon of ‘yBa’ – becomes a new kind of orthodoxy, influential in taste-making, and provoking inevitable response.

The translation of young British art into a social phenomenon, with its own cast of characters and social types, and its particular topography around the Hoxton and Shoreditch districts of east London, seems central to an understanding of the earlier work of Tim Noble and Sue Webster. As the couple moved to Hoxton in 1996, holding their first solo exhibition, ‘British Rubbish’, at the Independent Art Space, they arrived on the ‘YBA’ scene as the partying of that movement was already approaching its second wind. For Noble and Webster, the appropriation of ‘YBA’’s own idea of itself – as an oven-ready phenomenon, as it were – became their point of intervention.

In terms of their style, Noble and Webster have been claimed by some critics to revive the aesthetics – and tactics – that were set in place by the first wave of British punk rock between 1976 and 1978. Too young to have participated in this movement as anything other than youthful observers, Noble and Webster can be seen to have taken a received idea of punk – the strategies, the baggage and the healthy bloody-mindedness – and applied it to their own generation’s attempts to re-route popular culture through the media of contemporary art.

Prior to ‘British Rubbish’, Noble and Webster had already made works that centred on the sloganeering, fly-posting and do-it-yourself ethos of punk pamphleteering. Tim Noble had usurped a billboard poster competition run by Time Out magazine in 1993, with his work ‘Big Ego’. The competition was open to people who had been resident in London for twenty-five years (which Noble had not) and to this extent Noble’s design – a crudely assembled poster, featuring his face and the statement, ‘Tim Noble Born London 1968’ – was revelling in its own falsehood. Noble, after all, was born in Gloucester in 1966.

Similarly, in 1994, Noble and Webster doctored an image of the legendary artists Gilbert & George, by simply sticking their own faces over those of the original. They called this work ‘The Simple Solution’, and it followed the same thinking – in terms of making a creative virtue of hijacking an existing graphical device – as Noble’s disruption of the Time Out poster competition.

If one of the distinguishing characteristics of the ‘Young British Artists’ – as a mediated, social type – was to own or affect an image of ‘dumbed down’ rebelliousness (the ‘Boho Dance’ in Tom Wolfe’s definition of the type), then Noble and Webster were amplifying this tactic to the point of caricature.

More than one critic has remarked how their street tattoo parlour, with its amateurish, felt-tip-pen ‘tattoos’, exposed the way in which a previously working-class, light industrial area of London had become colonized in the name of art from the power-base of a bourgeois economy and lifestyle. This was Wolfe’s ‘Boho Dance’ made visible. As David Barrett was to write of the event: ‘Young artists finally had the hardcore tattoo they’d always wanted, and they strutted up and down Charlotte Road like a bad actor doing the LA Bloods.’

By the middle of the 1990s, however, Noble and Webster were beginning to plan intensely crafted pieces. Inspired by a trip to Las Vegas – although they say that watching videos of films about Las Vegas inspired them more – the couple began to work with light pieces. Exuberant, vivacious and redolent of the perverse glamour of British travelling fun-fairs, these light pieces took the ‘trash aesthetic’ of rockabilly gothicism and turned it into free-floating emblems of desire and sensory overload.

The visual joyousness of these pieces – simplistic promises of glamour, carnival and success – were matched by two further developments in the work of Noble and Webster. In many ways, their do-it-yourself aesthetic had become the signature of their vision: that despite themselves, almost, they were honing a view of contemporary culture based on the imminent implosion of cultural materialism itself.

What was emerging in their work, through their monolithic model of themselves as a quasi-neanderthal couple – ‘The New Barbarians’ (1997) – and their gruesome projections of themselves off the contours of garbage, was a targeted celebration of aimless nihilism. This was not the pro-active nihilism preached by Nietzsche, as a phase of spiritual empowerment. Rather, in the imagery of decay, violent death and destruction, honed with wit and tempered with sentimentality, this was the imagery of romantic nihilism: tribal, insular and dancing on the imagined grave of a society that might one day choke to death on the sheer waste of its own consumer products. The triumph of terminally dumbed-down culture.

In one of their most recent works, ‘British Wildlife’ (2000), Noble and Webster have consolidated the themes and techniques of their ‘shadow’ pieces. As with their obsessive involvement in crafting the ‘trash’ of their ‘white trash’ pieces, the couple have assembled a quantity of inherited stuffed animals – themselves reminiscent of a forlorn, morbid notion of Britishness – which will cast a monumental shadow of their combined profiles.

Through working with the legacy of taxidermy, in which they can describe the nuances and cruelties of the natural world, Noble and Webster present the viewer with a compelling tableau of morbidity and ghoulishness. If ‘Dirty White Trash (with gulls)’ put forward the idea that Noble and Webster saw themselves as trash, trashing in turn a rubbished society, then ‘British Wildlife’, with its poetically archaic assemblage of stuffed animals, seems to amplify the themes of mortality. In all of this, however, they celebrate their relationship with one another, reversing the sentiments of the classical ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, to suggest that in the midst of death there is life.

For ‘Apocalypse’, Noble and Webster have expanded their aesthetic to encompass an epic notion of the sublime – re-routed through the now established signature of their own vivid style. ‘The Undesirables’ (itself reminiscent of the title of a pulp exploitation novella from the late Fifties) takes the form of a mountain of garbage-filled bin-liners with a scattering of litter on its peak. The projected shadow of this crowning litter shows Noble and Webster – no longer in profile but now with their backs to viewer, and to scale – as observers on the summit.

Inspired, in part, by their drive to this summer’s Glastonbury music festival, and their wait upon a hillside, as the sun was setting, to watch David Bowie’s superb performance, the couple also cite the cover of Gary Numan’s Warriors LP as an influence on this work. ‘We’ve ascended above the trash,’ says Sue Webster, of ‘The Undesirables’ – thus completing (in the tradition of nihilism) a classic circuit of Western romanticism.

The white neanderthal couple in Webster and Noble’s ‘New Barbarians’ – coarse, territorially hostile, but embodying an attitude and expression at once suspicious, narrow-minded and assertive (a kind of ultra-conservatism, in the sense of protecting self-interest) – could also take their place in the Jurassic Park of post-modernism. They seem like a couple from some point in the future when the world is about to end – a post-historic, as opposed to pre-historic pair.

