WERE IT NOT A little cerebral for current TV tastes, making a well-known phrase out of the words “hell”, “handcart”, “going” and “to” might make a fitting task for the current inhabitants of the Big Brother house. With all vestiges of its original pretensions towards sociological experiment abandoned, this year Channel 4 has not bothered to mix and match personalities. Instead, 12 very loud know-nothings are being cooped up and prodded with stunning rods to keep their egos inflamed. A nation that once admired the virtues of wisdom, urbanity and humility, as represented in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows by, respectively, Badger, Ratty and Mole, has become entranced by a contest to find the greatest Toad of all.
Like the owner of Toad Hall, Big Brother’s tenants are extroverts. Indeed, as the weeks have passed, their displays have become borderline pathological. The F-word is now the only intensifier in town. The girls use leftover cake icing to frost their exposed areolae. Racism and homophobia as well as libidos earn their hour in the sun. Now the Hertfordshire constabulary are taking a look at the tapes after what is known as “a fracas” took place. Channel 4’s announcers advise viewers to expect strong language and nudity, a warning that in another era might have been delivered to visitors to Bedlam. Instead, for a culture that believes in its right to have a laugh, to be a-bit-mad-me and thinks discretion is for losers, it is the greatest of come-ons. The dirty dozen’s behaviour is not so much aberrant as noble, an extension of that most favoured of qualities, authenticity.
This is certainly how the inmates think. In their preparatory interviews, they boasted of their extroversion as if it were a prized accomplishment. By their own descriptions, gay Marco was a “drama queen”, homophobic Ahmed was “arrogant” and “argumentative”, Emma, sacked from every job she ever had, was “loud” and “dippy”. The lesbian anarchist Kitten positively undersold herself when she suggested she was only “ a bit gabby, a bit controversial”. On their CVs shone achievements such as Jason’s winning the Mr Best Buttocks, South Lanarkshire (1996) title and Stuart’s four A-grade A levels, from which triumph he extrapolated an ambition to “go down in history as the smartest man ever”.
In such times, the tradition of the introverted performer looks like a dying paradox. One thinks of the comedian Rowan Atkinson, whose role offstage is to play the Invisible Man at parties; or Alan Bennett — even now, at 70, barely able to acknowledge his homosexuality. But they are members of a near extinct breed. It is the age, instead, of the outrageous camp comedian who preens rather than crimsons at his audience’s applause. Craving, like all extroverts, reassurance that deprived of spectators he would still exist, Graham Norton on Desert Island Discs chose as his luxury a mirror. In politics Iain Duncan Smith, the quiet man who failed sufficiently to turn up the volume, skulks on the Tory backbenches. Brooding introvert Gordon Brown waits for ever to shuffle into the limelight vacated by his evangelically extrovert prime minister. In America, the last introvert president was Nixon. Before that, perhaps, Coolidge. Even backroom boffins now sashay centre stage. Reginald Mitchell, of Spitfire fame, and Barnes Wallis, who came up with the bouncing bomb, were stammering wallflowers. Now we applaud the vocal but bumbling Beagle scientist Colin Pillinger, whose sideburns surpass his success.
And as our role models perform, so must we, even down to the youngest. In the American classroom, shyness, once seen as a synonym for good behaviour and an indicator of intelligence, has been pathologised into social anxiety disorder, an affliction to be treated pharmaceutically. In Britain, a schoolscape in which talent competitions modelled on Pop Idol have replaced sports days, each must not only have prizes but emerge, in their heads at least, the stars of their own sitcoms.
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Introversion, the tendency to direct one’s attention and effort inwards, and extroversion, the reverse, were first defined by Carl Jung, who as an introvert himself tended to favour the former as the more mature of the two personality types. Reliable polling in both the US and UK suggests that the population breaks down roughly 50/50 between the two: extroverts, by the more noise they make, simply seem more populous.
In fact it is probably even harder for the American introvert. In a touching article in The Atlantic Monthly last year the writer Jonathan Rauch, after years of denial, came out as one, assessing himself as among the most “misunderstood and aggrieved” groups in America: “Extroverts are seen as big-hearted, vibrant, warm, empathic,” he wrote. “ ‘People person’ is a compliment. Introverts are described with words such as ‘guarded’, ‘loner’, ‘reserved’, ‘taciturn’, ‘self-contained’, ‘private’ — narrow, ungenerous words.” He pleaded for tolerance of his “orientation”.
