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Konrad Werner: Bollocks on TV

These days, there's an award for everything. Even thinking of fun ways to torture celebrities.

Image for Konrad Werner: Bollocks on TV
Yup, bollocks. Photo by Sakena (Flickr CC)

The “awards season” always makes you hate yourself, doesn’t it? You don’t care, you scoff at the professional fools making the decisions, you dismiss those decisions as “political”, but then it steals into your head, and you feel vindicated or annoyed, and then you feel so cheap and empty because of those feelings. And then two weeks later you can’t remember who won anyway. There’s nothing nourishing about awards. They’re just a thing that happens to other people that distracts you from your real problems. That’s probably why there are so many awards every year.

This was well illustrated this week, when someone at the respected media research institute Grimme decided to nominate Germany’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!Dschungelcamp – for its “prestigious” self-named award in the “entertainment” category. I’ve never actually seen the show. I’m not one of the 8,760,000 Germans who took time from their lives to watch the final last Saturday, when Joey Heindle won. Yes, Joey Heindle! Imagine! Maybe it is entertaining. All I know about it I get from a glance at the cover of the Bild, which handily keeps you up to date EVERY FUCKING DAY, and from memories of this video of Shaun Ryder eating a kangaroo’s penis in front of two famous children dressed as TV presenters, and from various court cases involving accusations of animal abuse.

But what I have realized so far is that it is a show where minor celebrities are tortured and humiliated, and lose if they decide that, actually, they don’t want to be tortured and humiliated anymore. So you lose if you claim your right to human dignity. Essentially, the final crowning of the winner is a televisual “fuck you” to the German constitution. They could just make it that the first person to renounce the constitution wins, but then I suppose the Salafists would win every series.

The Grimme Prize, according to their website, is awarded to “TV broadcasts that are a model for programming,” and their justification for this nomination was that within a week, “we get to know the contestants in all their strengths and weaknesses.” A bit like waterboarding.

By the way, the Grimme bods also nominated Günther Jauch in the entertainment category, for his work on “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Not all his work, mind – specifically what he did on September 24, 2012, when he gave “an exceptional performance with contestant Aaron Troschke, in which he completely deviated from the game principle of the show and entertained simply through the interaction of the two participants.” In other words, they had a chat and it turned out to be more interesting than the game.

Not sure who I’m rooting for this time. Don’t think I’ll bother staying up all night to watch though.