Peter Bazalgette
“Is reality television on its last legs?” is a pretty dumb question. But if I had £1 for each time I’m asked it I could make serious inroads into Britain’s swollen government debt. And a good deal of the money would have accrued in the past month, since Channel 4 announced they could do without Big Brother. In fact, reality television has never been stronger—dominating the schedules with narratives at about a tenth the cost of television drama. Telly tsars are no more going to give up on reality television then they are on news, sport or comedy. It’s become one of the ways that television is made.
Reality television is an unscripted show in which members of the public are placed in a predicament and followed by cameras to see how they will react. The phrase arose in the US in the 1990s when media folk were stumped as to how to refer to the hybrid formats pouring out of Europe—Big Brother, Survivor, Wife Swap, Faking It, Supernanny and so on. Reality programmes are essentially formatted documentaries. Commissioners used to send out directors to make a documentary about, say, moving house. The problem was that they had no idea what the production team would come back with. Worse, it was a one-off and they then had to come up with a new idea, then another, and so on. But format the idea and call it Location, Location, Location and you know that each programme will generate you a narrative with a resolution. You can then go on making the same show until the great British public tire of it (ten years in the case of Big Brother, 30 and counting in the case of the Antiques Roadshow).
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Tom Chatfield
Big Brother will no longer be watched by you
And so farewell then, Big Brother. Come the end of series eleven next year, Channel 4 has announced its intention to axe the ailing flagship of reality television, with the other major channels apparently also deciding they’d rather not step too close to its twitching corpse. The end of an era? The world has certainly tired relatively fast of this brand of reality, perhaps because real life, unlike art, tends wearily to end up repeating itself (forcing producers into ever-more-desperate attempts at enlivening). But BB’s death represents not so much a victory for taste as a striking rear-guard action by the forces of talent, which in recent years have colonised a rather different and altogether more cheering kind of television. As Sam Leith argued in his piece on “the death of do-nothing celebrity” in Prospect earlier this year:
Look at what tops the ratings now… The key shows are Strictly Come Dancing, The Apprentice, The X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. Personality and essence remain a vital component, but here are a quartet of television programmes that are predominantly about doing. You won’t triumph on them just because of what you’re like, but because of what you can do: play the tin whistle, clack the spoons on your kilted knee, belt out a Leonard Cohen song like you mean it… Some kind of a flight towards authority—towards excellence, even—is taking place. Witness that other staple of the reality television diet, Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, in which the super-chef descends upon a hapless restaurateur and brutally reminds them of the gulf between bad, merely decent and excellent.
It certainly suggests a fundamental limit to the notion of everyone being exactly as interesting as everyone else. As a still more withering critic than Gordon Ramsay once put it:
You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerd-othon: a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent.
The critic was Martin Amis, and the context was the Preface to his seminal essay collection The War Against Cliché (a version of which can be read online here). Amis himself finished the paragraph above with a telling final sentence: a shrug, perhaps, in the direction of Big Brother and its numberless associates. “Therefore, talent must go.” In 2001, with reality television in its first flush of world domination, few would have dared to disagree with his gloomy prognosis. Today, though, it’s BB that’s gone; and talent that remains on our screens.
Brian Semple
Nestor Kirchner's reluctance to go on reality TV meant he didn't get the thumbs-up from the Argentinian electorate
As our television screens are swamped with this year’s deluge of vacuous, talentless, fame-hungry nobodies (ie Big Brother contestants), take comfort in the thought that reality TV does not, as yet, decide our national elections. For this, writes William Gill in a free to read web exclusive for Prospect, is the bizarre state of affairs in Argentina, where the public elected not to give former president Nestor Kirchner another term in Congress thanks to his refusal to appear on reality TV show Gran Cunado (Big Brother-in-law).
The show, which is part of popular comedy programme Showtime, featured doppelgangers of the main candidates for the Congress elections, with the public invited to eject whoever they didn’t want. The trouble for Kirchner started when the real politicians were invited onto the show. All initially refused, but one—Francisco de Narvaez, whose popularity soared as a result and who then when on to beat Kirchner in the real election.