In such a fantasy, the world would not be coming to an end in a dramatic, Terminator-style apocalypse of infra-red night scopes, killing machines and rebels in the ruins; rather it would simply – dully, even – have ground to a dirty, multiple food-allergic, worn-out, hyper-polluted inevitable halt because of humankind’s insatiable greed. The New Barbarians could be strolling through the last days of the biggest shopping centre on Earth, still complaining, still greedy, still defensive of their self-interest above all. As an artwork, however, ‘The New Barbarians’ is owned by a wealthy private collector, for whom its message, wit and undeniably disturbing presence must perform the task once undertaken by classical allegorical painting to seventeenth-century aristocrats.

By the middle of the Nineties, the slipstream of the zeitgeist was pretty much dominated by a steady cross-cultural cloning of the two principal Attitudes: Irony and Authenticity, conflating mid-decade to breed the cult of Confession and the mediation of the formerly private and personal as mass public spectacle – another attraction in the Jurassic Park of post-modernism (with the writings of Theodor Adorno standing in for the Jeff Goldblum character’s warnings about fiddling around with evolution).

[Subsequently, a web-site would be launched at www.theory.org.uk which ‘packaged’ leading cultural figures as though they were children’s poseable action figures and bubble-gum trading cards (infantilism strikes again!) The theory.org.uk Trading Card for Theodor Adorno summarized his biography, strengths and weaknesses as follows: ‘German Thinker, 1903–69. Member of the Frankfurt School. Argued that popular media is the product of a “culture industry” which keeps the population passive, preserving dominance of capitalism at the expense of true happiness. Mass media is standardized, and the pleasures it offers are illusory – the result of “false needs” which the culture industry creates. Argument is elitist, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong necessarily.

‘Strengths: Saw culture to be as important as economics.

‘Weaknesses: Shows no understanding of popular tastes.

‘Special Skills: Extreme anti-capitalist argument.’]

Like the cloned dinosaurs, cloned media were reasonably single-minded about their message, and now the public were the new stars – so long as they were offering sex, violence, sentimentality or converting their back bedroom into a nursery. As the writer Michael Collins put the case, rephrasing Warhol’s maxim on fame, ‘In the future everybody will be ordinary for fifteen minutes.’

The Moment of Truth

On the evening of 1 December 1976, at around 6.25 p.m., a lorry driver by the names of James Holmes kicked in the screen of his ‘£380 colour television’ – as he later told the Daily Mirror – because he did not want his eight-year-old son, Lee, to hear ‘the kind of muck’ that Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols had just been coerced into speaking, live in the ‘Today’ studio, by presenter Bill Grundy. The following day, the exchange between Jones and Grundy was reported with some outrage by most of the British newspapers, providing punk rock with one of its more iconic labels: a banner headline in the Daily Mirror which exclaimed ‘The Filth and the Fury’.

Viewed now, the spoken dialogue between Jones and Grundy sounds curiously quaint, but the episode as a whole is still engaging. The actual swearing – ‘the muck’ that prompted Mr Holmes to put his boot through the tube – seems almost as weighed down by self-consciousness as Bill Grundy’s attempts to rise above his cheeky guests with a touch of schoolmasterly sarcasm. ‘What a clever boy!’ he purrs, with thinly veiled rage, as Jones responds to his challenge to ‘say something outrageous’ by calling him first a ‘dirty fucker’ and then a ‘fucking rotter’.

Leaving aside the early-evening transmission time – which was the overriding factor that got ‘Today’ into trouble and Grundy suspended – what remains compelling is the all too apparent manner in which the presenter loses control of his guests, and, as a consequence, reveals the speed with which television itself can lose its assumed authority. Throughout the shambolic interview, during which it becomes clear that the Sex Pistols are not going to submit to the role of ‘studio guests’, there is a gradual accumulation of tension – part embarrassment and part threat – that derives less from the inevitability of a conflict, than from the sense that we are witnessing an authentic breakdown in the power of television to contain its subject. As Grundy attempts to return to the autocue – his only lifeline to safety – we see a moment of extreme vulnerability in a medium that relies (or used to rely) on the illusion of control.

There is a common social impulse to witness spectacle, and, equally importantly, a desire to experience that frisson of excitement, shock or fear that accompanies the moment when the predictable passage of daily events is suddenly converted into drama by the occurrence of extreme behaviour. From a scuffle in the street to a major disaster, these moments of transition disrupt our sense of security and our perception of the world. To be present in the vicinity of such a disruption is to experience the adrenaline rush of confusion and fear we instinctively generate to protect ourselves. And to witness those same occasions in their mediated form is to experience all of their drama, but with none of the personal danger. We absorb the atmosphere of spectacle as a kind of narrative – a fact that has been well illustrated, in photographic terms, by Weegee’s stark images of life and death ‘as it happened’ on the streets of New York.

Through modern media we can pick out the soft centres, as it were, of heightened emotions and volatile situations. We can all become members of an invisible audience, the legitimacy of whose presence is morally and ethnically ambiguous. But whether we authorize our consumption of mediated events in the name of public interest and reportage, or whether we argue the fine line between voyeurism and documentary, we require, above all, that the occasions of disruption that comprise our sense of spectacle are authentic – ‘authenticity’ is the hallmark of truth, and hence the gauge of social value.

Today, authenticity as spectacle has become the Holy Grail of contemporary culture, the unifying style by which the zeitgeist is seen to be made articulate. From the gritty pop realism and boiled-beef brutalism of geezer fiction and Britflicks, to the interactive scenarios of third-person video games such as ‘Metal Gear Solid’ or ‘Silent Hill’ – in which media techniques of truthfulness are used to heighten action, control and suspense – there is now the sense that authenticity itself can be sculpted to suggest veracity as an image, in which truth remains ambiguous. This is not a marginalized creative form: the reshaping of current affairs programming to convey immediacy has been matched by the rise of broadsheet columnists recounting their personal lives as contemporary fables, embracing the breadth of the human condition.

But nowhere has this trend been more pervasive, and the issue of veracity more contested, than within the wake of ‘popular factual programming’: a genre which links the ‘authenticity’ of docu-soap and docu-drama to the studio-based spectacle of conflict of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ or ‘Vanessa’. As a cultural phenomenon, popular factual programme-making – and its impact on television, advertising and commentary – can be seen as the defining spirit of the 1990s: how do we mediate ourselves and who defines the mediation?

