That subtle sensation of dissatisfaction. A compulsion to remonstrate against an unacceptable slight on your expectations.
The consideration of how best to articulate your displeasure. The selection of the right ‘big word’ to firmly assert your authority.
The millisecond-pause for hesitation before unleashing righteous hell. The resulting verbal or, depending on circumstance, physical sparring.
The spoils of victory. Or the agonising misery of defeat. Or, worse still, the laborious cycle of increasingly narky correspondence.
Yes, complaining really is a thrill-ride of emotion, well worthy of its place as one of the nation’s favourite pastimes (just behind ‘talking incessantly about the weather’ and ‘blaming poor people for all of society’s ills’).
UK media is fond of all these national pursuits, but it is complaint culture coverage that’s beginning to take centre-stage in our newspapers. Expect 2011 to be The Year of the Official Whinge.
In the space of the last two months, our media has been caught up in a vortex of complaints.
The usual procedure goes like this:
Something appears on TV. Four people in Cheltenham disapprove. A newspaper picks up on this ‘offence’, then flagrantly exaggerates the scale of the offence caused.
The melodramatic news coverage incites easily incensed readers to join the list of original complainants, regardless of whether they’d witnessed the offensive material firsthand. Increased complaints lead to further fascinating news insight into how many people had been offended.
This silly tsunami of offensive material is rarely that offensive. What’s changed, in recent times, is how easy it is to complain about such material.
In years gone by, if Eric Morecambe had sworn at Angela Rippon, or Dixon of Dock Green had grittily tackled the child trafficking of gingers, the process of registering your displeasure with such atrocities was painstaking.
Finding a pen? And paper? At least you didn’t have to get an envelope t…oh my God, you DID need an envelope? COULD THIS BE ANY MORE PRIMITIVE?
All that, even before you found the precursor to Ofcom in Ye Olde Yellow Pages.
These days, it’s a cinch. Check your wi-fi, click on your Ofcom ‘Kneejerk Reaction’ bookmark, type a short missive about the mortal agony your television has put you through, hit ‘send’ – hey presto, you’ve moaned 21st Century-style before the credits have had time to roll.
Advancements in communication means there’s no thinking time any more, no ‘cooling-off’ period.
Even if you do take a rational approach to what’s on screen or in print, our ever-histrionic media will remind you that you’re deeply misguided and inadvertently contributing to the erosion of foundations holding firm everything that has ever mattered.
The more susceptible members of our nation, who probably still think Al-Jazeera is a terrorist cell, get sucked in by the fulminating newsprint and add their names obligingly to the burgeoning lists.
Last month, Frankie Boyle’s Channel Four programme Tramadol Nights fell victim to this phenomenon – recently it’s been Eastenders with its cot-death/baby swap story.
My favourite example involved The X-Factor final, the most watched TV show of 2010. As you’d expect, the big guns were pulled out for the end-of-season-spectacular.
Perhaps the biggest guns of all were, um, Rhianna’s thighs – her revealing outfits, along with Christina Aguilera’s uninspiring burlesque performance (reminiscent of an open-air Ann Summers clearance outlet being opened in a Lidl car park) added fleshy glamour to ITV’s top show.
A bit too fleshy for some Sunday night viewers, who had evidently intended to see Fiona Bruce eyeing-up some 17th Century restoration furniture rather than Matt Cardle trying to eye-up a Barbadian singer’s mantelpiece.
The complaints came in, 1,000 of them within 24 hours. Then the press took over, sensing a moral panic with added cleavage shot opportunities. By the end of the week, ‘journalism’ had helped to double the number of complaints.
The Daily Mail was so appalled by The X-Factor’s lurid antics, it dedicated endless pages to outline, and illustrate, why the performances were so unacceptably rude.
So, if the ‘pause’ function on your Sky Plus lacked clarity, the newspaper photos doubled your chances of spotting an errant nipple. Indeed, the Mail printed so many still images from the X-Factor final, if you’d cut them all out and collated them, you’d have a flipbook silently replaying the entire two hours.
Rampant hypocrisy all round then, especially in the case of the newspapers who would be jiggered if they couldn’t print spurious news stories about the same shows they seek to censure.
Which leads onto perhaps the dumbest aspect of this whole complainarama: it’s barely news at all.
About 19 million people saw The X-Factor final; just under 3,000 people saw fit to complain. This works out as 0.0157 per cent of the audience. Around 11 million people are watching Eastenders.
More than 8,500 have complained, working out as 0.077 per cent of the audience. In terms of people’s revolt, both fall some way short of the October Revolution.
This is what’s so annoying about the media’s dependency on manufactured outrage. Everything about recent complaint culture is redundant. Small numbers of people are wasting small amounts of time complaining about the inconsequential. The media are wasting newsprint on covering this piffle.
And, even if complaint culture claims a victim, who cares? Is Russell Brand using his Hollywood millions to mop up tears after losing his Radio 2 gig to ‘Sachsgate’? Has Simon Cowell embarked on weeks of self-flagellation because he inflicted a bikini-clad Rihanna on a nation’s unsuspecting youth?
Because some people don’t like naughty words, should we expect Frankie Boyle to jack in comedy to become a Jesuit priest?
Regrettably, complaint culture will only get dumber as the year progresses.
Look at the Metro newspaper earlier this month – it ran a story on how Boyle’s forthcoming live performance on the British Comedy Awards will become one of the most complained-about events in the history of the universe.
Terrifyingly, this means we’re now at the stage that new complaints about performers are being pre-empted before the performer’s had time to draft the material that’s predicted to be so offensive. Guilty until proven innocent, I guess.
To be honest, this is all getting me proper het up. Who do I complain to?
Keith Gabriel is a Birmingham-based PR account manager
He writes a blog for the Birmingham Post here
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