The Premier League is no longer England’s – this country ...



The Kardashians: The Egos That Ate AmericaWill our long national Kardashian nightmare ever come to an end?BY?ROB SHEFFIELD?September 10, 2014The Kardashians are about to celebrate the seventh anniversary of their astoundingly durable reality-TV juggernaut.?Keeping Up With the Kardashians?has spent an entire season building up to the blockbuster Kim & Kanye wedding special – just weeks before the debut of?Kourtney and Khloé Take the Hamptons. (You thought there was any as-yet-untaken-by-Kardashians turf? Not on American soil.) There isn't another story in the annals of reality TV comparable to this one. So many empires have come and gone in the Kardashian era:?The Hills, Jersey Shore, The Real Housewives of Wherever. All those people, all those lives – where are they now? But the Kardashians are right here, where they've always been. Which is freaking everywhere.The Reality TV Couples Curse The Kardashians are the last ladies standing in reality TV because they've simply always?believed?they were celebrities – endlessly amused with themselves, endlessly oblivious to one another. Their vanity is impervious to the outside world, which is how many of us often wish our own personal vanity worked. Their gargantuan egos, their petty jealousies, their catty feuds, the effort-vs.-eye-roll they put into reciting their lines, their commitment to frivolity at all costs – these are seductive qualities in a reality-TV star, however repugnant they might be in real life. Whatever it is you watch reality TV for, the Kardashians just have a lot more of it.Occasionally, the sisters will meet and mate with a human male who will regard them with curiosity, lust, maybe even warmth, only to find their company irksome. The sisters are always surprised when this happens. Why? They just are. They do not learn, grow, mature, suffer, any of that HBO Sunday-night business. They do, however, take pole-dancing classes. And get mad when Mom crashes the pole-dancing classes.It never ends. Just this summer, Kim's video game blew up into the megagrossing airport-lobby time-waster of the year. Kim showed up with her new name and an open kimono at the VMAs, then the sisters got caught texting during the moment of silence for Ferguson. The big joke at the Emmys was Jimmy Fallon saying, "For all our success, we will never make as much money as Kim Kardashian did for that game app."The dramas in Kardashian World don't change much. Kourtney is knocked up again. (She giggles, "Scott wants to kill himself!" Yes. He does.) Khloé mopes around the mansion in one of Lamar Odom's old sweatsuits. Mom Kris, who has achieved empire-building like Joe Kennedy never dreamed of, wants to party with Rick Ross and Diddy. While having lunch with Kris, Khloé observes, "You guys are having a MILF-off," while Kim notes, "My mom and I have always had this funny weird cute competition." You don't say.You might loathe the Kardashians, and that's more than understandable. But there are hardly any ex-fans of the Kardashians, because all they ever promised is what they keep delivering: a journey into the American ego at its most luridly monstrous, with lots of shopping. The ongoing Kardashian saga has turned into the rise and where-the-hell-is-that-fall of an American-family empire, bigger than U.S. Steel.From The Archives?Issue 1218: September 25, 2014Follow us:?@rollingstone on Twitter?|? HYPERLINK "" \t "_blank" RollingStone on FacebookThey might have The Voice, but do they have The X Factor?ALISON MCNEILLJun?5, 2015Simon Cowell – Has It All Gone Wrong?Let us take a trip down memory lane, back to February 2002. It is the final of?Pop Idol, and the country waits on edge as Will Young and Gareth Gates have their fate revealed. Coming forward to December 2006, Leona Lewis with her innocent nature and versatile voice has won the hearts of the nation, and stormed to victory in?The X Factor. Moving forward again to April 2009, the nation is stunned into silence when Susan Boyle begins her unexpected rendition of?I Dreamed a Dream, but just a few weeks later she is beaten by dancing sensation Diversity. Now moving forward to present day – Ben Haenow? Steve McCrorie? Or most recently Jules O’Dwyer and Matisse? Ring any bells? No? Is it possible that Britain has simply run out of talent?Whether you enjoy their music or not, X Factor contestants of the past have gone on to successful careers, some as global superstars. JLS, Olly Murs, One Direction and Little Mix are all competitors who have gone on to become household names, while others such as Joe McElderry and Stacey Solomon have moved into successful careers in other areas. Looking simply at viewing figures, interest in the show has declined massively in the last few years. The final of series 7, featuring winner Matt Cardle, runner-up Rebecca Ferguson, and third place (and the most successful X-Factor act to date) One Direction, attracted a huge 19.4 million viewers. By comparison the most recent series 10 final attracted only 8.5 million viewers, while the overall viewing figures dropped to their lowest since series 1 back in 2004.BBC’s venture into the search for the latest pop talent has had no better fortune in recent years.The Voice?has received huge criticism for failing to create a single ‘star’, with winners Leanne Mitchell, Andrea Begley and Jermain Jackman all failing to go on to successful careers in the music industry. Steve McCrorie, this year’s winner, doesn’t look set to do much better, with the final attracting just 6.87 million viewers, significantly below the overall average of 8.48 million. Despite the strong twitter action on the show, mainly from will.i.am, and the introduction of the word ‘dope’ largely being attributed to the show, to date, the right contestant has not been victorious. Some contestants have had a degree of success, such as Tyler James or Leah McFall, but?The Voice?certainly hasn’t produced any worldwide sensation.The question to be answered is why? What has changed since these shows began that has led to a reduction in the popularity of the shows and the acts they produce? While some acts such as One Direction have a mass following, as a whole we have become disillusioned with these over-produced acts who can