Keeping it Real? Social Class,Young People and ‘Authenticity’ in Reality TV

Introduction

Being oneself is a requirement of contemporary social relationships of governance oriented around norms of compulsory individuality, choice, self-responsibility and self-reinvention: the neoliberal self ‘calculates about itself and works upon itself in order to better itself’ (Du Gay, 1996: 124). Authenticity is central to these forms of selfhood, for they rely on the idea of an ‘inner’ self; the ability to overcome obstacles to ‘knowing oneself’ is central to the neoliberal project of self-actualisation. Authenticity is a moral duty: it is only through these processes that individuals can achieve fulfilment and foster a ‘sense that one is a “good”, a “worthy” person’ (Giddens, 1991: 79). As Rose (1996) argues, individuals are governed through such practices of self-making, compelled to engage in techniques of self-knowledge and self-examination to ‘realise’ their ‘true’ self:

… humans are addressed, represented and acted upon as if they were selves of a particular type: suffused with an individualised subjectivity, motivated by anxieties and aspirations concerning their self fulfilment, committed to finding their true identities and maximising their authentic expression in their lifestyles. (1996: 169)

The production of the neoliberal self requires ongoing ‘identity work’. Authenticity is something that we must work to produce, as we seek to construct an identity as normal and unique. This framework for understanding neoliberalism and selfhood has been used to understand the preoccupation with authenticity in Reality Television (RTV) (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). However, problematically, such work lacks attention to social distinction. In this article we show how young people’s identity work through RTV involves making judgements of different ‘ways of being’ and how this (re)produces social class inequalities. We argue that this happens as young people negotiate RTV participants’ claims to authenticity and in doing so claim particular class positions themselves.

Authenticity is central to moral economies of personhood and processes of class-making. RTV, like other cultural spaces, is a site where these play out: ‘Through the prism of individualization, class differences are re-invented, largely within the cultural and media field, so as to produce and re-produce social divisions’ (McRobbie, 2005: 101). To be judged as having been true to yourself is the ultimate accolade for RTV participants (Hill, 2002, 2004). ¹ RTV invites particular viewing practices oriented around the search for the ‘real’ self. It focuses on ‘ordinary people’, taken ‘in themselves, as signs of the real’ (Biressi and Nunn, 2004: 4). It uses the aesthetic devices of ‘the reveal’ and ‘the confessional’ (video-diaries, interviews to camera, etc.) to establish intimacy, interiority and the ‘authenticity’ of selves (Aslama and Pantti, 2006). Further, RTV claims to allow audiences to witness ‘journeys’ of self-transformation through which contestants ‘find’ their real self. Hill (2002: 324), discussing Big Brother viewers, illustrates that catching that ‘moment of truth’ is central to viewing practices and pleasures: ‘audiences look for the moment of authenticity when real people are “really” themselves in an unreal environment’ (see also Hill, 2004).

This process of navigating representations of authenticity in RTV is discussed by Rose and Wood (2005). They identify three overlapping paradoxical elements that must be negotiated in assessing RTV authenticity: ‘identification (beautiful people vs. “people like me”), situation (common goals vs. uncommon surroundings), and production (unscripted vs. necessary manipulation)’ (2005: 295). Jones (2003: 402) refers to the result of the negotiation of these elements as the ‘reality contract’: ‘the relatively stable understanding that the audience achieves after sufficient encounter with a genre, enabling it to predict with a degree of security the extent to which it can credit the programme with “reproducing reality”’.

Within RTV, the authentic self is a middle-class subject, with access to the resources through which to maximise its existence, to make the ‘right’ choices (Walkerdine et al., 2001). In contrast, the working class are located outside of the good authentic self. Textual studies show that, while their working-classness can propel some RTV contestants to fame, as a sign of ‘ordinariness’, it also constrains the symbolic value they can acquire (Biressi and Nunn, 2004; Holmes, 2005; Tyler and Bennett, 2010). They are often positioned as ‘too authentic’, unable to take up practices of self-realisation and requiring transformation towards the middle-class norm, assisted by cultural intermediaries or ‘experts’ to become fitter, thinner, better people (Skeggs, 2004, 2009). Thus, for members of the working class to successfully inhabit a neoliberal subjectivity requires that they work on themselves and move towards a set of dispositions and ways of being in the world associated with the middle class (Bourdieu, 1984). Such attempts at becoming middle class are perilous. Either they are seen as refusing such projects of self-reinvention, and so are positioned as lacking the critical self-reflexivity required to perform as responsible and ‘good’ neoliberal subjects (McRobbie, 2005; Skeggs, 2009). Or, if they are ‘transformed’, these working-class subjects risk ‘failing’ to present as authentic and so being accused of pretentiousness: ‘a charge levelled at people … in whom there is a gap between being and seeming’ (Lawler, 1999: 17).

