The politics of hyperbole on Geordie Shore : Class,gender,youth and excess

Introduction

Season 1 of MTV’s Geordie Shore, the British version of the US programme Jersey Shore, first aired in the summer of 2011. That English summer also saw the break-out of 5 days of rioting where, in response to a police shooting in London, young people took to the streets across a number of British cities, attacking and looting commercial properties and hitting out at the police. The headlines read, ‘The Underclass Lashes Out’, ¹ but importantly those ‘underclass’ involved was mostly under the age of 24 years (Ball et al., 2011). The media panic, and political rhetoric following the riots reinforced dominant neoliberal ideas about anti-social behaviour, denying any structural logic for young people’s social exclusion and reinforcing a rhetoric of ‘choice’ and ‘responsibility’. This framing of the riots came from the Right and the Left at a time of downward social mobility rates and high youth unemployment across Europe. The use of ‘underclass’ to describe the rioters is part of the heightened stigmatisation of the workless poor, who are divorced from the means of production and from the body politic itself. Importantly, it is a rhetoric that has also been used to impose greater penalties, austerity cuts and workfare regimes on young people (Tyler, 2013b).

The riots, and what they indicate about the current conditions of the young unemployed ‘underclass’, are used as the background context to understanding Geordie Shore which is also part of the ongoing ‘spectacularisation’ of the working class across television. This article intends to extend our understanding of the media’s role in the politics of identity, as ‘legitimat[ing] forms of identity that are primarily invented in order to generate commercial returns’ (Turner, 2009: 23), but in doing so, it also takes from Imogen Tyler’s (2013a) analysis of broader political currents in the UK context, the more dialectic relationship between social abjection and revolt. While it is impossible to completely do justice to Tyler’s argument here, it broadly stems from Bataille’s (1993 [1934]) analysis of the political functions of abjection and the creation of waste populations in order to reinforce sovereign power. Tyler’s emphasis, however, is to attempt to theorise the struggle between subjectivity and sovereignty because in the process of marking the boundaries of exclusion, waste populations are made instrumental to the ‘imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture’ (citing Stallybrass and White, 1986: 6 in Tyler, 2013a: 20). In this way, moving on from Kristeva’s (1982) more totalising psychoanalytic account of the notion of an abject subjectivity, Tyler argues for greater understanding of social abjection accounting for the potential subjectivities of those that are made abject as vital to understanding the discursive orders of social abjection itself. Through a reading of Butler (1993), Tyler (2013a) insists on a politicisation of abjection which can illuminate this sense of struggle and presumes a ‘collective demand of those made abject to be heard in the political present tense’ further arguing that

it is only by critically engaging with abjection as contingent expressions of normativity that we might begin to disarticulate the effects of abjection as lived. That is to understand how abjection gives rise to resistance we need to consider the material effects of being made abject within specific historical, political and social locales. (pp. 37–38)

In this spirit, this article turns to the aesthetics and histrionics of the reality television participants in Geordie Shore, addressing in more common parlance an understanding of ‘what’s in it for them?’ rather than the more dominant question in reality television literature of ‘how does it position us?’ In so doing, the article discusses how the participants’ actions are framed as forms of ‘hyperbole’ which are direct responses to being made abject and where reality television’s role in the production of identity generates forms of exaggeration which externalise the struggle of contemporary socioeconomic conditions.

Social abjection and reality television

Much reality television scholarship has been rightly concerned with how it has encouraged ways of seeing the working class within contemporary conditions of neoliberal late capitalism. Samantha Lyle (2008) refers to a ‘middle-class gaze’ in Wife Swap that sets up a normative middle-class subject position from which to judge the behaviours of participants. Reality television’s emphasis upon judgement is one of the new injuries of class (Couldry, 2011), and Beverley Skeggs and I have contributed to that debate by insisting that spectacularisation often detaches the behaviours of individuals from their social and historical contexts to highlight personal failure (Skeggs and Wood, 2012; Wood and Skeggs, 2008). Gilligan’s (2013) phrase ‘post-digital slumming’ describes how British documentaries obsessed with the urban poor have contributed to the ideological battle of blaming individuals and securing support for austerity cuts in the wake of the riots. The more popular journalistic phrase ‘poverty porn’ ² connects to the very real ways in which the poor are visualised in their naming and shaming for crime and benefit fraud, which is linked to increased systems of surveillance in what Wacquant (2010) calls ‘law and order pornography’. Such a set of scopic relations contributes to a culture in which those not succeeding under neoliberal regimes are made abject, failing as self-governing and self-disciplining citizens, and from which the normative middle-class gaze can draw a safe critical distance.

