How voting became TV entertainment

Television's hit formats are advancing onto the politicians' turf, and media researchers believe we can learn from this

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By Jyrki Räikkä
     
      Tonight [Sunday 22.4.] the Finnish public will gather in front of their sets to see whether singer Mariko Pajalahti and her dance partner Aleksi Seppänen or actress Sari Siikander and her partner Mikko Ahti come out on top in the final of the second season of Tanssii tähtien kanssa (Dancing With the Stars), Finland's own version of the BBC "celebreality" format Strictly Come Dancing.
     
Talking of "the Finnish public" in this context may sound like hyperbole, but the exaggeration is not really that great, considering that the competition has already grabbed the biggest viewing figures of the year so far - nearly 1,450,000 Finns tuned in for one of the earlier rounds. The final of last year's first season of the show had more than 1,570,000 viewers nailed to their armchairs.
      A part of the programme's attraction - and that of another succesful format, Idols (a spin-off from the British show Pop Idol) - lies in the home voting, where viewers get to choose which contestants make it through and which are dropped out.
      The classic representative and big daddy of "TV voting shows", the results watch of the Parliamentary Elections on YLE's TV1, lost out in the ratings this year to its foreign-made challenger.
      The election-night coverage gathered in "only" 1.3 million viewers. Not even the main evening news bulletin after the polling stations had closed reached the peaks of the entertainment show's ratings.
     
Entertainment-based publicity is laying down a challenge to political publicity, and is even using the time-honoured weapons of politics itself - votes and the discussion and debate they generate.
      The hit formats, spreading from one country and continent to the next, have become nationwide topics of discussion over coffee-tables and in workplaces around the world. In the Finnish case, the late-edition tabloids, which conveniently belong to the same large media groups as the TV channels screening the shows, keep the pot boiling.
     
The phenomenon has also sparked the interest of scholars and researchers, but not all of them are particularly worried about the trend.
      The Dutch media and popular culture scholar Liesbet van Zoonen, author of Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge, has stressed that the mechanisms that spawn political communities and the viewer communities of entertainment programmes are similar, as are the practical aspects of fan behaviour and political participation.
      In van Zoonen's view, entertainment is the mainspring of modern society, and as such should be taken into consideration in political decision-making and participation.
     
In recent decades, there has been a reluctance in Western democracies to accentuate the importance of the emotions in politics and political participation at the expense of decisions appealing to sense and reason.
      Nevertheless, van Zoonen believes that politics could learn from the sense of community and participation generated by mass entertainment, without this having any adverse effect on content.
      In Finland, too, van Zoonen's ideas find a positive response. It does not do to form a sharp divide between entertainment and serious social discussion, suggests media researcher Mikko Hautakangas of Tampere University. He is currently writing a post-graduate thesis on reality-TV in the Finnish context and on the behaviour of the audience for the Finnish localisation of Big Brother.
     
"The pathology of fans of reality-TV shows has often been highlighted in terms of the fact that they are deemed to be individuals who display a kind of hyperactivity about something that is of little intrinsic worth. And yet the same people who get all steamed up about how wonderful one of the Idols contestants is can in another context take part analytically and critically in some discussion on matters relating to society", says Hautakangas.
      In suitable doses, the operating models found in the entertainment sector can be an opportunity for the political actors and not a threat, he believes.
      For example, by using online forums, blogs, and other interactive channels for light discussion, decision-makers can set up a valuable interface with the voters and offer them the experience of taking part in the political process. Encounters of this sort appeal to the voters' feelings, get them thinking and talking, and get people galvanised into action.
     
"Making lists and voting are an integral part of fan-culture", notes Dr. Kaarina Nikunen, also from Tampere University, who has for her part examined the fan communities of TV programmes. In Nikunen's view fandom and the building of the star cult have also stepped increasingly obviously across the political threshold.
      It can be seen from the campaigns in the recent parliamentary elections, which played up the personal attributes of the candidates and the images associated with them. One clear example is the star cult that has been built around the election's runaway winner in votes gained, the National Coalition Party's Sauli Niinistö, now installed as the new Speaker of Parliament.
     
