What's so real about reality television?
asks Pete Wilding.




IN THE WEEK before the new series of Big Brother started, a forum on the BBC news website focused on the question: “Will you be watching Big Brother?” Perhaps a more incisive approach might have been, “Why will you be watching Big Brother? Again.”

There followed a number of proudly disparaging responses. One angry customer contributed a gem: “If I want to see a load of delinquents arguing in a stuffy room, I'll watch BBC Parliament.”

Still, Davina hauls in more than six million viewers for Friday night evictions, the only time you can be guaranteed that something will actually happen, and only a few less during the week.

There is a disparity here I find difficult to reconcile. Millions of avid viewers every night, yet everywhere you turn is somebody slagging it off. Who are these people? They can’t all be thirteen-year-old girls (and thank goodness for that – just imagine 6 million 13-year-old girls! The horror!).

Every age has its vice, of course. Reality TV seems to have become the guilty pleasure of the 21st Century. BBC Radio Five Live offers Big Brother news updates – why? My impression of the average Five Live listener does not indulge in the goldfish bowl nonsense that is Big Brother.

Clearly, there are people who watch who are too embarrassed to admit it. I’m tempted to use the analogy of passing a traffic accident – every sinew tells you to look away, but it’s just so captivating. Except, of course, it isn’t.

What we have here – and I’m including Celebrity Love Island, I’m a Celebrity…, The Farm and any other ‘reality’ TV show in this - is cultural cancer. Celebrity is the cause and effect of pandemic personality shortage: The public creative intellect is dulled into early retirement by gossip, cosmetic ‘beauty’ and the Sun. Desperate for personality, the public cling to the only thing they know, and the instigator of their despair: Celebrity.

Endemol has now taken this carcinogenic exploitation too far. The company behind Big Brother has announced plans for a show in which a group of men compete for a cash prize in a sperm race. Yes, you heard me right. In an IVF laboratory, their sperm will be inserted into a tube containing an egg embryo. Whichever, erm, penetrates the egg first will win the prize for the appropriate competitor.

This is humanity at its worst. Should we be surprised at the evil in the world when we display such a cack-handed, dispassionate, hedonistic, lollygagging approach to life? As shocking as many will find it, however, it is merely a further symptom of the cancer of which I speak. This is a question of degree, not type.

I would like to propose a dichotomous solution – one that will address both the innate dullness of the programming and the problem of celebrity and its effect upon modern western popular culture.

I think we should combine Celebrity Love Island with, say, Battle Royale. Let me explain: We take a clutch of B-list celebrities desperate for a career boost (delusional) or respect (even more so), and fly them off to a gorgeous, ready-made tropical island. They set off under the illusion that they will spend a few weeks drinking, flirting, sunbathing and looking better on camera than they actually do. En route, however, we chloroform them and revive them when we reach the island. Once there, they will be told that they have three days to kill each other. If more than one is alive after three days, they will all be killed. The survivor will be allowed to live and will be returned home.

Here is the beauty of Operation Celebrity Cleansing: Not only does this guarantee good televisual entertainment (the Japanese will love it, guarantee financial viability and strengthening relations with the Far East), in the Running Man sense rather than The Truman Show; it also addresses the issue of celebrity monopolisation of popular culture. It the same vein as Kitano, the aim would be to instill respect in celebrities, help them to realise their role and potential as role models, educators and, dare I say it, pillars of society, and to shock them into behaving. Ideally, the world of celebrity would implode, leaving a crater in pop culture that can only be filled by creativity, wit and, well, nice stuff.

