The only thing weirder than watching Brexit unfold on television is watching other people watch Brexit unfold on television. That’s what’s happening this season on “Gogglebox,” a British reality-TV show that lets you watch strangers watch TV. (And how do you spend your Friday nights?) The hour-long episodes follow ordinary families, couples, and best friends as they gather in their homes, across Britain, to chat, snack, pet their dogs, and occasionally cry, dance, or do a face mask, while the show cuts between shots of them and whatever they’re watching. It’s riveting.
Over fourteen seasons, on Channel 4, “Gogglebox” has built an unlikely audience; this season attracts around four and a half million viewers per episode. In recent years, it has collected a series of accolades, including a BAFTA award and four National Television Awards. Admirers regard the show with a kind of doting pride—for its underdog status and its humor, which is dry and subtle and, like oatcakes or Pimm’s, seems peculiarly British. There are spinoffs such as “Celebrity Gogglebox” and an annual special for cancer research. “Gogglebox” has been licensed in thirty-seven territories, including Ireland, Australia, Italy, Poland, Norway, Belgium, and New Zealand. (A short-lived American version, “The People’s Couch,” aired on Bravo, from 2013 to 2016). The British tabloids follow each episode closely, with headlines such as “Fans up in arms because Malone family never eat cakes they put out” and “Gogglebox fans stunned by Pete’s harsh comments about X Factor Celebrity Love Island contestants.’ ” Cast members are discouraged from appearing on other shows and attending red-carpet events—to preserve their ordinary man-on-the-street reputations—but occasionally they go on to have careers as B-list stars. Scarlett Moffatt, a former Goggleboxer, from County Durham, has a new show called “The British Tribe Next Door,” in which her suburban home has been painstakingly re-created in Otjeme, Namibia, where she will live for a month with her family among semi-nomadic cattle herders.
The shots in “Gogglebox” are always the same, as if someone had cut a hole in the subjects’ TV and put a camera through it. The effect is at once cozy and voyeuristic, with the cast members resembling both your friends and specimens in a living-room terrarium. “After a while, it’s very hypnotic,” Dick Fiddy, a television consultant at the British Film Institute, told me recently. He calls “Gogglebox” a “television phenomenon.” “It returns us to a time when there were fewer channels and people used to watch the same TV, and there were water-cooler moments,” he said. The appeal is similar to that of YouTube reaction videos, in which people garner millions of views by filming themselves watching movies or music videos. When content is disaggregated, and you watch everything alone on your phone, there’s a pleasure in feeling like someone’s there with you. Richard Howells, a professor of cultural sociology at King’s College, London, described “Gogglebox” to me as “a sort of surrogate community” and added, “Conversations which we might have had the next day at the office, or over the garden fence, we’re now having them somewhat vicariously.”
In a typical episode, Goggleboxers react to several popular British shows; “Peaky Blinders,” “First Dates,” “Strictly Come Dancing,” and “The X Factor” are regulars. In a recent episode, cast members stressed while watching a scene from the horror film “A Quiet Place,” in which Emily Blunt’s character has to give birth without making a sound.
Lately, though, like everyone in the U.K., they’re watching Brexit. Viewing the show, you feel as though you’ve stepped into the living rooms of a dozen Brits as they react in real time to the deepening crisis. There are moments of semi-seriousness. A Brexit special from 2016 opens with Giles and Mary, a droll couple in Wiltshire, sorting berries, and Mary mentions that she’d like some with Polish yogurt. “We can’t have it now we’ve left Europe,” Giles says. “The Polish shop will close.”
Mary blows out her cheeks. “It’s very rude, isn’t it?”
“Ungrateful,” Giles replies.
There are also moments of levity. In September, Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that Boris Johnson broke the law by suspending Parliament in order to push through his Brexit deal, and, soon after, the Prime Minister announced that he wasn’t going to resign, as his predecessors might have. “This is just going to be rolling on for years, innit?” Tom, in Manchester, said. “It’s just like a conveyor belt of dickheads,” Sophie, in Blackpool, added.
Some fans have been vocal about what they see as the intrusion of politics in the show. “Fucks sake, it’s Friday night, leave off with this boring Brexit shite,” one fan tweeted, recently. But others don’t mind. “Wine poured fire lit favourite thing about Friday #Gogglebox,” another fan tweeted. It can be oddly comforting to watch Brexit on “Gogglebox,” after a week spent staring into bleak headlines. “You feel less alone,” Fiddy remarked. “You think, Oh, it’s not just me that thinks it’s mad. Everyone thinks it’s mad.”
The editing suite of Tania Alexander, who oversees “Gogglebox,” sits at the end of a long hallway in the offices of Studio Lambert, the show’s production company, in central London. On a Monday morning in October, I visited the office and found several people huddled around a screen, preparing to watch a broadcast of a speech by the Queen, at the State Opening of Parliament. (The “Gogglebox” team watches the news throughout the day, looking for usable programming.) A whiteboard inside Alexander’s office listed proposed segments for that Friday’s episode: “Celebrity Hunted,” “Guide to Lesbian Sex,” “Own the Sky,” “News: Handshake.” Alexander, who is petite and middle-aged, was sitting in front of several screens, editing footage. She was wearing a black turtleneck and jacket and had a broken foot. She tripped one night after arriving home late from work, she explained. She waited a week before going to see a doctor, believing that nothing was wrong. “How could I leave the show?” she said. “It wouldn’t go to air.”