Enter Geordie Shore, MTV’s British ‘glocalized’ ³ version of Jersey Shore which has been a ratings success, regularly achieving over a million viewers per episode and a similar following on Twitter and Facebook. ⁴ It was greeted as the arrival of ‘hyper-reality TV’ where ‘the lowest common denominator is about to get a fraction lower’ (Pettie, 2011) and is part of a third ‘celebrity generation’ of reality television which builds on the increasing media knowingness of both participants and audiences (Kavka, 2012). ‘Geordie’ is the regional name of the dialect of people from Newcastle Upon-Tyne as well as the name of its residents, and Newcastle is a post-industrial city in the north of England. On Geordie Shore, we watch eight housemates, originally Gaz, Charlotte, Jay, Holly, Greg, Sophie, Vicki and James, live together in a Big Brother–style house where we follow their ‘party lifestyle’. The focus is on an extraordinary everyday of clubbing, binge-drinking and having sex and, importantly, everything is framed by the over-dramatisation of events. The action is rarely set outside of the house, except for the nightclub, which could be any nightclub, while the house itself is regularly moved to other destinations, possibly to increase the sporting of swimwear and also to highlight cultural clashes and the participants’ cultural ignorance. ⁵ The programme’s provocative content invoked an outcry from local residents about its representation of Newcastle. In 2011, Newcastle Member of Parliament (MP) Chi Onwurah condemned the programme and called for it to be discussed in Parliament over concerns about young people being plied with drink and performing lewd sexual acts for television. Local residents in Newcastle launched a Facebook page, ‘RIP Geordie Pride’. ⁶ Clair Wood in The Sun fumed, ‘Hope the idiots in Geordie Shore are hanging their heads in shame. The only thing they have achieved is being hated by the true Geordies’. ⁷ Thus, the show presents working-class youth as beyond the ‘limits of propriety’ (Skeggs, 2004): partying, arguing, screaming, crying and screwing. They are ungovernable, abject, revolting subjects who operate without shame, the very opposite to the self-regulating, good, neoliberal citizen. In this light, the show clearly perpetuates cruel and regional stereotypes of the white working class, fuelling the hate figure of the ‘CHAV’, which has become a key symbol of abjection and social exclusion in neoliberal Britain (Tyler, 2008; Tyler and Bennett, 2010).

Pleasure derived from watching such programming has been described as ‘ironic viewing’ where at least (middle-class) viewers can be reassured that they have better taste and moral judgement, while simultaneously enjoying voyeuristic titillation via the fantasy of an unregulated and carefree life (see Douglas, 2013 with regard to Jersey Shore, my parenthesis). The participants are therefore simultaneously ‘shocking’ and ‘comforting’ as they work to assuage ‘our’ anxieties, which means that the position of ‘ironic viewing’ relies on the viewer maintaining a distance from the participants. ⁸ However, audience research shows that scopic regimes in reality television viewing are more mobile and are triggered by different forms of attachments and empathies (Skeggs and Wood, 2012). Therefore, we also need to understand the embrace of these programmes by young participants and their young audiences; not all can surely enjoy that ironic position of distance, and Facebook and Twitter feeds suggest a more celebratory appreciation of this form of reality celebrity, its narrative structure and its excessive characters.