If RTV incites audiences to make moral judgements of personhood (Skeggs and Wood, 2008; Skeggs et al., 2008) then it potentially encourages viewers to participate in processes of social distinction which position the working class as value-less. Yet, there is little empirical work exploring how people engage with RTV and the processes of ‘class-making’ within it, despite its centrality to our lives (Allen and Mendick, forthcoming). In this article, we use qualitative interviews with young people (aged 14–19) in England to explore how they take up, resist and rework classed discourses of authenticity within RTV as part of their constructions of self, their ‘identity work’. We understand RTV to function as ‘a testing board for [people’s] self and social identities’ (Rose and Wood, 2005: 295), as performative, allowing young people to position themselves and others.

We focus on how young people’s negotiations of authenticity in RTV inform and are informed by their social class position. We show that young people’s readings of RTV are both surprising and challenging. The meaning of authenticity and the value ascribed to it and read onto the working- or middle-class RTV participants are not fixed. As we demonstrate, as an audience member, our relationship to RTV, and questions of ‘authenticity’ in television more broadly, is mediated by our experiences, capitals and resources, and, in particular, our class position (Skeggs et al., 2008). Judgements of personhood and of authenticity are generated from the interplay between text and viewer as RTV is ‘put to [identity] work’ (Turner, 2004: 102) by people within their everyday social practices.

Methods

We draw on data from two research projects that explore the relationship between young people’s aspirations, their identity work and popular culture. The first study, ‘Young women and the performing arts: Creative education, New Labour and the remaking of the young female self’ (abbreviated to ‘Arts’) was led by Kim Allen (Allen, 2008). It explored the educational experiences and career aspirations of young women aged 16–19 in Performing Arts education. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and conducted in 2006–7, it involved individual and group interviews with 20 young women attending two state-maintained educational institutions in Greater London. The interviews were conducted by Kim Allen, lasted between 45 and 180 minutes and covered educational histories, career aspirations and perceptions of work in particular areas of the entertainment industry, influences and ‘role models’ and views on celebrity culture including RTV fame. The study included working-class and middle-class participants from a range of ethnic backgrounds. The topic of RTV entered participants’ accounts through wider discussions of celebrity as they talked about the career paths available to them in the entertainment industry.

The second study, ‘The impact of the depiction of work in television drama on young people’s career aspirations and choices’ (abbreviated to ‘Drama’) was led by Heather Mendick (Mendick and Williams, 2008). It examined how representations of work and workers in television drama, including RTV, influence young people’s career aspirations. Funded by the British Academy and conducted in 2007–8, it involved 18 group interviews (with five or six participants each) and 31 individual interviews with students aged 14–16 in three English schools (in a rural location, London and a large Midlands town). The interviews were carried out by Heather Mendick, Katya Williams and Sarah Smart with group interviews lasting approximately 45 minutes and individual interviews between 25 and 45 minutes. The group interviews covered television consumption and views on different careers. The individual interviews revisited these topics, focusing on participants’ own viewing patterns and career aspirations together with questions on their self-identity and class, gender and ethnic positions. Participants were explicitly asked to discuss RTV shows in the group interviews through the use of extracts from the US Apprentice and still images of How Clean is Your House? and Supernanny. RTV also entered individual interviews as participants responded to questions about their television viewing practices and educational and career aspirations. Pseudonyms are used throughout; since some are cross- or neutral-gender, we give this information. Some participants chose their own pseudonym, many referencing popular culture.

