Top Billing: The Making of an Infantilist Viewer

It’s Thursday evening, 7:30pm, and millions of pale, fifty-something-year-old housewife toes are warmly settled in stokies across the country, ready to live their imaginary lives through a few indefatigable paragons of upper-middleclass waspish style. Yes, it’s Top Billing time. Time for vicarious television lives for those who need an aspirational injection of money-culture.

As soon as I see Mike Mol’s purposeful walk into shot, screen left past a green settee that, in a few minutes, will be termed “functional, yet aesthetically pleasing”, I begin to feel anxious. I just know there’s a tragically poor figure of speech waiting to dribble out of his taught little smile in a viscous flow of voice training (purposeful adjective overflow there). I know it’s the scriptwriter’s fault, but I can’t help pinning the blame on Mr SA. He just tries so hard to pull the cringe-worthy dialogue off that he’s more than complicit (I hope they don't script Dr. Mol's bedside manner; it would inevitably be euthanistic). Miss RAU (Jeannie D don’t ya know) is probably even more guilty. Except she has a higher smile-per-frame rate - almost as high as her co-smiler Ursula Stapelfeldt. I really marvel at Jeannie's ability to produce so many varied expressions of glee in a 30 second introduction of a dull game lodge. But I get so exhausted watching them. She’s either very happy in her work or she’s coked to the brim. Maybe it’s also a reluctance to drop those relentless beauty queen smiles once they win you a pageant title.

But it’s not only the presenters who challenge my couch-time composure (I do try to not get worked up, but always fail), the voice-over guys are even worse. How did Top Billing become a retirement home for has-been Radio 5 DJs? I used to love Phil Wright and Alex Jay when I was 14. Now they talk to me like I talk to my cat. And even he looks at me funny. The more I listen to them the more I think the viewer isn’t given a chance to decide what is significant for herself. The faked lilts and accentuations riding on their artificially energetic cadence tell us exactly what we are supposed to consider humorous, poignant, enviable, frivolous, desirable etc. Are we so daft that we need this didactic, spoon-fed TV? I almost expect them to talk down to us like a condescending aunt who finishes your sentences for you. Except here they start them for you too. It’s like we’ve been drawn unwittingly into a state of infantilism; we become children of “lifestyle” programming. And it never ceases to amaze me how they can state the obvious with so much conviction. Sometimes so enthusiastically that it can make you reconsider the simplest facts. You become inclined to doubt the validity of a truism merely because it's so difficult to believe that something so self-evident can actually be expressed with such satisfaction.

Although I can’t stand it, I can imagine how Top Billing works like an amphetamine. People wait in anticipation for the Thursday evening hit, get a huge high from the places they’re taken (basically out of their own lives), followed by a depressing comedown when it slowly dawns on them how far removed their life is from what they’ve just seen. Maybe I’m totally wrong and the programme just serves to fuel the viewer’s unrelenting drive towards the South Africash dream. Either way, is this programme a much-needed, light-hearted distraction from the everyday troubles we face in this country? Or is it a blinkered kick in the guts to those same troubles? Or can it be both simultaneously? Maybe when I’m a fifty-year old, addicted, infantilised viewer, I’ll have a quick answer to that.