Brenda Weber (2014) asks us to pay close attention to the generic hybridity of reality television and the way in which a show’s ‘architecture and narrative illustrate compelling points about identity, community and ideology’. For instance ‘structured reality’ programmes foreground their artificiality leading to questions about whether such self-awareness can provide some defence against stereotyping (Woods, 2014). Here, I want to further that debate by offering a closer analysis of some of the forms of excess on Geordie Shore, and to emphasise how, whilst they are a dominant feature of sensational reality production, they are also part of the structural contemporary labour conditions of media visibility. Paying attention to the production of excess as hyperbole helps to show how young working-class participants are struggling to establish legitimate forms of subjectivity from within the spaces of their inclusion which produces a particular exaggerated and ‘hyper’ social aesthetics. As Tyler (2013a) insists, processes of abjection are produced from the relationship between the political and aesthetic where the ‘visible and invisible’ as well as ‘speech and noise’ shape the very nature and form of political experience (Ranciere, 2004).

Making labour visible

Mark Andrejevic (2004) has discussed reality television as ‘the work of being watched’; in that, it acclimatises us into rationalised acceptance that our daily lives are monitored in the interests of mass customisation and global capital. Increasingly reality participants understand that ‘being themselves’ can constitute ‘labour’, which has an identifiable ‘value’ in the context of market exchange (Jost, 2011). The cast members of Jersey Shore and Geordie Shore are part of a more ‘durable’ second generation of reality participants who have been able to sustain their media personae in order to accrue some personal wealth and sustain the dubious currency of reality celebrity (Curnutt, 2011). Here, reality participants are clearly engaging in labour whereby the forms of exchange rely on their ability to perform themselves across multiple sites (through promotions, advertising, public appearances, as well as across social media) in order to preserve their place in the realm of television production. This seems perfectly understandable given the current figures for youth unemployment, which will form an enduring legacy of the current economic crisis – a whole generation who have never worked, at least not under the terms of waged labour. ⁹

As Andrejevic (2004) notes, reality television draws upon the increasing blurring of boundaries between the realms of production and consumption, where labour is subject to models of flexibility and where self-work is an increasingly important skill to stay relevant to the demands of the shifting labour market (Beck, 1992). But this ‘flexibility’ is also sharp ‘insecurity’ for those at the bottom end of the labour market (Allen and Henry, 1997). Curiously, reality television participation does not sit comfortably within the realms of ‘legitimate’ capitalist culture or as a ‘proper’ site of social mobility, despite its fit with these models of capitalism. When the success of Jersey Shore allowed participants the ability to negotiate better pay per episode, the cast was reminded by the producer ‘not to lose sight of who you are’ (quoted in Curnutt, 2011). It is extremely difficult to get accurate information about what reality participants get paid, as they sign secrecy clauses and cannot get equity cards to join more formal unions, cementing their exclusion from formal protected labour relations (Hearn, 2010). Participants on Jersey Shore and Geordie Shore actually make more money from public appearances through forms of precarious labour than through direct payment from Viacom. In one interview, Vicky from Geordie Shore suggested that there was no pay – ‘you can’t get paid for getting drunk’ – but she is keen to point out that the nightclub ‘appearances’, which do pay, involve running up and down the country, which is very tiring ‘hard work’. ¹⁰

To make money, participants must continue to work on their visibility beyond the show while consciously publicly defending themselves against criticism for getting ‘easy money’ or being ‘fame whores’; interestingly, Viacom is not subject to such scrutiny. Taking part in the show was not a guarantee of financial reward; Gary says, ‘we filmed our first series, went home and signed back on the dole’, and according to Sophie, ‘I’ve only just paid off my debt after getting so many loans after Geordie Shore’. ¹¹ Now that they have been filming Geordie Shore for 3 years (at the time of writing), the participants discuss the transition they have made from unemployment to financial security and stress their more ‘legitimate’ forms of entrepreneurialism. Following headlines that they are ‘nearly’ millionaires, Gaz said, ‘I’ve saved all the money from the show, it’s all about saving. I’ve just bought a nightclub as an investment. Altogether I’ve got three businesses’, while James now has a clothing range and a personal training website. ¹² Interestingly, the women’s entrepreneurialism beyond the show all relates to preserving their space within in the media sphere. Most of the women do cover shoots for lads magazines, and Vicky has a fitness DVD; Charlotte was the winner of Channel 5’s Celebrity Big Brother in 2013 and has a spin-off show on cable channel, The Learning Channel (TLC); ¹³ while at the time of writing, Holly had just released a record with a predictably sexy music video. ¹⁴ These differences relate to the gendering of media forms of visibility in the world of reality celebrity, but are also made part of the show, where occasional forays into work are all in the realm of promotions, working in bars or running stag and hen parties.