Participants in each study had different levels and forms of attachment to RTV. Some described themselves as avid RTV viewers, others spoke of hating the form. Some, including all those in the Arts study, had a particular (sometimes problematic) relationship to RTV as a possible platform to careers in the entertainment industry (Allen, 2011). In the Arts research, all but two of the 20 participants mentioned RTV in some way, and nine discussed RTV at length. In the Drama research, RTV was discussed in all of the group interviews and in all but three of the 31 individual interviews. Six of the individual interviewees selected RTV as among their favourite programmes. Even some of the minority for whom RTV was not included in their viewing patterns showed a commitment to the form. For example, Slim who ‘don’t really watch TV’, when asked to invent his ideal programme featuring work, imagined a reality show depicting ‘how they work and that … real stuff innit, no edited things’. The wide variation in how participants spoke about RTV suggests its complex role in young people’s lives.

The RTV programmes discussed by participants are mainly British series, such as Shipwrecked, ² How Clean is Your House? ³ and The X Factor. ⁴ However, they also include some shows from North America, such as American Idol ⁵ and The Hills, ⁶ or which have versions in both countries that are shown in the UK, such as The Apprentice ⁷ and Supernanny. ⁸ These shows represent a range of RTV sub-genres with a variety of relationships to authenticity, including game-doc, talent show, docu-soap and docu-drama. They are united by their central involvement of ‘ordinary people’ and their focus on capturing ‘reality’. While these shows represent a particular moment in RTV’s history, all but one is still being made, and older episodes continue to circulate on digital channels and the internet. As we discuss, developments in RTV since these studies were conducted cement the class-making practices that we elaborate here.

In both studies we used a similar methodological approach. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded for a range of themes, including RTV and social class. We analysed coded extracts discursively (Foucault, 1972; Potter and Wetherell, 1987). That is, we looked for patterns of meanings within participants’ talk and the ways these were spoken into being. We looked at how these discourses were negotiated by young people in their identity work and how this was informed by their social position. After completing our initial analysis on the two studies separately, we found connections between how the young people engaged with popular culture. We wanted to explore similarities and differences between participants within and across the studies. We began by looking at young people’s ‘uses of celebrity’ (Allen and Mendick, forthcoming). As we acknowledged in that work, researching across studies has difficulties, but the challenge of making sense of a range of data, collected in different circumstances, gives robustness to our analysis. For the purposes of this article, we reviewed all the data from both studies that related to social class and/or RTV.

Although we asked participants to describe their class position, in common with other studies they were usually ambivalent about talking about social class and reluctant to locate themselves within class hierarchies (Payne and Grew, 2005; Savage et al., 2001; Scharff, 2008). In the Drama research, participants were asked to identify their class position within the individual interviews. Four participants did not identify themselves, while most (16) of the others positioned themselves as ‘normal’, ‘average’ and/or ‘in the middle’. Methodological issues are central to how research participants situate themselves in relation to class (Payne and Grew, 2005). For example, the language used to ask participants about their social class and the context of the question can make possible or not particular ways of speaking about class. Furthermore, the desire to be seen as ‘normal’, especially among peers, is understandable, especially at the age of 14–16. We return to this claim to ordinariness when we explore young people’s rejection of RTV excess.

We assigned social class using a Bourdieuian framework (Bourdieu, 1984) where a person’s social class position is informed by their relationship to a range of ‘capitals’, notably economic capital (financial resources and assets), cultural capital (forms of knowledge and taste) and social capital (networks of support and influence). This emphasises the importance of cultural and symbolic alongside economic structures in understanding class, for ‘one of the ways in which social class is made “real” is through cultural mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, of normalization and pathologization’ (Lawler, 1999: 3–4).

