Clemency Newman Looking Into the Popular Reality Show Geordie Shore

From reality television to the hyperreal: How do the pressures of reality shows such as Geordie Shore cause their characters to change their physical appearance? Clemency Newman Abstract Looking into the popular reality show Geordie Shore, I will undertake research to answer why it is that the women who appear on the show change their physical appearance and what connection this has to their celebrity status. I hope to argue that because the women are considered lower class, they have no other power than their perceived attractiveness and are therefore pressured into trying to achieve a hyperreal body, relating to Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation. Introduction Reality television is big business, with over 300 reality format shows on air in the US alone (Washington Post, 2015) from Idol to Big Brother, they rake in millions of viewers every night and have a significant impact on popular culture. These shows present a concentrated, edited and scandalised version of everyday life, wrapped in the guise of being true to the viewer, only more dramatic. Television has the ability to shape our view of the world and now with the ever pervasive aspects of social media, networks such as Bravo can imprint an everlasting impression of what we consider normal. However, even when know what we are watching is completely unreal, we accept it as ‘reality’ and accept the characters into our lives, until they become overthrown by a younger, prettier and more outrageous model. Geordie Shore is one such television show which presents an exaggerated, hyperbolic version of reality, with the cast members performing ridiculous, violent and carnal acts in front of a worldwide audience and being celebrated in the process. First aired in 2011, Geordie Shore was the UK’s answer to sister-show Jersey Shore, about a group of eight young, drunk and oversexed Geordies (slang for people from the northern England city of Newcastle), following their summer working for a PR company and partying on a daily basis (MTV UK 2016). Jersey Shore’s overseas cousin out- shocked every aspect of the original, featuring more violence, drinking and sex than anyone thought possible and quickly became one of the network’s biggest hits. The show only served to affirm and push the already prevalent caricature of Geordies, a group of people already portrayed in the media as stupid, loud and loutish. Even though the show is considered reality, I will address the members of the cast as characters, as it is unclear how much of the show is scripted, with the members often playing defined roles and partaking in set-up situations. The format of the programme has not changed much over the five years of air-time, with each episode usually featuring at least one drunken night out, followed by a fight and a hung-over reconciliation the next morning. However, despite the monotony of the programme itself, its characters’ appearances (particularly the female members of the cast) have changed markedly, with many undergoing diets and cosmetic surgery to achieve a look deemed suitable for a television personality. From naïve teenagers, the girls have transformed into media-savvy 20 year olds, with their own fashion ranges, books and workout DVDs, with their looks becoming more extreme along the way. Characters such as Charlotte, Holly and Marnie have openly admitted they have buckled to the pressure to look good. In my research, I aim to analyse and answer how the media and its surrounding environment have caused this pressure, transforming these characters physically into a hyperreal ideal, with the aim of staying relevant and likeable. This topic is important due to the fact that Geordie Shore and other reality shows like it are so incredibly popular, with millions of viewers and a large influence on young people. The way these young women shape themselves leads to others to consider that their bodies consist of the same malleable stuff, which can be manipulated through any extreme measure possible to obtain the ‘perfect’ body. I will use sources such as Jean Baudrillard, Stuart Hall and my own first-hand investigation in order to come to the conclusion that the pressure to maintain a perfect physical appearance, due to unrealistic expectations placed on women in the media leads the characters of Geordie Shore to take extreme measures. How the characters’ physical appearance is depicted Originally, I had planned to look into how these characters’ behaviour influences the viewers of the show, as many of the viewers of these shows are teenagers, a particularly influential age, I had considered that brash behaviour would have some kind of negative affect on young girls. However, after conducting a survey into the opinions of viewers, mostly women aged 18-35, I discovered that although they are aware that these characters may have a bad affect on others, none of them actually considered them to be role models. After further research, I noticed that the female characters of the show have physically changed significantly over the few years the show has been on air. Most of them have undergone cosmetic procedures in order to attain a level of attractiveness considered desirable in Western society and have even spoken publicly about their reasoning behind it, with one character even releasing a video of her having her bandages taken off after a nose job on a social media account. I thought that it would be much more interesting to try and discover why these women are striving to change their physical appearances, to appear more perfect and why the exterior is considered so important, rather than altering their damaging, unhealthy behaviour of drinking, partying and fighting on a nightly basis. A survey was conducted in order to discover people’s opinions on the characters featured in Geordie Shore and 59 results were collected, consisting of a range of interesting opinions. Most results confirmed my original theories, for example that people watch because they “like to see something stupid” and that it “makes me feel good about myself” (anon, 2016). Shows such as Geordie Shore act as a cathartic tool for viewers to consider themselves more well-adjusted and normal, which I also hope to mirror later with the Victorian freak shows. Many, although they acknowledged this was a concern for younger, more easily-influenced people, thought they were just there to be laughed at and “something you’d want to avoid ending up like” (anon, 2016), a sort of warning for the viewer. One comment that was unexpected was that their physical appearance, having ‘improved’ over time, makes them role models, as “all the girls are fit now” (anon, 2016). It is surprising to me how one aspect of a person can be so concentrated and seen to represent the entire person, forgetting all other aspects and only focusing on the most superficial. In further interviews, I hope to discover if the characters’ looks are considered their most valuable feature, further looking into how their appearances are scrutinised and influenced by the public. I aim to begin my research by investigating if it is possible to compare the depiction of the characters in the programme to the unfortunate characters paraded in freak shows in the Victorian era, but with the ‘other’ shifting from a racial basis to that of a more complex class system. I believe the first step to understanding the motives of the show and the purpose it serves in contemporary culture is to look at similar examples from the past and see if they can somehow be compared, in order to understand it better. Stuart Hall argues that race is a construct, invented by the white European male in the time of colonialism, in order to consider some people the ‘other’, find differences between ‘us and them’ and de-humanise. I believe that Hall’s description of freak show characters such as Saartjie Baartman can be paralleled with Geordie Shore, such as the ogling of intimate body parts, seen as animalistic, the fascination of physical ‘beauty’, detached from any humanity and the perception of uncontrollable sexual urges within the characters (Hall, 1997). These characteristics act as a signifier that these people are not exactly the same as the rest of us and therefore, do not deserve the same type of privacy as us. However, Hall’s text only deals with the concept of race and all but one of the characters of Geordie Shore are white, but the survey conducted clearly shows that viewers clearly think of the characters in the same way, as a caricature of real life and a guilty pleasure to watch and secretly feel better about yourself. I think it would be interesting to find out how Hall’s theory can be related to Geordie Shore when such distinct divisions are no longer explicitly stated, but have to be discovered as they seem to be so unnoticeable now. One way which may be a method of connected Hall’s theory with the characters of Geordie Shore could be discovering whether the divisions that used to be assigned to race have now been shifted to a subtler class system. Results from my survey stated that the characters were not considered to be from a lower class, but that they “don’t act in a classy way” (anon, 2016), showing how the concept of class has shifted from where you are born to something more complicated. The hierarchy of a traditional class system, although still prevalent in British culture (where Geordie Shore is based), has shifted “from class as an economic category to one based on cultural practices” (Biressi and Nunn, 2013).

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