At the end of his defence at becoming ‘nearly’ a millionaire, Gaz’s punchline was, ‘It’s the best job in the world – we get paid to go out. It’s our job to get pissed, whilst other people work in factories’. Crudely put, Gaz’s remarks betray the irony of new labour relations since the decline of manufacturing in the United Kingdom, which has had a huge impact in the North East; in 2012, unemployment was 10.9 percent, above the 8.1 percent national average. ¹⁵ Media visibility is an opportunity for some potential (albeit restricted) economic mobility, but the participants must also be conscious of its precariousness and low status. Because the work itself is precarious, they must constantly engage in other work to extend their media visibility, and because it is devalued, they must also work hard to defend it. Where elsewhere, the obscuring of the boundaries of labour relations might be seen as part of the new ‘flexible’ labour market populated by ‘mobile’ selves, here in reality celebrity, participants must constantly make apparent, demark and work to ‘fix’ the grounds of what constitutes their labour. As a result, not only are the cast of Geordie Shore engaged in a process of work that might be termed ‘making themselves visible’, but they are also involved in ‘making their work as themselves even more visible’. This article suggests that these labour relations of media visibility produce the textual features of excess and hyperbole on Geordie Shore.

Making self-work visible: hyper-glamour

Reality television creates spaces for the ‘monetisation of being’ and the ‘branding’ of one’s identity through performance (Hearn, 2008). Woods (2014) has described how in both Towie and Made in Chelsea, classed femininities are performed in ways commensurate with channel branding strategies. Interestingly, Kavka (2014) has suggested replacing the notion of the ‘performative’ (iterative and constitutive, from Butler) with a notion of ‘flaunting’, whereby in reality television, participants must more consciously make their gender identities revealing of social codes and practices. It is not a question just of visibility, but of visualisability, such that in Real Housewives, ‘the logic of the programme is to make visible those aspects of hetero-femininity that are usually airbrushed out’ (Kavka, 2014: 64). As such, the classed and gender performances of Geordie Shore are similarly ‘flaunted’, so that they reveal the labour conditions of media visibility for working-class youth.

Each of the characters on Geordie Shore has a tagline, which is reiterated and repeated constantly through the show: James:

‘The hardest graft I’ve ever done is to do me hair’.

In these taglines, participants attach their subjectivity to the level of sexuality or visuality as they enter into a process where they are continuously called to animate themselves, in what Eva Illouz (2007) might call the constant ‘textualisation of subjectivity’ that is also visible across numerous other cultural fields, such as Internet dating sites. The tags demonstrate what Laura Grindstaff (2011) calls ‘caricatures’ of class in her discussion of Jersey Shore, distilled and condensed into the easy modes of performance in the era of ‘self-serve celebrity’. These taglines betray something of the emphasis upon visibility and its relationship to contemporary working-class identity. James’ ‘the hardest graft I’ve ever had to do is to do me hair’ is testament to the contemporary conditions of working-class masculinity in the post-industrial North of England, whilst Vicky’s ‘Geordie girl with the VIP edge’ registers the language of social mobility, resonant with economic hierarchies that are spatially lived out in capitalist culture in the emphasis upon ‘VIP’ entrances to clubs, restaurants and even airports.