Back in the mid-1970s, television barely understood that programmes could be made by simply filming volatile ‘real life’ domestic and civic situations, and rely entirely on flashpoints of confrontation to hold the attention of the viewers. Televised conflict, beyond the sphere of current affairs, was a rarity, and the occasions on which the medium had been challenged by circumstances beyond its control – as it had with the Sex Pistols – were regarded as memorable. When the dramatist and critic Kenneth Tynan became the first man to say ‘fuck’ on television, during a debate over censorship on Ned Sherrin’s ‘BBC3’, on 13 November 1965, he remarked that he would probably be remembered only for that incident. And the (now forgotten) fact that he had used the word within a dry academic discussion about an audience’s relationship with language was an irony that failed to save him from being branded, immediately, as ‘the man who said “fuck” on television’. What sealed his reputation was the objectivity of the medium: we actually saw him say it – our sense of stability had been challenged, and an evolutionary stage in the potency of television had been defined.

In 1974, a further defining moment in the evolution of TV took place when the BBC made a successful excursion into filming a factual series – regarded at the time as a radical experiment – about the daily life of a British family. In so doing, they discovered not only the power of the hand-held camera and the fly-on-the-wall point of view to convey tension and intimacy, but also the allure of authenticity. Paul Watson’s series ‘The Family’ was greeted by some critics with incredulity and distaste – how could a film about daily domestic routine, with no specific subject or story, possibly hold anyone’s attention? But the public proved the pundits wrong, and tuned in by the million to watch the volatility of a low-income, working family. Thus a template was established – already sketched out by the soft sociology of ‘kitchen-sink’ cinema – that authenticity was synonymous with dysfunctionalism.

The route to authenticity – or, more cynically, the allure of mass-voyeurism – lay in the simple televisual device of apparently removing the fourth wall of a person’s room and thus laying bare his or her privacy. By this means, a compelling sense of risk – absent in scripted soaps – was written into the TV format, answering our need for authenticity and spectacle.

Previously, such subject matter – ordinary British life – had been the highly politicized terrain of ground-breaking documentary directors like Humphrey Jennings, whose films, such as Listen to Britain (1942), would prompt the young left-wing film director Lindsay Anderson to pass an assessment of British cinema in 1957 which predicted the vogue for today’s popular factual television but assumed, wrongly, that social conscience and the rights of the individual would take priority over mere sensationalism and ritual humiliation: ‘I want to make people – ordinary people, not just top people – feel their dignity and their importance. The cinema is an industry, but it is something else as well: it is a means of making connections. Now this makes it peculiarly relevant to the problem of community – the need for a sense of belonging together. I want a Britain in which the cinema can be respected and understood by everybody, as an essential part of the creative life of the community.

What Anderson regarded as the ordinary person’s right to importance and significance as a subject for documentary – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, as he cited from documentarist John Grierson – has now become what the Sex Pistols once described as ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’. In the Nineties, following on from the success of such docu-soap series as ‘Hotel’, ‘Airport’, ‘Pleasure Beach’ and ‘The Cruise’, TV companies fell over themselves to combine the phenomenal appeal of ‘real’ characters (Jane McDonald from ‘The Cruise’ has now presented ‘The National Lottery Live’, published her autobiography and played at the London Palladium) with the moments of conflict that typify the format of daytime-TV studio debates (or ‘studio rage’ as it has been called). Fact, not only stranger than fiction, was perceived to be stronger, even if one ITC report opined that popular factual programming was pandering to ‘the worst of human behaviour’.

As docu-soap and conflict television both scored impressive ratings, the fusion of the two forms has come to revolutionize the programming schedules: one Friday evening’s viewing on ITV in April 1999 ran as follows: ‘Parking Wars’, ‘Motorway Life’, ‘Family Feud’ and ‘Neighbours from Hell’. Even the BBC’s Business Unit got sexy with a docu-soap drama about company merge, ‘Blood on the Carpet’. On cable, Sky TV has given us the hugely successful ‘Ibiza Uncovered’ and myriad half-hour shows – ‘Tango Tango’, ‘Police, Action, Camera’ and ‘America’s Dumbest Criminals’ – which edits chunks of CCTV and surveillance video into a kind of ‘You’ve been Framed’ (or ‘You’ve been Arrested’) by the emergency services.

As a format, popular factual programming can be seen as a reinvention of social realism, but one that replaces the heightened objectivity of the naturalistic style with a heavily coerced core of subjective values. Other than being cheap, the key to PFP’s success is its manipulation of public curiosity, placing viewers in the centre of a situation which is bound to test their tolerance and arouse their sense of vulnerability. In this way, the reality which such programmes mediate is being massaged by various formal devices to appear more real than real: the surface of the images is lacklustre and flattened, drawing attention to the immediate prompts of the situation – litter, clutter or any evidence of the subject being unprepared for being famous for being ordinary; long, unedited shots (sometimes running for minutes) that create a sense of portentous tension, while the new technology of small, digital cameras can convey a sense of immediacy or claustrophobia.

Thus the medium is so stretched that the slightest word or gesture becomes amplified. The traditional role of voice-over narration – to suggest authority, time line or commentary – has been either removed or replaced by a kind of disembodied Chorus, which hints at off-camera action, the consequences of which we are about to see. On programmes that deal with such volatile areas as, for instance, debt collection, environmental health and the RSPCA, there is the sense of being suddenly dragged back to safety at the ultimate moment of conflict – when someone throws a punch – or allowed to linger for as long as possible – when someone bursts into tears.

In most cases, the ‘authenticity’ of popular factual programming has been used to promote its treatment of the subject matter as being, to some degree, in the public interest. But in many ways such a claim for the genre is nothing more than the old device of positing pornography as sociology – ‘Look at these photographs, aren’t they disgusting?’ This also puts any critique of authenticity into the kind of moral headlock common in debates over contemporary art: to condemn contested material as sensationalist or prurient is construed as merely reactionary or elitist. What remains, beyond an unwinnable contest of value judgements, is the seismic shifts of audience share and ratings that will dictate the direction of the programme-making.

From the point of view of the programme-makers, the genre is an inexhaustible as the collective index of social situations and professions. But such a position is endemic within the genre of social realism. Robert Baldick, describing the cultural circumstances in which J. K. Huysmans came to write against Against Nature (1884) refers to the disillusionment of social realist writers in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century: ‘the novel of adultery had been worked to death by writers great and small; and as for the social documentary, they saw little point in plodding through every trade and profession, one by one, from rat-catcher to stockbroker …’

Television’s answer to such a cyclical problem has been both to up the sensationalism in its wares and spread the techniques of PFP – the span of social realism – into other strands of the medium: celebrities such as Geri Halliwell and Martine McCutcheon are presented in a carefully edited form of stylized ‘docudrama’ – thus satisfying the public’s need to be shown behind the scenes of fame and offered a sniff of intimacy with the stars. Similarly the fact that traditional situation comedies were based on the very professions and areas of human interest that now comprise docu-drama – corner shops, department stores, hospitals, police stations, holiday camps – has prompted, for instance, Carlton to commission a situation comedy – ‘Pay and Display’ – which replicates the look of a docu-soap.