Of course, I’m joking. Of course I don’t have designs on the mass slaughter of (hardly) innocent celebrities. This is merely an idea borne out of years of pent-up frustration at the defiling of what used to be a great British culture. People past appreciated the finer things – the arts, sincerity, dignity. But that has almost become the underground scene, vagrant and scowling at the cartoon successor prowling our streets. I can see these things – things to be proud of – slipping away. And, of course, the great irony of reality television is that it is so detached from any kind of realism. When was the last time you were under house arrest with a bunch of people you didn’t know or pleasured a pig in front of a rolling television camera? Or, for that matter, raced with a dozen other men to see who could father a child the quickest? ‘Absurd’ doesn’t cover it; ‘obscene’ is far more accurate. And, knowing that the net of popular culture falls, more so than ever before, on children under 12, let’s consider the role of the subjects of these people as role models.

Makosi Musambasi of the current Big Brother household is a nurse by profession, yet she had unprotected sex in front of millions of viewers to show everyone previously unsure about how to fall unexpectedly pregnant and catch any number of STDs exactly how it’s done.

At least two performers on another recent ‘reality’ television show found fame through kiss-and-tell stories of coke-fuelled sex with, well, real celebrities. Exactly when did that sort of thing become acceptable?

Furthermore, what exactly has Jade Goody ever done to deserve the fame and fortune that has found her? All she did in that den of iniquity was put on weight and make a fool of herself. She seems happier and a little more settled now, and good luck to her. But what kind of example does it set?

You see, these people are just as human and stupid and fallible as the rest of us, a vulnerability perhaps magnified by scrutiny. Purely because such behaviour has become our entertainment and cultural reference point, however, it becomes ingrained into the culture, making it acceptable for the younger, more impressionable generations.

Media analyst and author Steven Johnson has received critical acclaim for his book Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he suggests that modern popular culture is much more intellectually stimulating and mentally healthy than many people have suggested.

However, speaking to online independent news agency Alternet.org, he was less enthusiastic talking about reality television:

“I don't think those shows are the sharpest on TV and I certainly don't think that you're improving your mind by watching them - but they're a sign that the overall trend in our culture is toward more complexity.”

Diversity, perhaps. But not by any stretch of the imagination is the programming of Endemol, et al intellectually complex.

The first series of Big Brother was a terrific event and a worthy psychological experiment – not merely for the study of human nature under finite conditions to which we’re not accustomed, but moreover for the ignorance of the housemates toward the scrutiny out the outside world and the fame that awaited them. The follow-up was equally valuable for precisely the opposite reason – because they did know the reaction of the greater public and were aware that several of them would probably become millionaires at some point.

Thereafter, however, it has been spirit-crushingly pointless – why else do you think there has been a desperate marketing overhaul for every new series? Because the producers fear – naively – that the public aren’t stupid enough to be captivated by the saga of diminishing numbers of nobodies lazing around and squabbling for the entire summer. How wrong they are.

The show has now become a competition for who can be the most morally decrepit, defunct and deceitful human being – and get away with it.

Another answer on the BBC forum said that he went home to escape the dysfunctional backbiting and politics of the office, not to tune in to more.

But that’s just the issue. It’s not entertaining, it’s long since been a worthwhile sociological experiment – one look at the cast of characters shows it’s the only soap opera with a demographic narrower than its audience. Furthermore, it’s ugly. It forces us to see ourselves for what we are, or rather, what we are quickly becoming – a perverted, selfish, conceited, faithless race. It is visual cocaine for the blind, and even those who claim immunity are susceptible.

One particular contribution to the debate, from the modestly-namebadged ‘John, Bristol’, summed it up: “Why is the BBC even bothering to mention this let alone ask people’s opinions. It's not news, or anything remotely related to ordinary peoples lives - it's tabloid journalism at its worst. A child dies of hunger or related illness every few seconds and you consider this worthy of attention?”
Hear, hear, say I. Pretentious intellectualism aside, this is a real issue. In a tragically ironic echo from Orwell’s nightmare world, Big Brother has control of our minds and our actions and many don’t know how to wrest themselves clear. Please, please, please rid us of this tyranny – or a fate worse than that of Winston Smith, or even the kids in Grade 9, awaits us all.

Pete Wilding





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