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Broken Britain! Your reality TV fix awaits
Riots? What riots? Sally Bercow and Simon Cowell return us to normal service
Meanwhile, has anything about the riots made you feel more unsettled than the X Factor supremo's silence on them? Aside from donating to the Reclaim Our Streets fund, Cowell has not been persuaded to make a public statement explaining how to fix things, and this in itself feels the most glaringly unfamiliar of oversights. After all, in recent years, it has felt almost as though we were living in a Cowellocracy, with Simon invested with a near-messianic quality by politicians, and leaders of every stripe gibbering witlessly about what they could learn at his knee. Cowell appeared to be post-Blairism's maharishi, with Gordon Brown announcing he had a vision of "an X-Factor Britain", claiming the programme displayed "the value of ambition, how anyone can achieve things". Then leader of the opposition David Cameron hailed Cowell as "incredibly talented", agreed politicians could learn from him, and declined to dismiss the idea of a place for him in a Tory administration. At one point Cowell was invited on to Newsnight to discuss his idea to revolutionise UK politics – a TV show in which the public would debate issues with a red phone on stage, allowing Downing Street to call in and explain its position.
So are we witnessing a sea-change? In the riots, have today's politicians finally run up against the policy problem that they don't at some intellectually and ideologically bankrupt level believe could actually be solved by Simon Cowell? After all, if what we shall euphemise as "recent events" have shown us anything, it is that The X Factor is merely a light entertainment show, and is the answer to precisely nothing, unless it's the inquiry: "What apocalypse-hastening reality format shits a gazillion quid into Simon Cowell's bank account every week?"
But perhaps I am too hasty. The eye is caught by reports this week revealing that the venue for the X Factor bootcamp is the Selsdon Park hotel in Croydon. My dear! Forgive the lapse into anoraky areas of interest, but what a history-laden choice. As Tulisa never tires of pointing out, the Selsdon Park hotel's claim to fame is as the location for the 1970 conference of Edward Heath's shadow cabinet, which gave birth to a radical free-market agenda. Though denounced as "the work of Selsdon Man" by Harold Wilson, and largely abandoned by Heath under pressure, the flame was kept burning on the right, and when its advocates formed the Selsdon Group, it was at the Selsdon Park that they met again. Goodness, what tales those walls could tell. 1973: they bear witness to Nicholas Ridley et al enshrining economic theories that will dominate the Thatcher years. 2011: they stare mutely down at a cavalcade of X Factor contestants – hopped up on Cowell's free booze – who believe fame is a basic human right and are willing to murder any number of Westlife standards to prove it.
It's been a funny old journey, hasn't it? Naturally, it would take a media historian of the calibre of David Starkey to make some point about what has happened to Britain in the intervening four decades, and to declare some causal link between the ideals of Selsdon Man and the hellscape of the X Factor bootcamp and all it represents.
But given that Simon is an avowed free marketeer, who is on record as saying that he hero-worships Margaret Thatcher, Lost in Showbiz insists you regard his choice of the Selsdon Park as a clarion call indicating where our befuddled nation should go from here. Unless Cowell gets in touch to say otherwise, you may hereby assume that Simon's prescription for healing Broken Britain is not a craven, Heath-style abandonment of hardline free-market capitalism, but an even more rigid adherence to its principles.
Politicians, you have your instructions. It's time to face the music.
Marina Hyde guardian.co.uk
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