And herein lies the notion that veracity has become synonymous with confusion and dysfunctionalism – through our depictions of ourselves as vulnerable, damaged, volatile, matched by our fetishizing of realism. And this, perhaps, is an accurate reflection of contemporary society, revealing a truth about the way in which we live through our very attempts to come to terms with authenticity.

Or was it just that the networks were looking for ways of keeping vast, profitable ratings by teasing their audience with the suggestion that they might get to see people being beaten up, losing control or fucking? Or maybe it was all just a bit of fun. One argument about Reality TV was that it taught people how to empathize with one another; that as the age was ruled by territorial hostility and depersonalizing information technology systems, watching people interact with one another on TV (‘Look at those dinosaurs ripping one another apart!!!’) could somehow be edifying.

Championed by its creators as either a) an important breakthrough in television as a social medium, or b) honest-to-goodness, forward-with-the People soap ’n’ tabloid populism (which could also, in certain circles, mean a High Camp, how-deliciously-vulgar, semi-ironic exercise in slumming it in populism), the drift of such cloning in television would seem by the end of the decade to have reached critical mass. The walls of Jurassic Park were beginning to show cracks – the dinosaurs were head-butting the concrete as the viewers voted on who gets eaten next.

In other areas of cultural practice, the cult of the personal and the autobiographical had replaced Style Watching as the mainspring of self-expression and self-promotion. Never had there been a better time to declare yourself a one-person Bloomsbury Group. But where had this obsession with the personal, the confessional and a kind of omni-vision voyeurism actually come from? One answer might be that this was a generational neurasthenia, picking up on the Flaubertian notion (as picked up by his posthumous analyst-biographer Sartre) of art and creativity being the result of ‘the ever hidden wound’. So did we all feel wounded in some way?

Another answer to the question, though, might be boredom and a craving for one-shot celebrity, prompting a culture of ‘to the max’, which was spun to keep raising the pitch of its own superlatives. (‘Ultimate Terror! Ultimate Destruction! Look-at-those-dinosaurs!’)

From the early to late 1990s, across the temper of the times, the ‘ever hidden wound’ was being exposed, and made public. Could this disarm its artistic effect? For rather than undergoing the translation into a (Flaubertian – or even Warholian) model of art and creativity, in which the presence of the artist was converted wholly into art itself, the wound was being offered up, raw and direct, as a kind of celebration or cult of actuality in relation to the personal. Just what would people be prepared to do to get their little nugget of celebrity – to do their circuit of the dinosaur park? Throughout the second half of the 1990s, the answer to this – not surprisingly, perhaps – would be ‘absolutely anything’.

From the mutation and conflation of confessional culture and mediated ‘real life’ had emerged the broader trend of the barbarism of the self-reflecting sign – every bit as threatening, in its own way, as the gradually mutating dinosaurs unleashed by the founder of Jurassic Park’s blasphemous fiddling about with natural evolution. Shame on such grandiosity! We should have remembered the testament of Pee Wee Herman, returning from Texas with his beloved bicycle: ‘I’ve learned something on the road, you know – Humility!’

Tracey Emin

Sitting with the posture of an obedient child, Tracey Emin lights another Marlboro, inhales deeply, ponders for a few more seconds, and then pronounces: ‘Fundamentally fucked, but ideologically sound, that’s me.’ She concludes this definition of herself with one of those laughs you usually hear coming out of a phone box when three teenage girls are in there daring one another to ring up boys. And somehow this laugh speaks volumes about the woman.

For in her rapid ascent from the legions of Young British Art to being nominated for the Turner Prize, the whole point about Tracey Emin has been the fact that she expresses herself as the original precinct kid and disco girl: ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’ – as she described herself on a banner being towed behind a plane above the seafront of her home town.

As an example of myth-making within the history of art, you could say that Emin has used her perceived ‘ordinariness’ to much the same effect that Salvador Dali used his eccentricity, converting herself into a modern icon. In Britain, the yobs and the snobs have always had a soft spot for one another, and even the street-trader twang of Mad Tracey’s Thames Estuary accent has caused a shiver of delight down the spines of the male metropolitan gentry who tend to be in charge of the art world. For within the marble halls of the cultural establishment, a woman like Tracey Emin is wholly exotic.

But now Emin’s fame has splashed way over the edges of the enclosed, confusing world of contemporary art. In Tracey Emin – and the woman and her work are completely indistinguishable – the zeitgeist surfers of the late 1990s have identified the perfect mascot for contemporary Britain’s twin obsessions with real-life drama and public confession. Her art is entirely autobiographical, presenting only Tracey Emin’s highly visceral account of Tracey Emin, across a whole range of media from films and neon sculptures to writing and embroidery. And as it is a depressing fact that most women experience verbal abuse from male strangers, so much of Emin’s art is a direct response to all of the men who have called her a slut or a slag. Similarly, she explores her own relationship with those degrading labels, using a kind of child-like sincerity as her torch to see by.

Emin’s source material for the agony, confession and sexual memoirs that comprise the written pronouncements in her art begin with her birth. She describes the conception of herself and her twin brother, Paul, to be the result of a passionate affair ‘when my Mum and Dad got a crate of gin and a crate of scotch and fucked on the carpet in front of the fire – that’s how we came about’. With her distinguishing frankness, Emin has made no secret of the fact that her Turkish Cypriot father, a chef, was maintaining one household in London and another, with her mother, in Margate. Tragically, at the age of thirteen, Tracey was raped. Subsequent to this, she became sexually promiscuous ‘between the ages of thirteen and fifteen’, and more or less gave up attending school. Next stop would be art college.

By foregrounding sexual confession, accounts of her own despair and the innermost secrets of her relationships with friends, lovers and family, Emin has slipped into the whole current cultural climate which puts forward soft-core sociology as a subtle form of authorized, and highly ambiguous pornography: the daytime-TV studio debates that cleverly mingle sex with violence, the broadsheet columnists who offer up every last detail of their private lives as insights into the way we live now, and the docu-soap television programmes that derive their power from zooming in on the breakdown of their subjects.