The housemates are physically overloaded by classed markers of taste and excess, through which their bodies are the ultimate repositories of social experience (Bourdieu, 1984). Importantly here, too, labour is made visible: all of the women have excessively long ‘mermaid’ hair extensions, extended false finger nails, eyelashes, high-definition and exaggerated eyebrows, some breast augmentation and deep orange tans. These are excessive masquerades of femininity that refuse the look of ‘naturalness’ normally prized in valuations of middle-class femininity (Skeggs, 1997) and instead the women of Geordie Shore work hard to reveal, rather than to conceal, fakeness. ¹⁶ The men are similarly groomed and ‘pumped’, and many scenes are of both sexes curling, combing, spraying, plucking, and so on. In some ways, their collective appearance re-traditionalises gender in that girls are hyper-feminine, while the boys flaunt ‘hard’ pumped bodies born through working at the gym. But comparable appearances in Jersey Shore have also been described as ‘camp’ gender performances, as the men engage in constant beauty regimes (Douglas, 2013).

However, Klein (2014) argues that the ‘GTL mantra’ (Gym, Tanning, Laundry) of Jersey Shore is also connected to flaunting a subcultural expression of style associated with the working-class Italian American ‘Guido’. ¹⁷ Similarly, ‘being mint’ on Geordie Shore is expressive of a hyper-glamorous working-class aesthetic that is consciously ‘flaunted’ but is also highly visible on the city streets of the United Kingdom. For instance, there is a current fashion in Northern cities for young women to go shopping in the daytime in curlers and even a head scarf, simultaneously looking trendy in perhaps a Juicy Couture tracksuit, making public and visible the length of time spent preparing for a Saturday night out. Being seen in curlers would have previously been something the working-class woman would have wanted to avoid as a sign of lack of respectability, ¹⁸ but here, within the new labour relations of media visibility, it is recoded as sign of the work and time you put into yourself.

Teeth whitening, high-definition eyebrows, fake tans are all exaggerated beauty treatments that are born for the stage or the camera in a performance of self that is highly attuned to media visibility, whether that is Facebook or reality television. ¹⁹ It is an aesthetic code which directly looks into the lens and stresses the labour of its production. The amount of time invested in these body regimes is important because this is time that you have if you are unemployed, but evidence of time-intensive grooming is also a visible symbolic display of not wasting time. Position this aesthetic code against another figure of working-class British youth – the ‘hoodie’. According to Bell (2013), ‘the hoodie’ is the ‘critical index of a young person from an inner city housing estate’ and a figure that was central to the discussion of the riots of 2011. In David Cameron’s 2006 ‘hug a hoodie’ campaign, he talks about young people getting into trouble through boredom and having no better way to spend their time, not as connected directly to unemployment but through laziness and a nihilist ill-will; this same rhetoric returned in the wake of the riots (Tyler, 2013b). The ‘hoodie’ is configured in relation to contemporary surveillance regimes as looking away from the camera, refusing to take up the invitation of the lens and by remaining anonymous, in the political language of social exclusion, refusing the call to individual responsibility.

Hyper-glamour and the hoodie represent extreme extensions along the same axis of mediated labour relations because visibility is now one of the few forms of exchange available to unemployed working-class youth. While the hoodie hides, the working-class reality participant exaggerates his/her visibility to claim some type of legitimate subjectivity, and in each case, labour is marked by a relation to what is made visible or what is withheld. In stepping into the frame of the lens of Geordie Shore, there is an over-performance of class-making which speaks back to the bourgeois framing of working-class behaviour as ‘out of control’ and tasteless and reveals the labour-intensive conditions of the self-work ethic (unlike the ‘beige-ing’ makeover imperative which denies labour (Weber, 2009)). Since the summer of the riots in Britain, there has been an extension of austerity cuts, which affect young people, and a number of penal reforms to place further limits on the ability of working-class youth to occupy and move through public space. ²⁰ Within these conditions, it would make sense to claim visibility and mediated space, as a dialectic reaction to forms of social exclusion and as a refusal of other depressed subjectivities available to the underclass because they are rendered invisible and outside of the labour market (see, Charlesworth, 2005). Of course, in the past, youth subcultural expression has often involved a public and aesthetic claiming of visibility (Hall and Jefferson, 1993; Hebdige, 1984), but on reality television, this is not a straightforwardly ‘resistive’ subcultural strategy. Its self-consciousness is only made possible by the normalisation of media visibility, such that visibility itself is the end game.