Viewing Pleasure, Identity Work and Seeking out the Real

As discussed above, within RTV, notions of authenticity sit alongside ‘artifice’ and ‘performance’, inviting a range of audience responses. Our participants repeatedly linked their enjoyment of RTV shows to their ability to construct them as ‘real’, ‘accurate’ and ‘not fake’. They had to navigate contradictions to do this. However, this process, rather than suggesting the shows’ inauthenticity, was central to the ‘consumption of authenticity [as] active discourse’ (Rose and Wood, 2005: 284). For example, Preeti (female, middle class, Drama) contrasted the X Factor contestants where ‘you know they’re not acting it out’ with those on Big Brother where, because ‘they know they’re being recorded, you know they’re acting it out, being fake and everything’. Preeti thus expects Big Brother contestants to ‘perform for the cameras’ (Hill, 2002: 15). As with the participants in Rose and Wood’s (2005) research, discussed earlier, she constructs authenticity by negotiating paradoxical elements, bringing together the realist and the artificial, to make distinctions between programmes and people. She, like our other participants, was negotiating the ‘reality contract’ (Jones, 2003). In so doing, she took up practices akin to detective work, seeking out evidence of contestants ‘acting’ and ‘being fake’ for television, making judgements of what is real and what is not. This is illustrated in this lengthy extract from a young working-class woman, Famous, who wanted to be a professional dancer. Famous enjoyed watching The Hills, a show about the lives of young, wealthy, American women.

The Hills sparked controversy when it emerged that key scenes had been scripted by the show’s producers and writers. A raft of similar shows have emerged since, including the UK’s The Only Way is Essex, Made in Chelsea and Desperate Scousewives which have been termed ‘scripted reality’. However, it is evident from the quotation above that, far from interrupting viewers’ enjoyment, this ambiguity provides space for pleasure. At the beginning of the extract we can see Famous negotiating this element of production. When the interviewer then asks her what she likes about these shows, she leaves the troubled matter of production and explains that ‘you can relate to the situation’: the characters’ youth, ‘good jobs’ and ‘nice clothes’. When the interviewer draws attention to their wealth, Famous shifts again, labelling the people as ‘stupidly rich’ and the situation as ‘unrealistic’. Yet it is this classed ‘fantasy’ that allows her finally to connect to the programmes as authentic: ‘you want to have that sort of lifestyle’. So, although the young women in these shows have greater economic (and social) capital than Famous she connects to them through her aspiration for their ‘high society’ position and hence for social mobility. ⁹

Famous, in moving between reality and fantasy, sameness and difference, negotiates her understanding of the show as ‘stimulating yet familiar enough to allow imaginary participation’ (Rose and Wood, 2005: 290), using her viewing experience to make sense of her own life, desires and social positioning. Along with Preeti, Famous demonstrates that a reflexive awareness of contemporary media can sit alongside a commitment to the value and possibility of authentic selfhood. In the rest of this article we continue to explore how negotiating the reality contract involves judgements of the authenticity of RTV participants and the classed identity work accomplished through these.

Constructing Ordinariness: In/authenticity, Excess, Disgust

In the previous section, we saw Famous discussing the ‘stupidly rich’ women in The Hills. This is representative of a wider pattern of participants rejecting both upper-middle-class and working-class excess as inauthentic. As we argue in this section, class is made through these rejections. However, there is a powerful and integral asymmetry to these acts of class-making, with working-class excess being abjected.

Sentiments rejecting excess were far more commonly expressed in groups than in individual interviews. This suggests that they function, in part, as collective narratives and have a performative function to construct oneself as ‘ordinary’. These judgements were central to negotiating the paradox of identification as young people evaluated who is ‘not like me’ in order to reinforce their identity as ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’ and ‘in the middle’. This is particularly apparent in Chuck’s rejection of and dis-identification with both the working-class and the upper-middle-class contestants in Shipwrecked:

They’re just not my sort of people. They’re either from Liverpool, or … There’s sort of one extreme or the other. … Like there was a really sort of preppy ¹⁰ boy who was really sort of talking down to, you know, the sort of Essex builder and stuff. Yeah, I think they definitely set it up, potentially. (Chuck Norris, female, middle class, Drama)

Here Chuck demonstrates her negotiation of the paradox of production. She is aware of the ‘setting up’ of particular ‘characters’ and deliberate use of class signifiers by the Shipwrecked producers (for example, regional ‘Essex’ accents and manual labour signifying working-class contestants, and a ‘preppy’ aesthetic style and patronising behaviour for upper-middle-class contestants). Particular English regional identities and accents are marked as working class (MacLure, 2003) and recent RTV developments have further exploited this regional codification of class. Made in Chelsea, The Only Way is Essex, and Desperate Scousewives focus on the lives and loves of friendship groups in particular areas of England, and reproduce the conflation of locales and classed lifestyles within the wider social imagination. The first is coded upper-middle-class and the latter two focus on affluent but culturally and symbolically working-class groups. Returning to our studies, in their construction as excessively upper-middle or working class, these RTV contestants are rendered inauthentic. Using her awareness of the artificial staging process through which RTV reproduces classed stereotypes, Chuck establishes her own ‘ordinariness’ (Scharff, 2008; Skeggs and Wood, 2008).