sing (mostly), but often don’t have the complete package we desire. Recent successful artists, such as Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith and Taylor Swift, write their own music and make the music they themselves enjoy. This approach gives us more relatable celebrities, as it avoids the fake front we often perceive on talent show winners. The recent departure of Zayn Malik perhaps best demonstrates why talent shows like?The X Factor?don’t work; you can’t build a successful career without loving what you do, and you can’t love what you do if you hate the music forced upon you.So do Saturday night talent shows have any future? In their current form, the answer is plainly no. Society doesn’t want to watch poor quality acts embarrass themselves in auditions in an effort to boost their way to the top, and we no longer seem interested in singers who aren’t talented enough to write their own music or bring anything original to the table. My suggestion is that TV still has a lot to offer in terms of a platform for new talent. Shows which offer a stage to exceptional individuals could allow real musicians to promote their music to a wider audience, while variety acts such as shadow group Attraction,?Britain’s Got Talent?winners 2013, would still be able to display their talent, and go on to equally successful careers. The difference is that rather than looking for talent and working through masses of disillusioned individuals, we skip to the winners and stop wasting viewers’ time. A two hour show which gave 4 acts a half hour set to show the country their talent would surely be more enjoyable than watching 12 wannabes covering songs they don’t care about.Simon Cowell, we are bored of your formula. You can’t continue to dominate the world of music and entertainment with over-produced acts who have no authenticity. Without a reshuffle the days of Saturday night talent shows are numbered, and I for one will be glad to see them go.The Premier League is no longer England’s – this country is just the backdropJonathan FreedlandFriday 13 February 2015?19.35?GMTLast modified on Friday 20 February 201517.32?GMTMy first mistake, he told me, was that I still thought of it as a game. Wrong. The best way to think of football was as a TV property, comparable to, say, Downton Abbey.My conversations with senior figures in the Premier League are sufficiently rare that this one stayed with me. It was last autumn, a chance encounter on the fringes of the party conference season. As?a relatively new convert to the game, I found each insider nugget fascinating.So I listened closely as he told me that, later that week, his colleagues would be taking the?Premier League?to market, selling the broadcast rights to TV stations across the world. He was all but salivating at the prospect. Events, he explained, had conspired to make this the perfect moment to sell.Mighty Manchester United had just been humbled by lowly Leicester City, battered 5-3. “This is the only league in the world where that happens,” he said, doubtless rehearsing the pitch soon to be made to the TV channels of south-east Asia, north America and beyond.Such an upset would be unheard of in Spain or Germany. But unexpected plot twists were a reliable staple of the nearly year-round TV series that is the English Premier League. Did I know, for example, that a record 10 top flight managers had been ejected from their posts during the previous season? That was a selling point too. “It’s all part of the drama.”The result was that the Premiership had become the most lucrative earner of overseas broadcast rights in the world. American football still makes a mint in America, but hardly anyone else wants to watch it. The right to screen Premier League games in tiny Singapore is worth more, he said, than all the cash America’s NFL generates from overseas broadcast sales put together.There was something else too. International viewers liked the look of the fans at English games. The cameras would make a point of picking out families, women and children especially, along with diverse, non-white faces. He mentioned the group of Sikh fans often glimpsed over the manager’s shoulder at Old Trafford. Such a happy contrast with the Bundesliga, where crowd shots tended to consist of “white, male fans in their twenties, usually behind a metal fence”. Far less easy on the TV eye. In fact, the fans were so important, the Premier League would regularly write to clubs that had dared present a less than packed house for a televised match, scolding them for failing to provide a pleasing visual backdrop.Every detail of that conversation came back to me this week, after?Sky and BT agreed to pay a stunning ?5.1bn for the UK rights to screen Premiership games?for three years from 2016 – a massive sum set to be bigger still once international rights are sold again.Many have rightly condemned the injustice that will see tens of millions of pounds fill the pockets of star players, their agents and club chief executives while fans struggle to pay some of the most exorbitant prices in world football, whether for season tickets or TV subscriptions. Others have fumed at a system that sees clubs engorged with ever more cash – yet?still refusing to pay a living wage?to those who serve the drinks, clean the toilets and man the turnstiles. (As an Arsenal fan, it pains me to record that?of the top clubs only Chelsea pays a living wage?to its lowest paid employees.)The problem is that top flight football has soared far beyond the people who were once its anchorsThe problem is that top flight football has soared far beyond the people who were once its anchors: the fans, the employees, and those who live and work near the ground. Those people are, as the man from the Premier League admitted, merely a TV backdrop now, a CGI special effect in human form.The simple truth is, football has outgrown them. The fans might still think of Spurs or Liverpool as their local club – and it’s important to the TV producers wanting pictures of packed stands that they do – but it’s outdated. Everton or West Ham are now units within a global entertainment phenomenon, units that just happen to have a physical presence in Merseyside or London. ................
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