Faking It is a TV programme where individuals are trained up for a short period in some job or other and then put into a real situation where they have to act out convincingly what they’ve learned like they’ve been doing it for a lifetime. Among others there has been a DJ, a television presenter, a photographer, a model, a rock chick, an orchestral conductor even. Usually the person picked for the task is an unlikely sort with no background whatsoever in the chosen field. Amazingly, more often than not they pull off the scam. It’s about entertainment of course and that’s all it’s meant to be. But I’m interested in what it might tell you about the particular vocations. If an activity can be so readily faked doesn’t it undermine that activity and its practitioners.

In the postmodern, media-driven world, life is two-dimensional. Appearance and style are everything. If you can make the pose convincingly and be confident that’ll do. There is not necessarily a true reality behind every facade. Often the facade is adequate for the purpose. Faking It rests on this peculiarity of contemporary culture. It presupposes that many positions are low on expertise, high on show. It also exposes certain jobs as being less specialised than you might think. This might be no bad thing. People have always been prone to making themselves seem more important and expertly qualified than they are. Perhaps the modern world and TV programmes such as Faking It call out that kind of pomposity. Maybe just about anyone could, with a little coaching, present television or conduct an orchestra.

Or could they? There’s another important point here easily overlooked. All the talent/reality shows, the Pop Idols and Fame Academies, miss out a crucial stage in the process of finding recognition in the arts and entertainment, and that’s the bit that involves climbing the ladder. Even getting on the ladder at all can be hellishly difficult. Only certain personality types survive this arduous aspect. It can be an assault course of rejection and disappointment. Most contenders find such trials just too much and fade quickly. Only those rare individuals with the required characteristics summon the staying power. Usually these people are oddly suited. Somehow the context fits that oddness in their temperament.

The arts and entertainment industries are heavily context dependent. It’s about more than just the talent. Lifestyle, appearance, psychology, character and drive all play a big part, more so than in other spheres. Compare to say the professions or the academic world where expansive knowledge and application is enough. With those, you do the work, be good at it, and the achievement will be proportionate. This is not so in the arts. A thousand people can do the work and only one will come through.

With context-dependent it’s your ability to navigate the environment that is definitive. This is a talent in itself that’s often scoffed at. To this add right-place-right-time opportunism, and no small amount of serendipity and you begin to get the picture. Star-maker television and the likes bypass these all-important integral dynamics of the entertainment business, the difficult, unpredictable terrain where most won’t venture. It’s how you deal with that terrain that will determine your success in that strange and exotic world. One suspects Will Young wouldn’t have got to first base.

In Faking It it’s not just the activity that’s being faked, the biggest fake of all is that it obscures just how hard it is to get a foot in the door. With a reality show that work has already been done not by the contender but by the programme producers who themselves have probably climbed some slippery slope to get the programme made. To use the words again of an old veteran of stage and screen: “It’s not the work, it’s the stairs!”