It is important to look at the ambiguity, ‘defensiveness and the unstated in people’s views on class and read behind what is said’ (Savage et al., 2001: 878). The preoccupation with being ‘normal’ characterised many of the working- and middle-class participants’ talk about RTV. However, despite their reluctance to talk directly about social class, class was being made in these performances of (dis-)identification. For whilst the excesses of the upper-middle class were rejected, more acute was the abjection of working-class excess. We begin with an example of the rejection of the excess of the ‘stupidly rich’.

Many participants rejected the excesses of wealth, selfishness and ego among the upper-middle classes on RTV. This rejection of privilege and excess is evident in the following group discussion of ‘business gurus’ Donald Trump and Alan Sugar, the central characters in the US and UK Apprentice respectively.

Eve’s evaluations of Sugar and Trump as ‘business-like’ and ‘snobby’, along with the claim ‘I’m not that sort of people’ illuminates a strong dis-identification with a particular classed form of selfhood that other participants spoke of as ‘wealthy’ and ‘selfish’. However, while participants were asked about both Sugar and Trump, this discussion followed the group being shown a clip of the US Apprentice. Trump’s wealth and lifestyle is integral to the American version (McGuigan, 2008) and the clip showed him in his many luxurious homes and attending the Miss Universe pageant. Perhaps the young people’s strong reaction was, at least partly, a rejection of a particularly North American excess. In contrast, Sugar’s persona is less ostentatious and his lifestyle is not central to the UK Apprentice, congruent with his presentation as an ‘ordinary’ cockney ¹¹ boy made good that some other participants picked up on. This contrast between readings of Sugar’s authentic ordinariness and Trump’s brash excess indicates how discussions of RTV authenticity can (also) be performances of national identity and belonging. We argue that these comments can be understood as a collective production of Englishness, part of a ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig, 1995: 8), an everyday nationalism of ‘the embodied habits of social life’.

Working-class excess was also rejected but this was differently articulated, being associated with a lack of control and ‘illegitimate’ fame and frequently provoking disgust. In these ways, the working class were marked as too authentic. The rejection of working-class excess was less likely to be combined with the aspiration and identification present in the ambivalent quotation from Famous above. We argue that this response to working-class excess is usefully understood as abjection. Through processes of abjection they are expelled and so constructed as ‘outside the “human” as it has been naturalized in its “Western” mold by the contemporary workings of humanism’ (Butler, 2004: 32; see also Skeggs, 2004). These processes must be constantly enacted since ‘the “abject” does not respect such expulsions … so constantly threatens to move across boundaries and contaminate’ (Kenway et al., 2006: 120).

As others have argued, popular culture is a key site in which the social abjection of the working classes is performed; where working-class (often female) selves are produced as the constitutive limit to propriety (Skeggs, 2004; Tyler and Bennett, 2010). Such processes were evident in our research. In particular, evaluations of the working class were particularly stark in group discussions of domestic-oriented RTV shows:

[Supernanny’s] quite funny, to see the little kids how they disrespect their mums. (Timmy, male, middle class, Drama)

[How Clean is Your House?] makes me laugh. [Why?] Because some people are just dirty that’s why. (Tom Graff, male, working class, Drama)

Timmy and Tom emphasised the pleasure they took in abhorring other people’s excesses. We can see disgust and shame directed at failings of moral personhood, namely a failure to care for and control your family and your home, and a lack of respect and respectability. Tom connected unclean homes with unclean people, who ‘are just dirty’. Such judgements were made in relation to behaviour in public and private domains. For example, other participants pointed to the failure of people on television talk-shows to participate economically and cope with life. Some re-enacted how they would shout at contestants through the screen, calling for them to ‘sort your life out’. Their responses illuminate how RTV invites audiences to make moral judgements of working-class participants and, in so doing, position them as Other.