Should Kirchner, who is notoriously humorless, have set aside his pride and given into the demands of a reality TV-obsessed public? And how long will it before Cameron and Brown are duking it out in the Big Brother house to secure our votes? As ever, leave your thoughts below.
Tom Chatfield
Lakewood Church, Houston: the triumph of mega-religion
This month’s arts and books section features two lead articles on, first, the changing nature of global religion and, second, some more local shifts in the minor faith that is British reality television. In the first piece, Eric Kaufmann, a fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Centre, looks at John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s much-discussed new book God is Back. It’s an urgently important book, he argues, because it takes the established “religious markets” arguments—that a highly entrepreneurial incarnation of Christianity lies behind much of the influence of religion in modern America—and applies this to the world as a whole. Among other things, Kaufmann notes that China is currently “the world’s wild west” in religious terms—and that at current religious growth rates it “could be both the world’s biggest Muslim and Christian country by 2050.” Secularism, according to the authors of God is Back, may prove to be just one of those comforting myths the future will have to learn to live without.
In our second long arts piece this month, Sam Leith tackles the cult of “do-nothing celebrity”—and traces its happy demise in the relam of British reality TV. “I risk a place in Pseud’s Corner,” he ventures, “but I think [reality television] has undergone a telling change of ontological emphasis: from being to doing.” All of which puts, as he explains, the bulging ranks of the celebrity commentariat in an increasingly complicated position…
Tom Chatfield
The face that launched a million sales
You may have noticed that poor Jade Goody has been in the news recently. If the Sun is your daily paper of choice, in fact, she more-or-less has been the news, having featured on six of their last seven front pages. Where, in the middle of such a media storm, might an interested party find some sanity?
Well, I’ve been flicking through Wikipedia’s article on Jade Goody, and—more importantly—through its edit history, and my sense is that in its own way this rolling, lurching document is all the guide you’ll ever need to the whole business. It’s an amazing microcosm of all the attitudes, facts and opinions out there: a dynamic record that switches several times a day between gloating, sympathy, irrelevance and a concern for the finest details of fact that puts the coverage of even the most august print journals to shame.
As far as this this particular human drama is concerned, in fact, Wikipedia and its edit history together form a resource that’s more informative, mature, entertaining, sporadically surreal and yet representative overall than anything you’ll find almost anywhere else. To give you a sample of its finely blended flavours, here are some sample comments I’ve extracted from the article’s edit history over the last few months, in sequence, from past to present:
Actually her PhD is in Transformational Hermeutics. Appropriate, really, isn’t it?
added people of Caribbean descent (said ref confirms her paternal grandfather was a negro from the W Indies)
Replaced content with ‘is a repulsive, vile cow.’
radical hysterectomy rather than simple hysterectomy
by all means mention the mother, but being a lesbian or crack addict (as you recently added) is not relevant to Jades biography
Rv in the interests of rehabilitation and Jimbo’s views on “basic human dignity”, remove unnecesary bollocks. It may be true, but we don’t have to report it
added astounding – ‘a level of ignorance’ is an understatement – everyone is ignorant of some things
until we know that she has legally changed her name (and have a source for it), it should stay as Goody not Tweed
Listen I am experienced in this sort of thing. Legally her name is now Jade Tweed.
No, we DO NOT know what her name is until it is confirmed. Until then, it has to stay as Goody
this should not be deleted
yes it should, no decent article has this rubbish
corrected wording: it read as though she might survive, which is impossible; what is uncertain is how many days / weeks / months she will live
added that her sons were Christened as well as her
remove, the sun is not a reliable source for such BLP issues, and quite frankly, this is getting disgusting. WP:BLP makes it quite clear we must respect human dignity
Reverted good faith edits by Taopman; We’re not having a daily fucking countdown
removing vandalism, have some respect please
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