Before “Gogglebox,” Alexander was best known for the British reality shows “Seven Days,” which flopped (“No one watched it”), and “Undercover Boss,” which became a crossover hit in the U.S., among others. In the summer of 2011, riots broke out in London after a black teen-ager named Mark Duggan was shot and killed by the police. Several months later, Alexander’s colleague Tim Harcourt, remembering the riots, started a conversation about all the people who had been gathered around their televisions at home, watching and discussing the news. Studio Lambert pitched a show about watching television to Channel 4. “Basically, we thought, What’s everybody talking about when they’re watching? All those houses in Britain,” Alexander told me. She was a fan of “The Royle Family,” a British sitcom about a working-class family, which mainly takes place in their living room as they watch TV, and “Harry Hill’s TV Burp,” in which the comedian Harry Hill sits in front of the television and comments on the week’s programming. She wondered how an unscripted show along the same lines would work.
The logistics of the show are complicated. There are around twenty groups of cast members, and each week they are shown highlights, or “packages,” from several shows. Some families watch several hours of television in a night, periodically changing their outfits to keep up the fiction that they are watching in real time. Channels send shows to “Gogglebox” early, hoping to make it onto weekly episodes; news items are often worked in last minute. A gossipy voice-over is added on Friday mornings, and the final cut is delivered to the Channel 4 office across town, by motorbike, on Friday afternoons, to air that night.
Part of the pleasure of “Gogglebox,” according to Alexander, is in identifying with the reactions of normal Brits. (She thinks that the American version didn’t succeed because it was too aspirational. “I didn’t want people with perfect teeth,” she said.) News has always been the most important programming in the show, she noted, but she’s had to ease the cast into watching increasing amounts of it. In the early days, cast members worried that they wouldn’t know enough about current events. “They’re good people, they’ve got brains, they don’t want to look stupid,” she said. After episodes on the 2014 Scottish referendum, the general election in 2015, and the snap election in 2017, the cast grew more confident. “Part of it is being able to sort of gauge the temperature of the nation, in regards to what’s going on,” she said. “For the last three years, we’ve been dominated by”—she lowered her voice, theatrically—“the drama that is Brexit.”
The Goggleboxers seem as reluctant to watch Brexit as the rest of us. “Oh, God, it’s boring,” a regular named Sally, from Birmingham, said to her daughter in a recent episode. They had just watched a news segment in which Boris Johnson had tried and failed, yet again, to get his Brexit deal through Parliament. Another delay looked almost certain. “Nothing ever changes,” she said. She was wearing a pink turtleneck and was seated on a sofa covered in oversized pillows. “ ‘Breaking News,’ you think, Oh, my God, what’s this happening? And then, when you break it down, nothing.”
In a sense, though, the frustration is the point. When I spoke to Stephen Fisher, a professor of political sociology at Trinity College, Oxford, recently, he had just completed a poll on the most common reasons for supporting Johnson’s deal to leave the E.U. “There are lots of different reasons people give, but over half of them are ‘I just want it to be over and done with,’ and that is the overwhelming mood,” he said. On “Gogglebox,” he noted, many cast members “express their outrage and frustration, and a lot of those sentiments are very common across the country.”
One night last month, I visited Stephen, a hairdresser, and his husband, Daniel, at their home, in a village outside of Brighton. Stephen has been a cast member since the start of the show, but this is Daniel’s first year. (Stephen used to appear with his previous partner, Chris, who is also a hairdresser.) Their house is brick, trimmed in white, and has a statue of a poodle in the front yard. When I arrived, they were preparing to watch several hours of television, for the second night in a row. Stephen was wearing sweatpants and a black T-shirt and had settled on a leather sofa with Daniel and their three toy poodles. “We’ll usually start off with a mug of tea and some chocolate, and then we’ll give it until at least six o’clock, and we’ll have a glass of wine,” Stephen told me.
Like everyone else on “Gogglebox,” Stephen did not audition for the show; the producers found him through street casting. “They walked into the salon that me and Chris were working in and approached Chris about being on the program,” Stephen recalled. Later, the producers held up placards and asked them to respond to a series of headlines or images of celebrities, such as Simon Cowell, Kate Middleton, and the Queen. “We were chatty,” Stephen said. Stephen and Daniel have become favorites of the show for their suggestive banter, and fans sometimes show up at the salon; an Irish couple recently brought them a “Gogglebox”-themed cake. When I asked what it had been like to watch Brexit while on the show, during the past three years, they looked exasperated. They don’t know which programs they’ll be shown on a given night, and they always sigh when one about Brexit comes on. “We can never keep ahead of it,” Stephen said.
A field producer named Brett Lawrence had set up a television in front of Stephen and Daniel’s own set, which is too large for the show, and had installed two small cameras next to it. He had also set up a makeshift studio in another room. From there, he watched them on a small screen and asked them to adjust positions. “You can imagine some places there’s more dogs, there’s five people to contend with,” he told me. On camera, Stephen and Daniel discussed their day for the show’s preamble. Cast members are not supposed to catch up before filming. “Then we wouldn’t have anything to talk about!” Daniel told me. Stephen asked Daniel about a trip to a waxing salon. “I had my feet done,” Daniel said.
A few days later, the episode aired. In it, Stephen and Daniel watch “Take Me Out,” a dating game show, and “Seven Worlds, One Planet,” a new nature documentary series from David Attenborough. In another section, a news report says that the E.U. has accepted the U.K.’s request for another Brexit delay and has offered a “flextension.” “Flextension, Mary!” Giles exclaims in disbelief. “Oh, that’s a dreadful new word,” Mary says. “I wouldn’t mind a flextension myself,” Stephen says to Daniel, raising his eyebrows. Then, as if to cleanse their palettes, they all watch the finale of “The Great British Bake Off.”
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How “Gogglebox” Became a Chronicle of Brexit Fatigue - The New Yorker
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