Many middle-class participants also critiqued working-class RTV participants within a discourse of ‘inauthentic celebrity’ based on a perceived evacuation of talent, hard work and effort associated with RTV celebrity (Holmes, 2004a). They positioned The X Factor and Big Brother contestants as representing illegitimate celebrity where ordinary people become famous for nothing (Allen, 2011; Allen and Mendick, forthcoming; Tyler and Bennett, 2010). Typically, Carly criticised RTV stars such as Big Brother’s Jade Goody ¹² as illegitimately achieving greater economic rewards than university graduates:

It’s very shallow … people who aren’t famous for anything … [like] Jade Goody … people who don’t work hard … You could spend five years at uni[versity] studying and then come out and earn less than someone who has been on Big Brother. (Carly, female, middle class, Arts)

Despite, or perhaps because, Carly’s middle-classness was suffused with anxiety (see Allen, 2008), her readings here echo those of the middle-class women in Skeggs and colleagues’ (2008) study. They operationalised their social and cultural capital to take a critical distance from RTV, positioning themselves as TV critics and displaying distaste for the ‘inauthentic’ fame of working-class contestants. In both critiques of RTV celebrity and the expressions of disgust at working-class participants, these young people were establishing their own value and position as middle class.

In the final part of this article we examine a different conceptualisation of ordinariness and authenticity mobilised by other, mainly working-class, participants. These participants placed great value on RTV contestants they believed had ‘kept it real’, whilst mocking those they felt had tried to be something they were not. In these readings of working-class RTV authenticity, worth is based on a contestant’s perceived lack of pretentiousness.

Anti-pretentiousness and Valuing Working-class Selves

Attention to the empirical can challenge readings of the working class as value-less presented within textual analyses and this was affirmed in the responses of the young people discussed above. In this section we show how some participants valued working-class RTV contestants who had seemingly achieved fame and credibility because of their working-class ordinariness: those who had maintained their ‘true’ self against the odds (when others want to change you). These were largely, but not exclusively, participants from working-class backgrounds.

Ordinariness, specifically loyalty to one’s working-classness, has long been a central element of stardom (Dyer, 1998) and a mediator of authenticity within RTV fame (Biressi and Nunn, 2004; Holmes, 2005). For example, Big Brother star Jade Goody was admired by several working-class women in the Arts study. In particular, Goody was respected for achieving fame by capitalising on ‘who she was’ and staying true to herself:

She’s smart she knew what she wanted to do. She went on Big Brother and people thought she was stupid but she has made money and a career out of it. (Reece, female, working class, Arts)

She went into Big Brother and was herself … [But] Big Brother has changed now. Before … you could be yourself but now Big Brother is … a lot more twisted … You’re not in control of yourself. They can portray you in whatever way they want to. So you couldn’t use it to launch yourself coz you don’t have control over your career. (Kerry, female, working class, Arts)

Applauding Jade’s success at being enterprising in her exploitation of the celebrity machine, Reece and Kerry drew on the language of meritocracy and social mobility that saturates RTV shows; in particular, talent shows like The X Factor (Inthorn and Street, 2011). They also invested heavily in the notion of a true and authentic self. However, unlike Carly (discussed earlier) for whom Jade represented ‘inauthentic’ celebrity, Reece and Kerry mobilised an alternative conceptualisation of labour and brought a different value system to bear on their evaluations of Goody (Skeggs and Wood, 2008). Specifically, Kerry emphasised the work required to maintain authenticity in the context of RTV fame and Jade’s resistance to its imperative of self-transformation. ¹³ Further, Kerry’s concerns, that ‘before … you could be yourself’ but now ‘you’re not in control of yourself’, show her negotiation of the paradox of production and suspicion towards contemporary Big Brother. For Kerry, the programme no longer provides a space in which working-class girls like her can achieve success by being themselves, but is manipulative and poses risks to working-class ‘authenticity’.

