FAKING IT

Dick Pountain/11 December 2001/12:56/Idealog 89

I'm not normally a big fan of reality TV shows. On dipping a toe into 'Pop Idol' I found it rather less fun than watching baby seals being clubbed to death. 'Big Brother' did divert me briefly, but that doesn't prove much because although I've never actually sunk to watching paint dry, I'm certainly capable of staring vacantly into a log fire for up to three hours without moving a muscle except to breathe. However the exception to this rule is the Channel 4 series 'Faking It' which has completely hooked me over the last few weeks.

The premise of the show is simple: take a total novice in some skilled trade, and in only four weeks train them up to the point where they could fool a panel of experts in that field. The first program, which turned a lowly hamburger-flipper into a trendy West End chef in four weeks was good enough, but the one in which Shelley, a young dancer, was turned into a competition-winning show jumper was exceptional, and even rather moving. It quickly transpired that Shelley had been brought up in care and severely lacked confidence in her own abilities: watching the agonisingly horsey husband-and-wife training team gruffly rebuild her confidence was quite uplifting (a rare experience on today's television). But it was the last program, in which a young classical cello student was trained up to be club DJ that really set me to thinking. My first reaction was, how can this possibly be compared to the previous skills - cooking, hairdressing, horse-riding - as it is quite clear that the physical skills involved could easily be imparted in four hours, let alone four weeks. That's assuming the subject has a rudimentary sense of timing, and if they don't then four years or decades would not be enough. In fact much more of the program was devoted to honing attitude, banter and dress-sense than performance per se. The weakness of the premise becomes obvious if you imagine reversing it, by teaching the two DJs to play a Bach cello suite in four weeks: a tough one. But the thing that struck me most forcibly was that the DJs continually talked as if (and clearly believed that) they were *making* the music, rather than merely directing its reproduction. The people who actually recorded the dance tracks that they so adroitly synchronised never figured at all, seldom so much as a name-check.

However as this is PC Pro and not TV Quick I suppose I ought to drag this column back to the subject. Just as I was thinking these uncharitable, even slightly snotty, thoughts about the DJs, I realized that I am actually guilty of doing something very similar myself, which steers us toward weighty matters such as the effect of computers on skilled professions, populism, democracy and elitism. My own little 'DJ' trip can be found in the pages of this very magazine, in the law column of the Real World section: you see, I did that illustration (the Visa Fish), and the way I came to pursue this graphical side-line was by a process of computer-aided Faking It. The law column is necessarily concerned with abstract matters, which made it difficult from the start to find any visual material to illustrate it, apart from text-heavy legal Web pages. So one day about four years ago, I used Paintshop Pro to make an illustration for a column on child pornography - it was a montage, a Bellini Madonna-and-child with their eyes and Jesus's genitalia covered by black rectangles. I simply slipped it into the Zip file with the text, and it went into the magazine without comment. I continued to do this for several months until I came clean to the art editor, who decided that the illustrations were good enough to run and that I should even be paid a meagre stipend for doing them.

Now it's certainly the case that I have some (very minor) artistic ability: I was good at drawing at school and would have pursued it further had not the rigid 1950's educational ethos forced me to specialise in science alone. But I don't kid myself that my drawing is good enough to publish, nor that I have that certainty of line, that distinct personality that is the mark of great illustrators. Thanks to the peculiar history of Dennis Publishing I happen to know several of the best illustrators in this country, and I do not for a minute pretend that what I do is the same as what they do. In fact, hyper-conscious that I am Faking It, I deliberately forbid myself to draw anything, bar a few supplementary lines, and work entirely from found and clipart images. I have however developed a considerable skill at mixing, bending and colouring images in Paintshop Pro, which is of course exactly what those DJs were doing with records. Am I depriving a real illustrator of a job? No, there's no budget to pay a professional fee. Am I devaluing the skills of the illustrators' 'guild'? Yes I am, but then computers, by taking the hard work out of so many aspects of life, are doing that everywhere you look. Am I an artist, comparable with Bellini? Er, no. Is it a good thing that people can now short-circuit the hard slog needed to master a deep skill such as playing a musical instrument or painting in oils? That depends on whether or not it leads to the extinction of the actual skills, for without them we'll have nothing to mix...