As seen on TV
Whether we like the idea or not, young people in western culture get most of their cues and their role models for life from television. TV tells them what to look like, what to expect from the world and how to behave. TV tells them what to eat, what to buy and what to wear.
A modified screenshot of “The Incident”
I am not a watcher or a fan of Big Brother but I was very interested in reality TV’s precursor, Cinéma vérité when I was a film student back in my 20s. Cinéma vérité means, roughly, “cinema of truth”.
My studies led me to take an interest in the BBC/ABC co-production Sylvania Waters (1992), an early version of the reality TV that has become so prevalent today. Sylvania Waters presented a family of nouveau riche Australians who thought they were the bee’s knees but were actually a bunch of bush pigs with money and that’s why viewers tuned in each week. To watch white trash make arses of themselves on national TV and remain firmly cocooned in utter cluelessness. Australian audiences lapped up its first taste of reality TV.
Shows featuring real people rather than written characters — reacting to the overly scripted vistas early television presented us with — form a bridge between solid ground and pixil fantasy. Seeing real people on TV makes TV more real. It’s a place you can visit, like Bombay or China, and so the things we see upon it become more solid and viable.
Big Brother “jumped the shark”, devolved from post-cinema verite and became a game show the day it was moved from its secret mystery location to Dreamworld, and its participants were housed next to the performing seals and their buckets of fish just in case there was ever any doubt.
According to friends of mine who do enjoy Big Brother and have been following the program for awhile, the current batch of housemates are exceptionally ordinary. Viewers used to tune in to see individuals playing off each other. This batch of Ken and Barbies have little to offer aside from arse crack and attitude perhaps this is why the network has resorted to louder and cruder garish tricks to keep the viewers watching and sending those expensive SMS messages.
Personally, I think that whether or not the network handled the recent behavioural incident (for more details, see here) on BB adeptly or not is irrelevant. Whether or not someone scripted the sexual misconduct and paid the boys to do what they did or whether they just pushed a lot of buttons and hoped for something controversial to take place makes little difference. If Big Brother does not keep the pace; if the titillation factor and soft porn late night screenings do not keep young people gagging and texting for more then the show will drop its ratings & the advertising spots within its timeslot will devalue. Big Brother must keep upping the ante. What I’m wondering is, how far do we want them to go?
The 1979 SF mini series The Quatermass Conclusion depicts society on the verge of collapse. Gangs and cults have taken over the streets. Television, running on a limited budget, combines pornography with children’s programming: something the whole family can enjoy.
And remember that wacky game show featured in The Running Man: Your Money or Your Life? With a good third of an evening’s news broadcasts already devoted to sports and sports injuries, how far are we really from Rollerball do you think?
I suspect the BB honchos would love nothing more than acts of genuine criminal violence to take place live to air. Because, without such acts, the show is going to die in the arse. They’ve wrung every drop they can get from the concept already; all there is left is controversy, either real or manufactured and really, what’s the difference to a bunch of slack-jawed teens to whom television is the window to the world?
Cinema and television such as 2002’s My Little Eye and an episode of the new Dr Who have had a poke at such issues already, but still the ‘reality’ juggernaut lumbers on. I’ll bet plans for the next wave of ‘reality’ are on the table already. Here’s some title suggestions how about: ‘Teenage Date Rape’ or ‘Survivor: Child Sex Assault’. Depends what they can get away with. Depends how desensitised we allow ourselves to become.
Me? I’ll take an episode of Dead Like Me over Big Brother’s dead in the water any day…
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I’d prefer an episode of Dead Like Me over BB too but they don’t actually screen any of the good shows anymore. TV programmers treat television viewers like monkeys.
Another interesting fictional take on “reality TV” is “The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe”, a novel by DG Compton — written in 1974. It’s set in a future (our present?) where death of anything except old age is rare. A TV network hires a journalist to follow a woman dying of some rare disease and film the progress of her death via a camera implanted in his retina, for the curiosity of society at large.
Apparently there was a film of the novel, called “La Mort en direct” or “Death Watch” (1980), but I haven’t seen it.
Series 7 is also a rather good fictional reality TV flick.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251031/
Well, I would say digital pay-for-view television, DVDs, and the Internet are part of the reason why commercial free-to-air television has turned to reality shows, and lapped them up.
Lost, Medium, Law & Order and House, etc. can all be watched by hiring it from a DVD store, and without the adverts, or just head out to the cinema for a good movie instead. I don’t think networks would survive without these shows, and there are so many of them: The Biggest Loser, Survivor, Race Around the World, The Apprentice, Australian Idol, Dancing With the Stars, and the list goes on.
Of course, like all products, they have a life-cycle. Perhaps Big Brother edt al is near the end of its life-cycle, so it needs something ‘new’ to keep it alive. So they turn to sexual scandal. Sad, yes. It’s like marketing any product, nothing captures the population’s imagination forever, but the marketers keep trying anyway.
This is the first time I’ve watched Big Brother, and its fascinating in a sick way. Why do we do it as a society? Watch I mean. All I can conclude its better to compare yourself to distant, unreachable personalities, and say “We’ll, at least I’m not as delluded as they are.” Like standing next to a fat person and saying that you are thin.
In an attempt to answer your question, David, Ben Payne tries to explain why he watches the show at http://benpayne.livejournal.com/91962.html
And on the subject of fictional treatments of ‘reality tv’; one of the Law & Order franchise (probably SVU, which is the only one I watch regularly) also had an episode about a BB-type reality TV show. In theirs, someone was murdered in the show, and it was discovered that the producers had deliberately selected someone with a history of violence as a cast member. (I wonder if the producers of BB saw this: it was on their network.)
One can argue that this is sour grapes from a drama show which may see itself as losing audience share to reality TV. OTOH, I can’t imagine a drama show getting away with something like the turkey slap or last year’s penis-in-the-hair incident - and in that case, the blame would fall squarely on the producers. In reality TV, the producers can say that it was unscripted and blame it on the people in the house… which, disturbingly enough, is not unlike John Howard’s denials in the children overboard affair, or the US government’s treatment of the Abu Ghraib case; “honest, it wasn’t us, we didn’t know this would happen, we didn’t give the orders, we obviously can’t be held responsible…”
Okay, I’ve gone from cynicism to conspiracy theory, and I admit, that’s over the top. It’s probably not fair to compare the actions of the boys in the BB House to those of the guards at Abu Ghraib, even if their excuses were similar. But why do people do these things? Could it have something to do with the examples we’re being given by our political leaders?
I remember seeing a news report a year or two ago about a group of scriptwriters working for one of the US networks (Fox I think) claiming damages for poor working conditions, overwork, unpaid overtime, etc. The thing was, they were described as “scriptwriters for a reality TV show”…
Perhaps TEN should be made to produce their BB scriptwriters and scripts in court. Let’s see how many such “incidents” they wrote and how “real” this piece of unreality is.
To David S.,
To be fair to reality TV shows, they still need scriptwriters for the host’s homilies, the voiceovers, etc., etc. You don’t expect the otherwise unemployable camera hogs BB uses for hosts to be able to come up with an intelligible sentence on their own, do you?
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