Good evening! And welcome to the … erm, I dunno, let’s call them the World Entertainment Awards. Here’s your host for this evening: a person who has a show on whatever TV channel these are being shown on and has been chosen as part of a carefully planned strategy of intra-network synergy! But if you don’t like them, not to worry – they’ll just be here for five minutes telling some tepid jokes that dance gently around the fact that half the people who won last year’s awards are now awaiting trial, before the bizarre but somehow unassailable rigmarole of having each award presented by a different set of presenters, who were famous enough to make us want them to be here, but not talented enough to be nominated for anything.
Yes, that’s right: awards season is in full swing, by which we mean it has been going on continuously for our entire lives and will never end until we all die under the weight of a lifesize bronze statue presented to us by Dermot O’Leary. You might think that once the Oscars are over, you would get some respite from whoever is doing the night shift at Mail Online declaring whether famous people look nice or shite, but not any more. Like train delays and Tory governments, the awards season is now in a state of miserable permanence.
This week, it was the turn of the Best Fifa Football Awards, a ceremony that only exists because football’s governing body found time between accepting briefcases full of cash and sending Qatari children to meld girders with their bare hands to get in a fight with football’s existing awards ceremony, the Ballon d’Or, and start its own shindig in protest.
Awards in sport are always odd. France’s manager won the best manager award for winning the World Cup, but surely the award he really won for the feat was the World Cup. Why does he need this secondary bit of silver as voted for by a panel, having just won the competition based on objective merit? Will James Corden start hanging around the Olympic podium now? “Phelpsy, mate, congratulations on your gold medal, and can I announce that you’ve also won the award for best swimmer?”
Fifa’s bizarre ball play was followed by the National Reality Television Awards, an event that is not shown on television and doesn’t have the budget to spring for anything that resembles an award, with winners receiving something that looks as if it could be made using an entry-level Rymans laminator. Pictures from the event made it seem more like a school leavers’ ball than a glitzy do, with contestants from First Dates, Bake Off and The Apprentice photographed arriving at the carpet-less shindig, although slabs of chewing-gum-inflected grey pavement do at least feel “real”. The big story of the night was Susannah Reid (below) winning three awards, including best presenter and best TV show, although you might say the bigger story was that she showed up to collect them.
The next day on Good Morning Britain, Piers Morgan, who wasn’t nominated, mocked Reid for her wins: “It’s not exactly the Oscars.” That may be so, although in 2008 Morgan held his own awards ceremony, the Morgans, a tongue-in-puffed-pink-cheek affair in which awards were given to luminaries such as Fiona Phillips and Nancy Dell’Olio, so perhaps he’s not the best judge of a trinket’s significance. One can only imagine the doors being propped open by the trophies bearing his name.
If you are tiring of all these dos, you are not alone. The sheer number of ceremonies is causing something of a crisis in the tuxedo-wearing community. In the past year, viewing figures have been down for almost every big awards show, with the Oscars, Grammys and Video Music Awards all drawing some of their lowest audiences ever. Last week’s Emmys was supposed to be a chance for renewal, with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels drafted in to give the show razzle dazzle. In the end it was another ratings flop, and jokes bombed so badly it seemed as though the audience was taking part in a mass choral rendition of John Cage’s 4’33”. The only respite came from an onstage proposal from the winner of best director of a variety special. It was touching, but distracted from the fact that he was winning an Emmy for directing the Oscars. If award shows are, at the best of times, a circle jerk, surely the Emmys giving an Emmy to the Oscars is closer to one of Lennon and McCartney’s myopic self-pleasure sessions.
As recently as 2014, the New York Times wrote about soaring viewing figures for awards shows. In a profile of the entertainment company Dick Clark productions, which produces many of America’s backslappers, it told the story of a “small, musty company” that for decades had “trundled along on television’s periphery” only to find itself suddenly buoyed by the renewed popularity of awards shows. Things were going so well it was set to produce 14 events that year, including new annual treats such as the People Magazine Awards.
“There is no way around it,” said Allen Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, at the time. “We have something spectacular going here.”
It turns out that “something” was massive oversaturation. The inaugural People awards were a disaster and were cancelled after a year, some promised electronic dance music awards never materialised and the company’s owners quickly looked for a buyer.
With viewers switching off, is it any surprise that the Mobo organisation has cancelled this year’s bash, claiming to be “regrouping” for a better outing in 2019? Or that the Oscars’ organisers want to add a prize for “popular film” because low ratings must be down to plebeian viewers unable to comprehend a Churchill biopic, rather than because they put out a three-hour show, 70% of which is strangers thanking strangers.
So is there anything that can be done? Sadly not, friends, because in some ways celebrities are the same as we mortals: their default position is to spend the night in watching Countryfile and playing with themselves.
If GQ wanted to just put on a big party and invite the great and good of music, politics and film, chances are most of them wouldn’t show up. But throw in the possibility of winning a small statue and suddenly those “maybes” turn into, “Yes, and can I bring 12 guests?”
The best thing we can do is think of awards not as a recognition of excellence, but as the celeb world equivalent of someone dragging you out on a Saturday night by offering to pay for your Uber and buy you two mai tais on arrival.