Immoral exteriority: hyper-sexual animation

The good neoliberal subject is a future-directed mobile self that can move through space and time with ease, and the television makeover narrative often emphasises a trajectory of moral redemption where the markers of class, race and excess must be overcome to move into that future (Weber, 2009). Historically, the working classes have been deemed morally acceptable if they can narrate a redemption narrative, such as that of the deserving poor (Steedman, 2000), but Geordie Shore resists such a classic positioning. The participants’ excessive, sexually explicit and drunken behaviours are revelled in, over and again. While the house gets transported to other countries for visual relief, scenes of excess are revisited, as each night out represents a similar pattern: spend time getting ready (getting ‘minted up’), going out, trying to ‘get off’, ‘tash on’ (making out with people of the opposite sex), which often ends in a raging argument or ‘kick off’ with the group. Without a redemption narrative, the participants refuse any ‘reflexive’ understanding of their subjectivity through which to demonstrate moral interiority, instead stressing an alternative way of being through which they ‘live spontaneously at the level of everyday life’ (Bennett, 2003: 22).

However, on Geordie Shore, actual sex acts are not as important as the visualisability of sexual activity. Charlotte, when asked about sex on television, said,

It’s just like normal sex you totally forget the cameras are there … we have competitions and ask the crew, ‘who looks the best when they are having sex’ And they always say on the sly that it’s me. If only there were Baftas for that. ²¹

It is the visibility of the act – who looks the best – not the performance, who is the best, which is prized here in an understanding of pornographic convention. What is curious is that on Geordie Shore, there is actually very little sex shown: there is some grainy, night-time surveillance-cam footage, images of (mostly male) bare bottoms crawling under duvets and duvets moving up and down, but there are rarely any breasts or genitalia; such sequences are mercifully short. Klein (2011) argues in Jersey Shore that the use of grainy footage contributes to a classed aesthetic that feels ‘trash’. In another interview, Holly suggests that the scenes ‘are just bed covers going up and down with a bit of noise thrown in’. ²² Yet, we are still led to believe that the housemates are ‘at it’ all the time by their constant references to ‘banging’ and by their talk of sex, not only in terms of what actually happened but also to what they want or do not want to happen. It is the talking about sex, not so much the act of sex, which takes up most of the screen time. In reality television mode, it is the reaction not the action that is the central dramatic device. Sex therefore is exaggerated beyond what can actually be seen, which means that our understanding of ‘visualisability’ must extend beyond the visual to other ways of making actions, feelings and so on more noticeable. ²³ In the space between the screening of sex acts and the hyperbolic talk of the sex acts, the sex itself becomes reanimated, given life that it perhaps never had and recast as something much more compelling than the original.

Consider the ratio of action to reaction in the visual economy of the showing and telling of sex. In a very short extract in Episode 3 of Series 1, we see a duvet moving up and down, which is taken as an indication that one of the participants, Sophie, is having sex. This scene is interspersed with four to-camera segments where she ‘commentates’ on her own behaviour, which flouts the accepted rules of ‘confessional’ to-camera narration that is common in documentary style:

Last night I found meself a lad

I like tashed on n everything with him.

I don’t know what happened but I’m the first girl to shag on Geordie Shore.