Nikunen warns against drawing too simplistic parallels between the worlds of politics and light entertainment.
      Then again, it is important in both politics and entertainment that those in the glare of the public spotlight remain convincing and are able to nurture the image that their stardom has generated.
      "In reality-TV voting, the demand for being ‘the genuine article' is pivotal. For example, in the Big Brother household this means that viewers look askance at people who change character in the course of the show", says Nikunen.
     
Even if decision-makers may have something to learn from the entertainment world, the media researchers are less than excited about the idea of actually merging politics and reality television.
      In 2002, an attempt at such a marriage was made in Argentina, with not very impressive results. Canal América 2 ran a show called El Candidato de la Gente, which was a kind of "Pick Your Own Congressman for the People" format, with 16 political novices being groomed for a possible seat in the country's Congress. The programme was apparently canned after one series owing to poor ratings.
     
This did not prevent it from being spotted by eyes a little further north. Showtime's The American Candidate sought (and failed) to produce a candidate for the 2004 U.S. Presidential race. The series, which ended up being tossed around the cable networks, claimed to feature "ten candidates from all walks of life [competing] to see if they have the qualities and qualifications to become President of the United States". It got on air seriously late, and the eventual winner Park Gillespie never managed to make it onto the campaign trail.
      In 2006, Gillespie tried to get into the House of Representatives from the Republican ranks in the state of South Carolina, but did not have enough support to run in the Republican primaries, and he pulled out of the race.
     
In Britain, too, there has been a "Do you Want to go to Westminster?" type of talent show called Vote For Me*, recalls Saku Tuominen of the Finnish production company Broadcasters.
      This "political Idols" effort, from ITV, signally failed to get any air under its wings or become a hit when it was launched in 2005. There has been no second series.
     
Tuominen nevertheless thinks it possible that reality-TV shows drawing on politics could take off in Finland, if they are realised ambitiously enough. To be fair, in his visions of how it might go, the reality-TV aspect comes rather closer to straight documentary.
      "The options are almost endless. To take just one example, a programme could follow the local election campaign in Finland's smallest municipality, or it could go around 24/7 with the candidates chosen for the head-to-head runoff in the Presidential elections", suggests Tuominen.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 22.4.2007
     
     
*Translator's Note: Rodney Hylton-Potts was the winner in the British Vote For Me talent contest with more than 80% of the phone-in votes. He was a candidate who modelled his political platform loosely on the standard London cab-driver, jocularly regarded as being generally "slightly to the right of Attila the Hun". A former solicitor and ex-convict (he served two years for mortgage fraud), Mr. Hylton-Potts advocated a total ban on all immigration, forced repatriations, withdrawal from the EU, the compulsory castration of all paedophiles and child molesters, repeal of human rights legislation, the legalisation and taxation of all drugs except heroin and cocaine, and a programme to build many more prisons. Since the producers ITV and Mentorn claimed that the series was looking for "people who appeal to young voters", and since it was also supposed to be a way of reducing moderates' apathy and disenchantment with the political process, it might be a little worrying that the radical "comedy fascist" Mr. Hylton-Potts won. Nevertheless, for the programme-makers it was probably a much greater disappointment that the show never gained an audience much over a million viewers in each of its five episodes, and it has since been quietly buried. Buoyed by the instant television publicity, and with his election deposit paid by ITV, Mr. Hylton-Potts later stood as an independent candidate in the Folkestone constituency at the 2005 General Election. He received 153 votes, which was 22 votes fewer than Lord Toby Jug of the Monster Raving Loony Party. The seat was won by Michael Howard (Conservative), with 26,161 votes..


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Politics goes entertainment (5.12.2006)

Links:
  Dancing With the Stars (Wikipedia)
  Liesbet van Zoonen personal pages
  Mikko Hautakangas: The Finnish Big Brother and the hyperactive public of the Internet forum (scroll down for English)
  Kaarina Nikunen
  A personal (and scathing) review of Vote for Me from a BBC blogger
  ´Comedy fascist´ is viewers´ choice in TV election (The Times, 16.1.2005)
  ´Political Idol´ met by viewer apathy (The Guardian, 11.1.2005)

JYRKI RÄIKKÄ / Helsingin Sanomat
jyrki.raikka@hs.fi