‘That’s the whole reason why I’m popular,’ she says. ‘It’s the way the psyche of the nation is right now. Ten years ago, in terms of art, there was no room for me anywhere. No galleries would show my work or listen to my ideas. They’d presume me to be pathetic, and self-indulgent …’

Then Emin gives another of those laughs, and makes a kind of ‘yes, I know what you’re thinking’, eyes-raised-to-Heaven expression of self-criticism, before adding, ‘And there’s a lot of people who still think that I am pathetic and self-indulgent …’ When you meet her, Emin seems fragile to the point of bird-like: a petite, slender woman wearing embroidered mules and an elegantly simple dress, with a pink cashmere cardigan loosely knotted around her waist. She looks much younger than her thirty-seven years. The force of her personality seems to reside in her almond-shaped, coffee-coloured eyes – the strongest evidence of her Turkish Cypriot background – which can shift their expression from mean suspicion to melting vulnerability from one second to the next. She seems too small for the large red sofa on which she is sitting, in her vast, top-floor studio loft in the heart of Whitechapel – the district of London’s East End that is enjoying renewed fashionability due to its increasing population of young artists, and their accompanying galleries and cafes.

‘During Thatcherism,’ Emin continues, ‘if you didn’t fit in with the crowd, you were on the outside, and if you were on the outside then you were a nobody. And that was the general feeling for everything, no matter what your place was in the hierarchy: you had to fucking fit in, and if you didn’t – forget it. And the whole culture was built on that. But get rid of Thatcherism, and everything was turned around. Then, it became the cult of the individual, the loser and the outsider – because those were the types who had been ignored for fifteen years.

‘So suddenly we’ve got everything from “The Jerry Springer Show” to Princess Diana’s confessions on TV, or Paula Yates saying all those things the other night that – well, I didn’t find them difficult to listen to, but I did find them surprising. That your husband died from this auto-wanking thing rather than committing suicide. But that’s how much things have changed: there’s an audience who want to listen to these things now, whereas before there wouldn’t have been. It’s like people want to watch “East-Enders” because they don’t want to think about their own lives; then you’ve got this other thing where you home in on real people’s tragedies, lives and stories. And people feel that they can relate to that.

‘But that’s also why a lot of people don’t like my work – they’re sick of me. But the fact that I’m there is because of the psyche of the way that people are thinking now. And of course, that’s all going to change – I know that. But I’ve always done self-portraits, anyway. It’s like I read Julie Burchill’s autobiography, I Knew that I was Right All Along, and I read her column, too, and there are loads of cross-over things with my work in that.’

Kneeling on the floor behind her, an assistant is working on one of Emin’s famous embroidered textiles: a large square montage of fabrics that shouts out its witty slogans (‘Planet Thanet’, for instance) in what look like letters made of fuzzy felt, as part of a vivid, visual cacophony of accusations, confessions and emblematic signage. At a glance, it looks like a multicoloured version of the graffiti in a bus shelter, but it is a strand of Emin’s work that is compelling, somehow managing to coerce the reader into studying every last centimetre of its public announcement of private feelings.

In terms of its artistic lineage, it brings to mind the feminist reinvention of embroidery samplers made by women artists in ‘The Subversive Stitch’ exhibition, or the ‘Fun City Bikini’ pieces made back in 1970 for the ‘Cunt Power’ issue of Oz magazine. Similarly, the famous poster campaign developed by the Madeley Young Women’s Group in the early 1980s, using slogans to educate boys in their social treatment of girls – ‘We hate you when you call girls slags’ for example, or, ‘What You Staring At?’ – rehearsed aspects of the sentiments and tactics that can be found in Emin’s embroideries.

But where the artistic precursors of Tracey Emin’s aesthetic were usually defining the political position of women’s collective experience, Emin articulates her personal experience as a wholly autobiographical, multimedia epic. Her drawings have an expressionistic intensity that has earned them comparisons with sexually charged and neurotically taut works by Egon Schiele.

Expressing the experience of loneliness and pain arising from violation – or a sense of having colluded with acts of violation – and the inevitable, accompanying self-hatred, Emin’s art could be seen as both a calling to account of the people who have shaped her life, and as a purgative ritual through which she attempts to regain her innocence. In this way, she claims her accounts of personal experience have a political validity.

And in this there is a kind of Napoleonic ambition. Emin presents herself through her art in grand, self-enshrining gestures, which somehow manage to mingle supreme arrogance with an endearing and courageous streak of pure heroism. Having presented her work in ‘The Tracey Emin Museum’, she then called her first one-person show, at Jay Jopling’s powerful White Cube gallery, ‘My Major Retrospective’ (on the grounds that she thought that this would be her first and last ‘proper’ exhibition). In one particular work, ‘Montenegro’ (1997) she has made a small army of tanks out of matchboxes and matches, each bearing a tiny flag with ‘Emin’ written on it, making their way across a classroom map of the world.

‘When I was at Maidstone College of Art, what I liked was that everything had a Marxist bent. So instead of just hearing lecturers, they’d get in the women from Greenham Common, or the striking miners. We even had a lecture from Sinn Fein, although they had to hold it after five o’clock, as opposed to within the college hours. But we were all interested to hear what they had to say. So people were bringing living history into the college, so we weren’t just studying in this little bubble of art school; they were trying to make us aware of what was happening politically and socially, and I’ll always be grateful for that. By going to Maidstone, I learned that art can be bigger and broader than just art.

‘There is a politics behind what I do, but that’s not my priority. So, for example, when I published a first-hand account of my abortion in a national newspaper, that was going to be pretty fucking political – particularly when you’ve got fucking Blair suddenly saying that he doesn’t really agree with abortion. So that’s going beyond art, that’s bigger than art. I got a load of letters from the Pro-Life, Pro-Choice people, and from women who had had a termination and felt that they’d made a mistake. They were people who felt that I’d actually said what it was like to have an abortion, rather than simply giving an opinion about it.’

While she was at Maidstone College of Art, prior to attending the Royal College of Art, Emin began to develop the personal and artistic stance for which she has become famous. The college’s social secretary for two years, she organized such events as the ‘Ideologically Unsound Talent Show’ – as a riposte to the Marxist leanings of the college – and also became something of a local legend. She recalls how a banner in the main hall, proclaiming ‘Smash Racism’, was doctored by a student to read ‘Smash Tracism’.