I think the ‘year of the slut’ has actually begun – get in [slaps fist in triumph]

In Eva Illouz’s (2007) description of emotional capitalism, she talks about the various ways in which intimate relationships can be detached into objects for control and clarification, so that they can be rationalised, traded and exchanged in processes of ‘out-contextualisation’. As is common on reality television, Sophie is called to commentate on her own behaviour, producing a present-tense evaluation of her past performance. In the process, Sophie is also detaching herself from her sexual relations and commentating on herself in a way that is not reflexive, but evaluative in terms of her media visibility. In Illouz’s (2007) terms, the commentary is subject to depersonalisation, ‘emptied of [its] particularity to be evaluated according to abstract criteria’ (p. 36). Sophie’s commentary registers her as ‘the first girl to shag on Geordie Shore’ whilst she does not talk about the experience of the shag. (Was it good? Was it the best or worse she has ever had?) This is followed by her analysis that ‘the year of the slut’ has actually begun, reinforcing her tagline. The use of this voice as witness to herself is not as it would be in news or documentary to validate the event with authenticity, but rather to reanimate the event into something else. This is not narration but animation, which can only produce hyperbole.

In the same episode, we see Charlotte and Gary in bed accompanied by a volley of 13 separate to-camera reports on the revelation surrounding the size of Gary’s penis. This is how they culminate: Charlotte:

Gary is a sex machine and I think I’m one of the only girls that have not given him sex.

The story itself is more reperformed than performed as we see very little of it actually happening such that the event becomes a quotation of itself. When in the footage Charlotte is amazed (‘that’s so big’), in his own commentary on himself Gary repeats to camera, ‘When I got the secret out she was amazed’. The commentary is in an endless present, despite the event being in the past; the participants move seamlessly between the past and present tenses in the performing and reanimating of themselves then and now. Like a stuck record, in order to escape from retelling the same instance in the most banal of ways, the reactions can only get more exaggerated – ‘it was like a parsnip!’ Therefore, on Geordie Shore, participants are involved in the continuous ‘hyping’ of events and in their escalation, performing them as ridiculous and ‘out of control’. In doing so, sex acts are amplified and result in the most outrageous of hyperbole – ‘I thought it was going to smash the walls down – bosh bosh bosh’. If there is a pornographic aesthetic to Geordie Shore, of the kind Lury (2005) talks about in serial dramas such as CSI, it is one in which the kinetic editing of the scene and the commentary exaggerate the act as comedic cartoon, rather than a scene for arousal. This hyperbole frees the event from anything that might actually have happened, since it is the process of making sex more noticeable, rather than the sex itself, that is prized. The extent of the process of animation is suggestive of the work that must be put into exaggerating sexual proclivity. Appearing ‘out of control’ is here a discursive performance which ultimately gives events new life and simultaneously speaks back to expectations of self-governance. Instead of succumbing to any (neoliberal) demands to offer a self-reflexive narrative of redemption, the participants are constantly engaged in a (spitting) ‘out-contextualisation’ of hyperbole. Rather than present responsible moral interiority, under these labour conditions of televised visibility, they work hard to produce the opposite: hysterical immoral exteriority.

Conclusion

This reading of Geordie Shore has described the ‘hyping’ of character, sex and emotion as features of the broader labour conditions of media visibility for working-class youth and the limits imposed by gender. In Imogen Tyler’s (2013a) discussion of the dialectic nature of the ‘revolt’, she discusses how social abjection is made in politics and struggled over by those made abject. Here, reality television encourages hyperbole through which participants work hard to maintain their noticeability in response to the expectations of work and self-work in the current neoliberal conjuncture. Media visibility itself constitutes new forms of labour whereby looking into the lens produces aesthetic and flaunted acts of excess. This can be seen as a response to downward social mobility whereby young people face a crisis of possibility where their futures are increasingly uncertain as they struggle to manage their conditions of precariousness (Berlant, 2011). In this context, on Geordie Shore, set in the post-industrial North of England, normative codes of working-class propriety, respectability and shame are reworked in the sight of media visibility as one of the depressingly few routes to some form of ill/legitimate subjectivity. In this struggle, participants are negotiating the terms of their media visibility against the backdrop of expectations of being beyond responsibility where the cramped repetition of their performances forces animated hyperbole. As in Kristeva’s (1982) account of the looping back temporality of abjection subjectivity is always in revolt against itself where, ‘I expel myself, I spit myself out’, and thus in Geordie Shore, stereotypes are literally ‘spat out’ as rhetorical expressions of the contemporary politico-affective situation.