This morning, I finally saw a preview of The Best Job In The World BBC1 documentary. I was prepared for the worst: critic after critic has panned it as 'another show about fame-hungry wannabes, humiliating themselves'. 'Depressing,' one writer called it. 'More young people thinking they deserve success for no reason,' another screamed in vitriol from her bedsit. And I was pretty scared, to be honest. I didn't take my teddy bear to the viewing, but you can be damn sure I seriously thought about it (he doesn't like London, though, so I left him at home).
The documentary's not depressing in the slightest. We come across - by and large - as what we are: young, optimistic, adventurous people, trying as hard as we can to grab life by the throat when it's trying so hard to punch our lights out. As people who haven't given up and retreated to a world of sofa-surfing and family size packs of Doritos; as people who take opportunities, and do our damndest to make the best of them. Not one of us looks fame hungry: predominantly because we're not. None of us applied for the Best Job for fame. We applied because we wanted to be paid a lot of money to write on a beautiful island: no more than that, and no less. And that's exactly how it comes across. We had fun, we had an adventure, we made friends, and we learnt a little about ourselves in the process. Which is more than you can say for the majority of Februarys and Marchs, frankly.
Instead, it's the critics who have humiliated themselves. In life, there are the people who play, and the people who watch from the sidelines. Not one critic has been able to see the experience for what it was. With negativity, bitterness and - far, far worse - a dull imagination, they have churned out yet again the same little diatribes about 'fame' and 'wannabes': tired diatribes that lack hope, that lack faith and that lack the ability to see a bigger picture. In a country that is slowly slipping into the jaws of a mass depression, the documentary shows people fighting - in their own little ways - against it: to keep believing that good things can happen, even when everything is indicating otherwise. And if it's depressing, it's only through the jaded, miserable eyes of the depressing people watching it. The people who have long given up fighting, and tucked themselves away into their packs of Doritos (I know enough journalists to be able to say this with some authority).
The irony, of course, is that the crime we are accused of committing - a quest for fame - is inherent in the very industry who are acting as our executioners. These critics think that we want people to know who we are, and yet a beautiful hypocrisy shimmers behind every snippy little line they write. Writers, journalists, critics - call it what you like, and I count myself among them - write because, whether they admit it or not, they are seeking their own little bit of immortality, and their own little bit of verification. It's far, far worse than wanting people to know who they are: they want people to know how they think. They want to burrow into the minds of people, and leave a little something behind afterwards. Which is far, far more arrogant than ever wanting somebody to recognise your face. Hiding behind The Sunday Times or The Daily Mail banners are people who think that their opinions are worth listening to: who think that they deserve a voice, because somebody with a lot of money and no sense has said that they're allowed one. Who think that they deserve success because somebody once told them how to string a line of words together and put a full stop in the right place.
Oscar Wilde once pointed out that an artist creates, and a critic destroys. In doing nothing but tearing apart the small, ineffective steps we all took towards a dream, it is not The Best Job In the World candidates who humiliated ourselves: it is the people who have judged us for it. However we come across as individual characters is irrelevant, ultimately. What we stood for - as a group of 50 - was a group of people who were still raging, still creating, still driving towards something: towards anything. And the people who can't see that - who get on the Victoria line and blankly commute back to their television sets and their bored little cats and the partner they don't have sex with anymore - are the people I feel for.
Because there's a game going on, and all they'll ever do is watch it from the sidelines.
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