Take The West Wing. I'm about half-way through the seven-season box set now, and it is striking the extent to which - perhaps because it is being watched mainly for entertainment value - the subtleties of artifice do not emerge in bolder colours. Another way of putting this is that a bunch of people going 'er, not sure, I'll find out', talking over each other, dropping pens on the floor or doodling on a notepad, i.e. the things that go on in almost every meeting, never happen in The West Wing. Showing people doing that would not make them look impressive, and since the object of the show is to demonstrate how impressive the real West Wing is (or ought to be), what you get instead are a series of talking heads - in effect a group of characters, who periodically have their turn to produce the most relevant statistics, in the right order, at the right meetings.
This is, I suppose, part of the object of The West Wing - to be a drama about policy and politics, perhaps more than about politicians and advisors. And the compromise is the requirement to get as much factual information into the dialogue without swamping the characterisation; I suspect that on the whole - with the exception of 'republican' characters within the drama - there is a bit of sacrifice of character to make this happen. But the effect is to create characters that seemingly know everything relevant about everything, and buried within all this attempt to crowbar fact into discussion is realism - I doubt anyone has ever worked anywhere that resembles The West Wing, and the reason is that such places, and such people with the facts always at their fingertips, simply don't exist. If you don't believe me, I challenge you to watch 6 episodes, and note all the topics for which cast members seem to have all the relevant facts ready, and think whether such people really exist. Nobel Laureate or not, the President knows way too much to be real (charming though Martin Sheen is).
At the other extreme, a recent comment on Twitter read something like 'Anyone who believes that the civil service is capable of conspiracy has clearly never worked in it'. This is the West Wing antithesis - the perception of government by people who don't have the facts at their fingertips, who are simply not as capable of achievement as one might think. I doubt, in fairness, either position is quite true, and the comment on Twitter was almost certainly meant as a joke. But it reminded me of the extent to which my viewing of The West Wing is noticeably unsubtle - perhaps it's because I want to believe that West Wing people exist. A similar thought occurred to me reading Clive James latest autobiographical volume, and he described how a chat show was put together, specifically that guests were 'prepped' so they knew which stories to come out with, because they knew the questions being asked. I had always thought, with complete naivete, that it was spontaneous.
There is, I think, something of an insidious quality to these things. What purports to be real is, in fact, artifice. But not simply something made to look like it is real; it is something that is made to look people better than real. The consequence is that we view such actors as more talented than they are (or, in the case of The West Wing, the thing their acting is trying to represent), and the reality as consequently less impressive. Watching, for example, a parliamentary committee in action next to an episode of The West Wing, does not make our politicians look particularly good; but in practice they probably are doing a good job.
Reality is often to hard to watch - both in the sense that it is less impressive, but also in that it is more awkward. It's not so much the shining brilliance we miss, as the absence of embarrassment. It's what makes programmes like The Office hard to watch - there's a memorable scene where Tim, Gareth, David and Ricky are trying to outdo each other with jokes about jelly, Tim having started things off by suspending Gareth's stapler in bright yellow jelly. The awkwardness of no-one being able to think of anything funny, after a couple of gags, and the realisation that this has broken up the conversation and means everyone needs to go back to their desk, is exquisitely done. But it's almost unbearable viewing.
Of course, you could just see this as a version of Hollywood make-believe. Ever wonder where Jason Bourne gets all his weapons, ammunition, and money from? Why do bad guys drop after the first gun-shot wound, when our heroes stroll around with half a magazine lodged in parts of their body without so much as a limp (see Last Action Hero for a parody of this). But I think we know to suspend disbelief for such shows - they are, after all, not really trying to be real, just the right side, in aggregate, of believable. TV shows like The West Wing, I think, are trying much harder to be real, and the danger is therefore greater that we will take fictions like it as how reality should be, and how people should be. Reality, and real people, tend to be much less impressive, but no worse for that. It is what makes them real.