And there is an element in this anecdote that seems to hint at the darker side of her ambivalent yet addictive relationship to being known as a vivacious character. In her film and text, ‘Why I Never Became a Dancer’ (1995), she recounts how she ran out of a disco dancing competition in 1978 because what she thought were the cheers of a supportive crowd were in fact the jeers of a group of men – some of whom she had had casual sex with – chanting, ‘Slag, slag, slag’. Similarly, in her paintings of having anal sex, there is an ambiguous mingling of self-hatred, accusatory polemic and sensationalist shock tactic. There is a strong sense, conveyed by the memoirs related in her art, that in desperately wanting to be popular, or loved, Emin has either debased herself or been exploited. In one of her text pieces she writes, ‘Happy to die for love, that’s me and it’s sad.’

‘If I was comprised of lots of different people, and I had to list them, I know that Silly Cow would be one of the first on my list, and Spoiled Brat would be another. Then there would be, Compassionate and Caring, Loyal and Lap-dog. I’m like one of those dogs who would walk across a whole continent to see my master again. It’s a bit pathetic, but it’s true. A lot of my friends, who are quite critical of me, say that I have standards and that I get into trouble when I try to make them apply to other people. I don’t lie, for instance – try that one out – and I’m a faithful person. In fact, I have been unfaithful twice in my life – once was just a kiss with another person – but I wouldn’t go through that hell again.’

Emin increasingly uses writing and text as the most direct means of communication within her work. She has given public readings of her work, and has self-published two collections of her writings, Always Glad to See You and Exploration of the Soul. Her style wanders between a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of her personal feelings, to a form of vernacular, anecdotal storytelling that reads rather like letters to herself or to the subject of the piece. In this, her literary ambitions follow in a tradition of female confessional writers, from Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, through to the writings of Kathy Acker. And, in many ways, she adapts the notion of confessional writing to that broader culture of confession that she sees as currently supporting her reputation.

Subsequent to her drunken appearance on a TV debate about the Turner Prize, Emin is turning to writing – or the idea of writing – more and more, as a retreat from what she regards as the mounting pressures of her celebrity. Most importantly, she wants to devote herself to writing a book, which her agent, Jay Jopling, is already proposing to publishers.

‘There haven’t been many people drunk on television: there was Oliver Reed, George Best and myself. I think that the nation likes it because it shows the vulnerability within us all. I mean everyone gets pissed and makes an arsehole of themselves, but not in front of four million people. I was told that the viewing figures for that programme went from one and a half million to four million in the time it took me to walk off.

‘I want my life to quieten down, and I have quite a few personal problems that I can’t sort out because I’m on the run all the time, in my head. I drink too much. I’ve cut down my drinking by sixty per cent, but I still have a very bad problem when I go out socially. If I do the book thing, it means that I can solve things by being peaceful and quiet. I could go on trains to places I haven’t been before. There are loads of Holiday Inns which are built on bypasses and things, and some of them have got swimming pools; I could go there and just write for four days.

‘When I start my book I’m going to be writing two thousand words a day, every day. That’ll take me a couple of hours. I write really fast, stream of consciousness, and while there might be a few things which don’t make any sense when I read them back, at least I’ve got the ideas down. It’ll be a book of short stories, and the fiction will come in where I change some names and places. I’ve written one book about my life from the moment of my conception to losing my virginity when I was thirteen; this’ll be the follow-up – my life from age thirteen to twenty-one.’

Ultimately, people’s opinion of Tracey Emin – as a current phenomenon – is based and divided on whether they perceive her brand of autobiographical art, and her promotion of it, to be a sincere and socially edifying act of personal catharsis or simply an exercise in self-publicity. And this is an argument that can run and run, without ever reaching a useful conclusion. For every critic who finds Emin’s art to be courageous and liberating, there will be another who denounces its provoking of controversy, or the questions that it raises about the role of fame within the constitution of contemporary art.

While it is easy to find people who might offer spiteful or envious comments about Emin, and even easier to find people who cannot sing her praises too loudly, she appears to possess the ability to discourage simple objective critique about her practice and the phenomenon of her current success. And if the direct polarization of opinion about an artist is a test of his or her significance, then Emin is clearly significant.

‘She is a very significant presence within Young British Art,’ says the critic and art historian, Richard Cork. ‘There is a strong sense of vulnerability in her work, and the feeling that the only way for her to proceed is to try and exorcize some trauma from her past. She doesn’t seem to exclude anything from this process of self-disclosure, and while this could quite easily degenerate into a fairly unbearable form of narcissism, she does get away with it. And I think that this is because she is not trying to raise herself above criticism or self-criticism; she is clearly trying to deal honestly with her past, but there is no suggestion that she has achieved serenity.’

‘I was talking to someone the other night, and why the hell should I still be an outsider when I’m sixty?’ says Emin, with regard to her position in the cultural establishment. ‘There’s no reason for it. I’d be like the really interesting, funny guy who you meet in the pub when you’re fifteen, and then when you’re thirty-six he’s still in there – only now he’s fifty-eight and still sitting in the same fucking pub in the same corner. I’m not interested in becoming like that. I haven’t had to change what I do; I haven’t had to bow down to the system. I mean I didn’t get any O-levels or A-levels, and people said, “You can’t go to art school.” So I just got my own form and filled it in.’

Today, Emin’s detractors serve her cause to as great an effect as her supporters. Her former boyfriend, for instance, the poet and painter Billy Childish, has recently gained a good deal of reciprocal publicity off the back of his old flame by launching his ‘Stuckist’ movement – a loose-knit group of painters who have published a twenty-point manifesto, ‘Against conceptualism, hedonism and the cult of the ego-artist’. On the front of this manifesto is a quote from Tracey, supposedly made about Billy: ‘Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!’

‘Well, his paintings are stuck,’ says Emin, with disarming frankness, but genuine affection for Childish and his enterprise. ‘This is just one of Billy’s pamphlets – he’s done loads of them, and it’s a good, healthy thing – and a newspapers got hold of it and they know that it’ll make a good story.’

But when Childish published his stories and poems about his relationship with Emin, she found them ‘hateful and hurtful – particularly reading about all of his sexual conquests – it used to do my head in. But now I see that they’re not about me, they’re about him and his take on life, and he doesn’t come across as particularly admirable.’ And in this, perhaps, one can see the reverse side of Emin’s own artistic practice.

In a recent television documentary about Emin, the only critical voice in the programme – as the gents of the art world vied with one another to mingle faux-laddish candour with quasi-ironic hyperbole – came from her twin brother, Paul, who claimed to have lost his business contract in Margate because of the controversy generated by his sister’s work. ‘I want to use this occasion to state that I, Paul Emin, have no connection whatsoever with Tracey Emin’s art,’ he stated. And Emin herself, from her Whitechapel loft, admitted that her work back in Margate might find a reception very different from its current fashionability within the art world.