And orientation it is. Introverts have an active cerebral cortex that cannot cope with overload; going into a noisy pub can be physically painful. Extroverts, on the other hand, have a sluggish cortex and need external stimulation to ratchet it up to an optimum level. It may all come down to how your individual dopamine receptors work. Introversion is not a choice; it is how you are.
Yet society can still lean on us to behave against type, sometimes successfully. Rowan Bayne of the University of East Anglia, the author of a new book, Psychological Types at Work, explains: “Some societies and some situations clearly evoke extroversion rather than introversion, and vice versa. The way you behave is affected by lots of factors as well as your predisposition, and, of course, alcohol has a major effect in disinhibiting people.”
The vodka jelly and other liquids being pumped into the Big Brother house are certainly playing their part in pushing extroversion to its exhibitionist extreme. But amid the programme’s increasingly tearful collision of egos, one story is emerging of particular interest. Michelle, the bored mortgage adviser who would prefer to be a glamour model, confessed at the outset that she was an “ex-shy person” who, hurrah, had become accomplished at “pulling ” every weekend.
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Under the huis-clos conditions imposed by Endemol, however, her veneer is disintegrating. Trapped in the secret bed-sit part of the house, she first responded hysterically to her would-be amoré Stuart flirting with other women and then claimed that a fellow contestant had appropriated her name. The pitiful wreck of a bunny-boiler that hid under the bed-sit’s duvet suggested that though she may have chosen extroversion, her dopamine was not so easily duped.
But if Michelle chose the wrong “cure”, there may yet be ways for introverts to cope in an increasingly extrovert world. Dorothy Rowe, the psychologist who for her book The Successful Self spoke to successful representatives of both personality types, speaks on the matter with some authority, for she is an introvert who in her twenties learned extrovert conversational tactics from a friend.
“What I always advocate is that you can become a wise introvert or a wise extrovert. A wise extrovert comes to realise that they do not need to have absolutely everybody in the world liking them, that they can manage as long as the significant people in their world do. What we introverts have to learn is that you cannot get the entire universe under your control. You have to accept that life is a matter of continuous change, go with the flow and make do with the tiny bit of the universe you can organise. And when people accept that wisdom, their behaviour changes. Introverts cease to be so obsessional, organising and needing to achieve something every minute, and extroverts find it easier to spend time on their own.”
And even in popularity contests, extroversion may not be the only way to win. At the end of his National Theatre adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, Alan Bennett has Toad admonish Rat for not explaining the benefits of “not showing off, being humble and shy and nice”.
“ . . . what you didn’t say was that this way I get more attention than ever. Everybody loves me! It’s wonderful!” And as the nation’s No 1 introvert and national treasure, Alan Bennett should know.
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Do you prefer introverts or extroverts? E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
INTROVERT OR EXTROVERT?
1 You are asked to explain why you did something. If you always have an answer — sensible or not — you are an introvert. If your response tends to be, “I don’t know, I just do things”, you are an extrovert. Faced with a problem, introverts tend to think for some time before acting. Extroverts prefer to get started.
2 Your day is planned; something happens to disrupt it. If your reaction is one of anxiety and confusion, you are an introvert. If your first thought is “How delightful and stimulating”, you are an extrovert.
3 Extroverts want everybody to like and approve of them. Introverts want to win approval from a small group of people whose opinions they value.
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4 Extroverts want to achieve in order to be liked. Introverts feel that achievement is important for its own sake.
5 Which of the following matters to you more? Your relationships with other people, or a sense of personal development, control and organisation? The former makes you an extrovert, the latter an introvert.
6 Introverts fear chaos because they feel that they will shatter into pieces, while extroverts fear being abandoned and rejected because they feel that they will disappear. They will look in the mirror and see no one there.
DOROTHY ROWE
INTROVERTS LOVE . . .
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Possession by A.S. Byatt
Amélie
Yamamoto
Corsica
Brown
Hatha Yoga
Victorian terrace
Cats (non-pedigree)
Radiohead
INTROVERTS HATE . . .
Vernon God Little by D.B.C. Pierre
Kill Bill
Versace
Barbados
Blair
Ashtanga Yoga
Open-plan loft
Dogs (especially big ones)
Busted