Glee – camp, outrageous and now revolutionary

Barack Obama has been called many things. But a Gleek? Surely that's going a bit far? Apparently not. It turns out the President of the United States is indeed a 'Gleek': a fan of the American TV series Glee. Or at least he pretends to be for the sake of his wife and daughters who, along with tens of millions of others across America and around the world, most definitely are.
 
Since it premiered in the US a year ago, Glee, the deliciously camp, outrageously vicious, ridiculously inspirational musical comedy set in an American high school, has become a most unlikely phenomenon, upending almost every idea of what's possible in mainstream TV.

The show has already won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy television series, and its audience figures went through the roof when it returned to TV in April - with a Madonna-themed episode - after a four-month break.

Glee refers to the high school's show choir, known as the glee club. Featuring five to eight all-singing, all-dancing 'covers' of pop and showbiz classics per episode - from the Rolling Stones to Barbra Streisand to Amy Winehouse to Broadway show tunes - Glee has also become a huge boon to the music industry. In 2009, the cast of Glee had 25 singles charting on the Billboard Hot 100, the most since The Beatles.
 
"Glee is helping alter the dynamic between music and television," says the Los Angeles Times. While many younger viewers appear to be losing interest in the once invulnerable American Idol, Glee "looks poised to be pop's new tastemaker," says the paper.

This indeed is the big news: among adults in the key 18-34 demographic, Glee has started beating American Idol, which it immediately follows on Fox TV on Tuesday nights, an unprecedented development.

According to the latest ratings, this Tuesday's American Idol was the lowest-rated since August 2002, its first season. Glee is now the number one show on American TV among 18-34-year-olds. As the showbusiness website The Wrap puts it: "Next to Glee’s supercharged vocals, over-the-top choreography and radiant glow of professionalism – not to mention white-hot record sales of late – those kids struggling away on Idol are starting to look kinda... lame."

Glee has proved that musicals and television are not mutually incompatible. Since Fame went off the air in 1987 after six seasons, the US networks have from time to time attempted to introduce new television musicals for adults. They have all flopped badly, including the most recent, Viva Laughlin (2007), about a casino and starring Hugh Jackman, no less; and Cop Rock (1990), set in a police station. For some reason audiences couldn't warm to boys in tight blue uniforms with truncheons and handcuffs breaking into song as they banged up suspects. Not gay enough.
 
But, as the fresh-faced TV movie High School Musical proved, American high school, with its evil cliques and magnificent jealousies, is fertile territory for overblown, camp characterisations and loopy plots.

Glee features an absurdly stereotypical bunch of misfit outsiders, overseen by teachers who have even worse problems with relationships and social boundaries.
 
The kids include Rachel, the over-achieving Jewish diva, who is so disliked that she is, as one critic put it, "the most deliciously annoying high school arriviste since Reese Witherspoon in Election." There's the inevitable gay kid, Kurt, who is so blindingly effeminate and mincing you wonder why gay groups haven't been picketing. He even puts on make-up when he plays football.

Then there's Quinn, the beautiful, blonde, rich cheerleader, who happens to get pregnant. She tells the boy who was foolish enough to impregnate her: "We had sex because you got me drunk on wine coolers and I felt fat that day."

There's even a kid in a wheelchair, and one whole episode, Wheels, in which the whole glee club rode around - and sang and danced - in wheelchairs so they could empathise. And there's an Asian-American kid with a fake speech impediment, managing to include a whole bunch of minorities in one character.
 
But it's the adults - who appeal to adults in the audience - who really steal the show, particularly the titanically evil Sue Sylvester, played by Jane Lynch.

Sylvester (above) is the tyrannical head of the cheerleading team, the Cheerios. She does everything she can to undermine – well, destroy – the glee club and anybody who has anything to do with it. Perennially dressed in a track-suit, Sylvester may be the greatest television villain since Larry Hagman's JR Ewing in Dallas, and is a reminder that the very best television is built around villains.

The galumphing, 6ft cheerleading teacher is certainly not above pushing little kids out of the way in the school corridor. "She'll walk by a kid with books, and knock them down, just to knock them down," Lynch explains of her character. "I'm very violent. I throw things."
 
Sue Sylvester, as befits a villain, has all the best lines, of course, and the show is worth watching just for those. Here's just a tiny sampling: "I don't trust a man with curly hair. I can't help but picture little birds laying sulfurous eggs in there, and it disgusts me"... "While they were in there, I told them to go ahead and yank out those tear ducts. Wasn't using them"... "You have enough product in your hair to season a wok"...
 
The show has its detractors. The right-wing has taken against it with a vengeance, attacking the show, which is produced by the openly gay Ryan Murphy, whose last series was Nip/Tuck, because it tries "to normalise teen homosexuality".
 
One conservative critic wrote that Glee was millions of dollars of sound and fury aimed squarely at children. "The creators... are all about getting between you and your kids with their political and social agendas."
 
Conservatives were particularly incensed by an episode in which Sue Sylvester berates a couple of her cheerleaders: "You may be two of the stupidest teens I've ever encountered. And that's saying something. I once taught a cheerleading seminar to a young Sarah Palin."

All of which will leave the British producer Simon Fuller with a headache: not only is his creation American Idol suffering as a result, but his top judge, Simon Cowell, is jumping ship this summer in order to be free to host the US version of his own hit creation, The X Factor. The task of finding a suitable replacement for Cowell just got a lot tougher.

‘Glee’ continues on E4 on Mondays at 9.0 pm.

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