‘I would like to show some of my work down in Margate,’ she says, ‘but there isn’t really anywhere to show it. There’s the library I suppose. But it would mean hiring a space and organizing it, and I’m too busy to do that. But it would be interesting, because a lot of my work is about growing up in that locality, and it would be quite interesting to hear the responses from other people growing up there. But it wouldn’t really serve my purpose. What really serves my purpose is having a great big fuck-off show in New York. That’s what serves my purpose.’

Confession as public spectacle was woven in to the burgeoning obsession with any form of celebrity. As the decade progressed, it appeared that the values traditionally, and even sneeringly, ascribed solely to the tabloid press – voyeurism, sensationalism, knee-jerk morality – were becoming all-pervasive as the temper of the times.

Applied post-modernism as a sophisticated parlour game had authorized no end of super-whizzy look-Mum-no-hands ways of flirting with tabloid culture, but the principal readership of the endlessly cloning celebrity magazines – as much as the audiences of daytime confession ’n’ conflict TV ‘debates’ – seemed to be drawn, demographically, from the lower-income end of the scale. Thus, the new aristocrats of celebrity culture (as well as the old aristocrats who were just aristocrats, but still got loads of celebrity-space) were kept in place largely by a particular public need for a kind of epic, ongoing soap opera of people who seemed to have more teeth than them and nicer houses than theirs. The celebrities, perhaps, were just another of the Compensatory Pleasures (like extended credit facilities or deli-style sandwich fillings) that people in the Nineties needed to compensate for … living in the Nineties. But one fundamental result of the cultural equation between confession and celebrity would be that the poor, quite literally, were supporting the wealthy.

Ulrika Jonsson

Just type ‘Ulrika Jonsson’ into the subject window of your Internet search engine, and you’ll be sent back a lengthy list of sites, all of which promise ‘Ulrika Nude!’ Trawled up from the murkier depths of the web, these sites specialize in computer-manipulated images of celebrities. It’s a kind of cyber-harem that doubles as a somewhat sordid gauge of modern fame. You get the feeling that if you were a celebrity, checking out your virtual profile, you’d probably be pretty miffed to find yourself pornographically pixilated in this way. That said, when you saw the sheer number of people whom these sites have fiddled around with, you’d maybe feel strangely hurt if you weren’t included.

At thirty-two, Ulrika Jonsson was both defined and misrepresented as a sex symbol. Meeting her outside one of the smarter Windsor commuter stations, sitting behind the wheel of a soft-top Saab, dressed in casual black with Gucci sunglasses, she looks like any off-duty career woman. Neither her image, nor her voice – slightly ‘county’, with the odd dead-drop into New Labour Mockney – seems to hint at media celebrity and part-time wild child.

Saab lend her the car in exchange for the occasional personal appearance. She wants the estate version so there’ll be room for her five-year-old son’s bike in the back. ‘I drove a Fiat Panda until a couple of years ago,’ she explains, as a dashboard slightly more complicated than the flightdeck of the Starship Enterprise winks lazily into life. And this little fact says a lot about the woman: Ulrika embodies the point where tabloid-hounded TV personality – flashy cars, the Met bar and lots of foreign holidays – meets Home Counties mum: the school run, early nights and swimming lessons.

On the one hand, you could say that Ulrika’s entire career as a TV presenter and national pin-up has been driven by the juggernaut of her sex appeal. On the other, she has never promoted herself as anything other than ‘ordinary’. The trouble is, Ulrika emits that particular kind of ordinariness that many people also find sexy. She is probably the only prime-time television star to have been photographed wearing an Agent Provocateur négligée while leaning at a jaunty angle against the extension hose of an Electrolux dust-buster. She shares with Felicity Kendal – the star of the terminally domestic Seventies sit-com, The Good Life – the fact that she has been voted ‘Rear of The Year’ in a national poll.

Ulrika uses the word ‘ordinary’ to describe herself, as though it is the one card in her hand that can’t be beaten. ‘People like me because … Well, they like me, if they like me at all, because I’m ordinary. I suppose that when I started out, nearly twelve years ago, there weren’t a lot of young female presenters. There wasn’t the amount of satellite channels that there are now, and even Sky was only just starting. Now, there are millions of young girls who are TV presenters and they’re on the cover of just about everything. But I do think that I’m just ordinary. And I don’t mind laughing at myself. So maybe I just make people feel comfortable. People don’t really know what pigeon-hole to put me in, because I keep changing my course and I don’t seem to fit into any pattern.

‘I’m not quite sure how it all happened for me. I didn’t mind messing around in a crowd, but if there was a serious audience I’d probably walk the other way. Even now, when I do stand on a stage, I tend to be very self-deprecating and take the piss out of myself. Because I feel that I’m almost not worthy to be there, I think that if they can see me laughing at myself, then they won’t laugh at me. We can just laugh at me together.’

Even as she’s saying this, in the wholly ordinary surroundings of a National Trust tea room in the Home Counties, on a perfectly straightforward Thursday afternoon, another nice woman (middle-aged, mumsy, terribly polite) comes up and asks her for a pair of autographs. ‘We’ve been having a debate,’ the woman explains, ‘and we want to know if you’re Ulrika Jonsson?’ ‘I was this morning,’ Ulrika replies, signing the proffered menus, and then she’s worrying whether the recipients of these autographs will spot that she’s written ‘lots of love’ on one of them and only ‘love’ on the other.

And that’s another thing that you begin to notice about Ulrika – she seems as though she is constantly having to monitor her every slightest move, as though anything that she says or does, however trivial, could be seized upon and used against her. Again, she seems to use her ordinariness as both weapon and shield in her constant fight with what she sees as her misrepresentation within the press. It’s as if she’s trying to shy away from something, these days, even as she’s still on the celebrity roller-coaster.

But with the media feeding frenzy that attended the ‘discovery’ that Ulrika is pregnant with her second child, you begin to see the reasoning behind her paranoia. Despite the fact that, by her own admission, she has taken a deliberate step back from the limelight, taking on very little new work, the news of her pregnancy dominated no fewer than five newspaper covers over a weekend when there were plenty of other important news stories – the little matter of major rioting in central London, for instance.

