UnReal Life
Mark Wright's Hollywood Nights is, I predict, the next big step in the evolution of the 'docu-soap', just as much of a culture-shock as TOWIE was back in the day. It's genuinely mind-numbing - in a good way, of course. It's more doc than soap (someone even emerges from behind the camera at one point to confirm that they are indeed 'shooting a documentary', in case anyone was confused about that), so you might expect it to contain more reality than soapier examples of the form.
Not so! It comes across as even more unreal than TOWIE. That's character-based, but this is event-based. And the events it depicts are transparently fake. This is certainly not about reality - unless, perhaps, it's about a reality that has irretrievably broken down.
Superficially (and actually) it's about Mark Wright going to Hollywood with what he describes as his 'entourage', an idea that someone may just possibly have picked up from the TV show Entourage. The entourage here is a group of male friends, all of whom - I somehow felt - have been selected on the basis of their being less good-looking than Mark Wright himself. In Hollywood they end up in a seedy hotel where, out in the hotel corridor, they are 'alarmed' to hear some shouting and a shot. The gunshot is a plausible noise, but the words that precede it sounds like dialogue from a terrible movie - it could almost be coming from someone's TV, except that then it would have been more convincing.
An oddly glazed-looking policeman then turns up and 'has a word' with Wright's 20-year old cousin, who he believes has been drinking. The 20-year old cousin looks about 35. The shooting appears to have been forgotten. I get the feeling that Wright is deliberately undermining our sense of 'reality' here, deconstructing the stuff of our lives in the manner of the later work of Jean-Luc Godard. Either that, or this programme has driven me insane. But it comes to the same thing.
Earlier, Mark and his entourage had had trouble finding the hotel. In a conventional documentary this could have been covered by a few lines from the voiceover - 'Mark has lost his way', Dame Judi Dench (or whoever was available) would say, and then they could go on to the next thing. But Wright has taken the bold step of not using a narrator, so that even the tiniest, most irrelevant thing becomes a 'scene', which has to be acted out, by people who can't act. So we get Mark in a car park, ringing a friend who knows the area, arranging to meet the friend, going to meet the friend, and finally having a conversation in which he gets round to asking the friend - 'Right, see, well, the thing is, what I wanted to ask you is - ' - directions to the hotel. It's a brilliant stroke, confronting you over and over again with the peculiar banality of Mark's situation. It is as if the viewer were being repeatedly smashed in the face with a brick. Though not a real brick.
And then there's that title! How did they come up with that? Will there be further series, called things like Mark Wright Flies Kites, Mark Wright On The Isle Of Wight, and Mark Wright's Men In Tights? And will they finally be collected into a boxed set of DVDs entitled Mark Wright's Pile Of Shite?
Not so! It comes across as even more unreal than TOWIE. That's character-based, but this is event-based. And the events it depicts are transparently fake. This is certainly not about reality - unless, perhaps, it's about a reality that has irretrievably broken down.
Superficially (and actually) it's about Mark Wright going to Hollywood with what he describes as his 'entourage', an idea that someone may just possibly have picked up from the TV show Entourage. The entourage here is a group of male friends, all of whom - I somehow felt - have been selected on the basis of their being less good-looking than Mark Wright himself. In Hollywood they end up in a seedy hotel where, out in the hotel corridor, they are 'alarmed' to hear some shouting and a shot. The gunshot is a plausible noise, but the words that precede it sounds like dialogue from a terrible movie - it could almost be coming from someone's TV, except that then it would have been more convincing.
An oddly glazed-looking policeman then turns up and 'has a word' with Wright's 20-year old cousin, who he believes has been drinking. The 20-year old cousin looks about 35. The shooting appears to have been forgotten. I get the feeling that Wright is deliberately undermining our sense of 'reality' here, deconstructing the stuff of our lives in the manner of the later work of Jean-Luc Godard. Either that, or this programme has driven me insane. But it comes to the same thing.
Earlier, Mark and his entourage had had trouble finding the hotel. In a conventional documentary this could have been covered by a few lines from the voiceover - 'Mark has lost his way', Dame Judi Dench (or whoever was available) would say, and then they could go on to the next thing. But Wright has taken the bold step of not using a narrator, so that even the tiniest, most irrelevant thing becomes a 'scene', which has to be acted out, by people who can't act. So we get Mark in a car park, ringing a friend who knows the area, arranging to meet the friend, going to meet the friend, and finally having a conversation in which he gets round to asking the friend - 'Right, see, well, the thing is, what I wanted to ask you is - ' - directions to the hotel. It's a brilliant stroke, confronting you over and over again with the peculiar banality of Mark's situation. It is as if the viewer were being repeatedly smashed in the face with a brick. Though not a real brick.
And then there's that title! How did they come up with that? Will there be further series, called things like Mark Wright Flies Kites, Mark Wright On The Isle Of Wight, and Mark Wright's Men In Tights? And will they finally be collected into a boxed set of DVDs entitled Mark Wright's Pile Of Shite?
posted by martin at 11:21 AM
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