Similarly, Paul singled out Lee McQueen, the working-class winner of UK Apprentice season four, as someone he liked for achieving success ‘because he was quite common’. ‘Common’ is a derisive judgement directed at the working class, inferring a lack of both respectability and uniqueness. Yet for Paul, it made Lee more authentic and his success more admirable:

All the other series that you’ve watched you see the people who win it are very posh usually, brought up from like a good upbringing and already quite wealthy. But he wasn’t, he was quite common and quite like a grafter … He made his way, and in the end he won it which is good. (Paul Macock, male, middle class, Drama)

As with Reece and Jade, Paul valued that Lee ‘made his way’ and ‘won’ against the odds, without the privileges of birth (‘a good upbringing’) or money. He enjoyed seeing hard work, ‘graft’, rewarded. Although Paul was middle class, explaining ‘I think we’re quite well off. I mean we have, we live in a nice house, we have nice cars’, there was a narrative of upward mobility in his account. Paul explained that his dad left school with few qualifications but went on to own a property maintenance company: ‘my dad was much more lower, not lower class, but you know he wasn’t very, like extremely wealthy’. We would suggest that this connection with his father’s ‘boy done good’ past enabled Paul to locate value in a working-class RTV contestant whose hard work had been rewarded with upward social mobility. However, Paul’s investment in Lee McQueen and his father’s working-class narrative can, like the participants in the previous section, be read as an attempt to establish his ordinariness: ‘here the logic works by establishing that working-class people are ordinary because they work’ (Savage et al., 2001: 888).

Similar evaluations were made of Leona Lewis, the 2008 the X Factor winner. Leona has been framed in the British media as a ‘humble’ (and ‘respectable’) working-class mixed-heritage girl from Hackney, East London, who found herself in extraordinary circumstances (Gannon, 2008). She was liked by Anything (female, working class, Drama) because she was ‘just like a normal person’ and did not let it ‘get to her head that she had that talent’. However, Anusha, a female, black working-class music student and aspiring singer in the Arts study, read Leona as inauthentic. Describing an episode of The X Factor in which Leona was filmed ‘going home’ to Hackney, Anusha condemned Leona for masking what she saw as her ‘true’ working-class background (‘from the hood’ and ‘the [council] estate’) and pretending to be from Stoke Newington, one of Hackney’s few middle-class, gentrified enclaves:

I hate Leona Lewis. I don’t know why she’s telling people she’s from Stoke Newington. She’s from the hood. She’s from the estate … when they filmed her for the show, going back to see her family and friends, they drove her right past her estate and up into Stoke Newington … it’s so important to stay real, authentic, coz it will end, when you’re broke and they take away your Bentley … then you’re screwed … you’ll need your real friends then.

The ‘going home’ trope is integral to the construction of RTV authenticity, routinely used to create a sense of contestants’ journeys and ‘back-stories’. Anusha, like other participants, mobilised critiques of pretentiousness among working-class RTV contestants whom they felt had got above their station: people in whom ‘what they seem to be is not (considered to be) what they are’ (Lawler, 1999: 17). While the producers, in filming Leona’s ‘going home’, position the whole of Hackney as working class (drawing on wider historical constructions of the area as a ‘rough’ urban locale), Anusha carefully dissects the show using her own local knowledge of the variously classed enclaves of the borough. Thus, Anusha’s negotiation of authenticity was informed by her social class position and the resources she brought to the text but in unpredictable ways.

It may seem surprising that Anusha’s critique is directed at Leona’s apparent pretentiousness rather than the X Factor producers’ choice of location for her ‘going home’ film. However, this performs a function. Anusha utilised Leona’s RTV ‘success’ as a mechanism to reconcile how she would negotiate fame herself. Her rejection of Leona suggests that, for Anusha, the rewards offered by RTV fame must be carefully managed. Anusha’s attachment to the importance of ‘staying real, authentic’ speaks of the fragility of RTV fame for working-class girls like her, where status and material goods (like a Bentley car) can be taken away as quickly as they are achieved, or can invite accusations of pretentiousness. Furthermore, this example highlights the precariousness of working-class negotiations of authenticity, namely the risks associated with self-transformation through RTV in which girls like Anusha heavily invest (Allen, 2011): ‘the potential benefits in terms of improved opportunities, “improved” self, [need] to be balanced against the potential costs of losing one’s working-class cultural identity, and with it a sense of authenticity’ (Reay, 2002: 412).