‘The pregnancy was never announced – it didn’t come from me or from any of the people who work with me. But I’ve been forced to admit it, unhappily, when I’m just a woman who has become pregnant and would like to be enjoying the pregnancy. I can’t describe the feeling of panic which all this attention and prying has caused for me. Not least because I’m only just pregnant, and any woman will tell you that the first three months of a pregnancy can be very problematic. This ridiculous media circus doesn’t make me feel important, it makes me feel ridiculous. None of it has any relevance to my job, or what I’m known for, and the stress is enormous.’

From the very beginnings of her career as a TV AM weather girl, who went on to present the snappily athletic series ‘Gladiators’, the fact that Ulrika was partially sold to the public as a bouncy ‘Swedish blonde’ has made her natural tabloid fodder. Even when she made the jump from mainstream to cult, by appearing as a kind of ironic version of herself on ‘Shooting Stars’ – the send-up of a quiz show hosted by Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – Ulrika’s private life was always made pretty public by the press. Married, separated, and now a single parent, her every holiday and dinner date (she once went out with Prince Edward) seemed to prompt another frenzied whoop of glee from the paparazzi. Now, you can hear the mounting anger in her tone the moment she touches on the subject of the tabloids.

‘What they’re basically saying is, “Because you earn all this fucking money, and because you get all the fucking glory, you can take some of the shit as well. Because we’re going to dig, and we’re going to chase, and we won’t be happy until we’re burying you.” And I just think that’s wrong. I think that because I’m in the entertainment business, that’s considered egotistical and they just want to shatter it or bring it down.

‘There are certain people in the business who will give the press exactly what they want. They’ll turn up to everything and they’ll pose and do anything. I’ve never been like that, but I’ve still managed to attract that kind of attention. Whether I burp or fart it’s in the papers. But then when I was pregnant, for instance, I was chased in a car.’

Beyond the tabloids, one of the difficulties facing Ulrika, professionally, is her lack of a coherent role. Over the course of her career, she has, for instance, swung from singing in a musical to interviewing the Chancellor of the Exchequer about macroeconomics. Similarly, as the presenter of ‘Gladiators’ – which was hugely successful as a prime-time series, reaching the mega-millions figures in terms of ratings – she was placed in a position where she could spend the rest of her career being known for just one programme. Her popularity on ‘Shooting Stars’ went some way to reinventing her for a new audience. But once again, with Ulrika, you are faced with a mass of contradictions beneath the ‘sexy but jolly good fun’ public image.

‘It was about six months ago that I discovered I had a real crisis of persona, to so speak. I really did have no idea of who I was. There’s always been two people in my personality. One is very calm, and in need of security and a solid home life. The other can be completely hedonistic – in a fairly mild, but still wild way. Now I’m feeling the need to explore new areas – things that are nothing to do with TV or public life. I’d like to pursue my interest in painting and writing for instance.

‘I’m developing the idea for a novel – it would sound too grand to say I’m actually writing a novel, because that’s a big enterprise. But I have read some complete shit, and thought, “I could do better than that!” This is me boasting, but I’d read about all these young people writing the stories of their lives – I just finished Geri Halliwell’s autobiography – and I’d always thought that I’d write the story of my life, if only as a form of therapy. So I’ve started trying to write it down in a couple of different styles, but I haven’t worked out which style to follow yet. It’s not necessarily going to be for publication, but it would be for my own benefit.

‘The other thing that I’ve been doing for years is writing poetry, and that, I think, would be really interesting to publish. But it is so terribly personal, coming from all kinds of experiences that I’ve been through – good and bad, but predominantly bad.’ The contradictions in Ulrika resurface once again; here’s a woman whose bedside reading, she says, is Joanna Trollope’s aga-sagas and Dostoevsky’s epic description of insanity and despair, The Idiot.

In many ways, it would seem to make sense for her to follow the path of ‘Shooting Stars’, and take advantage of the high fashionability that type of ‘ironic’ TV now commands. It has become a feature of post-modern comedians, such as Vic and Bob, or Harry Hill, to showcase essentially conservative media personalities within the surreal, volatile set-up of their programmes. Similarly, Absolutely Fabulous, as a hip sit-com, brought new audiences and brilliant new roles for both June Whitfield and Joanna Lumley. But are these ‘guest stars’ being asked, to some extent, to become stooges?

‘Bob went too far on “Shooting Stars” once – with a gag about my son during my divorce – but I laughed along with it and he apologized later so it was all OK. I don’t know why they thought of me for “Shooting Stars” in the first place. But I was a great fan of Vic and Bob so they didn’t have to ask twice. I remember doing the first series and just enjoying myself, but having no real sense of achievement. And then suddenly everyone was saying how brilliant it was to have me on the programme, and how clever I was. And I was thinking, “But I’m not doing anything – I’m just being me.” I’m really good at word association, and that kind of fits in with the way Vic and Bob tend to work. It was really just repositioning people’s perception of me, after seeing me reading the weather or presenting “Gladiators”.’

With this in mind, you feel that Ulrika ought to be appearing at Glastonbury with the Beastie Boys, or doing a collaboration with Damien Hirst. Contemporary culture thrives on such unlikely combinations, merging the radical and the populist in a way that seems to sum up the quirks of the zeitgeist.

‘I’d do anything with Bruce Springsteen like a shot,’ says Ulrika, laughing. ‘But this is all really new for me. “Shooting Stars” was a cult show, but does that make me a cult figure, or simply a member of a cult show? It’s interesting how things have changed for me, after feeling the pull, so to speak, of “Shooting Stars”, but I’d prefer to wait and see how things develop.

‘Age doesn’t bother me. Turning thirty was great, and turning forty just reminds me that I’m mortal! I’m quite enjoying maturity. With the programmes I get offered, I’ve tried to be true to myself and only do the things which I think are worthwhile. But increasingly I’ve found that I’m not being offered anything I particularly want to do. I certainly don’t do this for the money, and I have never been dependent on anyone financially. I’m not being negative, I’m simply saying that I’d like to step outside the circle, so to speak, and consider new things.’

Ultimately, Ulrika Jonsson would seem to be at that crossroads in her life that comes to us all with the approach of middle age. On the one hand, there’s a career to pursue, and all the pleasures of success. On the other, particularly with raising young children, a whole new set of priorities comes into play. One can’t help thinking of the way in which Zoe Ball, also, has made a fairly public attempt to use domesticity to distance herself from her image as a good-time girl who’s one of the boys. It’s probably a common feature of early middle age, simply to want the best of both worlds, and that’s where Ulrika seems to be at. Also, you get the feeling that she’s pretty sick of the ‘girly’ image.