Indeed, Reece, Kerry, Paul and Anusha, like the collectivist-oriented fraction of the working-class students in Reay’s (2002) study of working-class transitions into higher education, mobilised an alternative conception of authenticity: here the ‘authentic self does not have to be divested of its working-classness’ (2002: 411). Instead, authenticity is expressed through a loyalty to one’s past. Their responses to RTV invert dominant evaluations of authentic selfhood which dismiss working-class RTV contestants as immoral, unworthy, lacking. They provide a challenge to the neoliberal demand to become ‘better’, to transform the self by taking on middle-class values, appearance and/or lifestyle. Indeed, changing oneself, or rather being changed, is positioned by these mainly working-class participants as a failure.

Conclusions

In this article we have shown that social class is always being re/made in and through judgements of authenticity, as young people negotiate the reality contract with a range of RTV programmes. However, this process is neither simple nor predictable. Despite inviting audiences to make classed moral judgements, RTV texts allow a range of readings. The middle-class young people in the studies were more likely to judge RTV participants as ‘inauthentic’ and therefore as value-less subjects. The working-class participants were more likely to mobilise alternative readings which valued their authenticity against pretentiousness. However, this was not always the case. The key way in which dominant discourses of authenticity were produced was through a rejection of excess as part of young people’s desire to position themselves as ‘ordinary’, ‘in the middle’ and ‘normal’.

Our analysis has several implications for the study of social class, RTV and young people’s identity work. First, it highlights the importance of the empirical. RTV ‘raises important questions about how to conceptualize [texts] that [claim] to incorporate resistance at [their] very core. Such questions … ultimately return us to the real, or empirical audience’ (Holmes, 2004b: 169). Class is made through RTV texts as their narratives and representations are watched, discussed and used by people to make sense of the world and their place within it. Our judgements of the selves we see on Big Brother or The Apprentice are always informed by and inform our relationships to ourselves and those around us. As we have illustrated through a turn to the empirical, to better understand the significance of RTV we must attend to its role in identity work and broader class-making practices.

Second, we have not presented a straightforward mapping of young people’s classed readings of RTV. While we have highlighted some differences in the discourses enacted by working-class and middle-class young people, we showed that class position does not determine how young people read RTV authenticity. More generally, we must consider the role of class movements within individuals’ biographies in shaping their readings of class in RTV, particularly its narratives of social mobility; explore intersections of class with gender and ethnicity; and look at the peer dynamics within which young people express their classed identities. Indeed, in this article we identified a difference between young people’s articulations of classed authenticity in individual interviews and groups where, in the latter case, these had performative functions both to construct oneself as ‘ordinary’ to others and to construct a collective sense of ordinariness.

We want to conclude by thinking about the implications of this analysis for young people. We have located agency in young people’s negotiations of RTV authenticity as an active discourse which provides opportunities to invert and resist dominant evaluations of class and authenticity. Yet, there are problems within this. For example, Anusha’s rejection of pretentiousness can function to keep her in her place, fixing her as working class and happy to be there (Walkerdine and Lucey, 1989). Additionally, young people’s relationship to RTV authenticity is implicated in wider neoliberal mechanisms of surveillance (Andrejevic, 2004). Whilst playing with the notion of authenticity, the young people presented an underlying belief that there exists a true self and ‘easily forget that through [their] viewing pleasures, [they] are directly legitimating surveillance itself’ (Couldry, 2008: 9). In expressing their ‘true’ self via their opinions of RTV contestants, the regulation of selfhood operating through this is rendered invisible. For working-class young people, this regulation of selfhood is more punitive and it is thus more crucial to identify and challenge it. Indeed, these critical interventions are given greater urgency in the current climate of austerity with high youth unemployment, declining social mobility and increased costs of post-compulsory education. Instead of looking to growing economic inequalities, senior UK politicians (for example, Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, see Wintour and Lewis, 2011) have held RTV fame – and specifically The X Factor’s ‘“get rich quick” celebrity culture’ – responsible for fuelling the England riots of summer 2011. We hope that our work can contribute to disrupting such assumptions around young people, social class and RTV.