The Red Room in the U.S. Big
Brother house, where contestants communicate via camera with the programme’s
producers.
Big Brother fans in
Cologne, Germany, welcome their favourite contestants back to “real” life. |
A new television genre
has won huge audiences across the world. Despised by some, adored by others, reality
shows play upon the paradoxes of modern society—but at what cost?
 Nine
people are travelling across Spain in a bus. Ten Poles will be locked in a house
in Warsaw. Germans have been invited to slim and earn their lost weight in gold.
A seemingly mundane set of events, watched over by cameras and transformed into primetime
television by the fact that everyone must work together though only one can win.
Reality may have perplexed philosophers and scientists for centuries, but in the
jargon of modern-day television it has become a surefire way to entice the restless
viewer. Across Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America, programmes devised
on the basis that a “real” set of events involving “ordinary” people is unfolding—with
cash prizes—have defied the industry’s rules of thumb. Place ten unknown men and
women in a locked villa in Spain under the gaze of 29 cameras, and the result is
unexpected: 12 million people, a third of the nation’s population, tuned in to watch.
Everywhere the small-screen formula of constant surveillance, money-driven competition
and confinement has travelled, it has triumphed. In the United States, Survivor—featuring
16 contestants marooned on a sweltering Malaysian island and forced to eat grubs—simply
overwhelmed all other summer programming, picking up 50 million viewers. A sister
show in Brazil did likewise. Some 15 countries, meanwhile, have adapted the Dutch
programme Big Brother, launched in 1999, in which ten people inhabit a house, converse,
complot, and with the help of viewers’ votes thin down over several months to a final
winner. An estimated 300 million people have now seen the show; those veterans of
the Spanish villa are already stars, contributing their particular mystique to the
market of celebrity tie-ins through a video-game and auction of their favourite blankets.
“We created a new genre where we proved that ordinary people can be very interesting
as characters, and where next-door people can do much more than everyone expected
they could,” declares John De Mol, the Dutch head of Endemol Entertainment and inventor
of Big Brother.
For muttering critics and offended bishops, however, this new genre was a case of
television sinking to a misanthropic low. While some agreed with De Mol that his
show was consensual, competitive fun and excellent fodder for what American producers
term the water cooler—the place in the office where staff gossip—opponents found
only voyeurism and degradation. In Germany, government ministers suggested the programme
could be declared unconstitutional. Bernard Crick, biographer of the author George
Orwell, despaired at a fulfilled prophecy. People “are simply depoliticized by cultural
debasement, dumbed down, kept from even thinking of demanding fair shares,” he wrote
of Orwell’s satire in 1984, the novel that invented Big Brother. The show, he suggested,
offered the same glitzy “prolefeed.”
Intimate
troubles under the glare of spotlights
So many viewers
and such attacks would suggest that cameras and humans have been striking up a new
relationship. “Viewers come from all social classes, even culturally very high ones,”
argues Ignacio Bel, a professor in information rights in Madrid. “It comes down to
a morbid fascination, to an unhealthy curiosity.” When the American channel Court
TV briefly ran a show in which criminals confessed their murders on camera, the concerns
seemed fully justified. Watch Big Brother, however, and privacy fears may be allayed.
For a start, the participants want to be there: their fear is not exposure but anonymity,
a kind of individual fade-out. And though much of the appeal centres on the promise
of spying a saucy moment—sex is always being talked about, though rarely had—the
truth is that the viewer’s diet is less salacious. In the British version, contestants
overslept, tended chickens, photocopied their anatomy, and decried the utter tedium
of living on television without watching television. Rather than intrusive, the antics
were just excruciatingly banal.
But look again, and the same lack of action can take on a different meaning. Nothing
much happens, no-one emits an even remotely interesting opinion, but the tell-tale
reality TV gesture, the quick eye-flick, registers the nearest camera. Each conversation,
vacuous as it may be, treads a perilous line between self-expression, impressing
housemates (who nominate each other for eviction), and currying favour with millions
of sofa-bound viewers. The effect is akin to a public relations assault course. “It
appealed to the psychologist in me,” says 39-year-old Nidi Etim from Manchester,
England. “Watching how they all interacted, who were the natural leaders, how they
coped with the nominations.”
At the heart of reality shows’ popularity are exactly these interpersonal conflicts—the
same force which animates traditional drama, soap-operas and talk-shows. Indeed talk-shows
are among the closest relatives of reality TV, allowing “ordinary” people to thrash
out their most intimate troubles under the glare of studio lights. But the new genre
has a different focus. Cameras are mounted on an island or in a house, and a mini-society
is invited in. Viewers pry on events, monitor reactions, assess behaviour. Instead
of an individual’s tale, or a daily life, the show is about the society’s evolution,
the disintegration of an artificial assembly via a period of co-operation towards
a final prize-winner.
“The best mixture of fiction and reality that has existed until now,” insists Elizabeth
Lopez, producer of Gran Hermano for Spain’s Tele5. The shows may be contrived (the
producers of the U.S. Big Brother tried to bribe dull contestants $50,000 into making
way for a “sexy” newcomer), but as Lopez says, the participants “write their own
scripts.” For many viewers, the struggle is all too recognizable. It is the balance
between staying on the show, getting others off the show, and preserving at least
a façade of solidarity. It is a “script” that the modern workplace and family
are founded upon—battling to be first but staying popular. In Internet chat forums,
the debate centres on who is sincere, who is “playing Miss Cool,” who is the villain:
in short, how each person responds to the challenge. Add cameras and excessive stage
management, says social psychologist Peter Lunt (see interview opposite), and the
stakes get even higher. Contestants are not just playing with each other, but with
the very nature of living in a world dominated by the emotions, language and images
coined by the mass media.
With it has come a new kind of celebrity. Graduates from the school of 24-hour surveillance
such as Holland’s Bart Spring and U.S. Survivor victor Richard Hatch, a gay corporate
trainer, have soared into fame’s dizzy heights—Spring has even launched his own logoed
clothing range. Rather than offer perfect teeth, the new stars glitter with ordinariness:
they are people one could know before fame won them the services of bodyguards and
image consultants. Non-stop availability of many shows on the Internet, gossip sites,
public voting, even the chance to e-mail participants, reinforces this democratic
attraction. Reality TV appears to be under viewers’ control even as it trumpets media
power.
The
cynical appeal of a staged life
Following its
early successes, the mix of ceaseless documentary and game-show is spawning in a
frenzy, confining volunteers in buses (De Mol’s new show The Bus), locking them to
possible mates (Chains of Love, De Mol again) or chasing them round cities (the extremely
bizarre game at www.realityrun.com). “Any given success is overproduced like mad
by imitators,” says Todd Gitlin, a leading thinker on the media from New York University.
All harmless, say the show’s producers. No blood is spilt, and no-one ends up poorer.
Yet the loops connecting television and society are difficult to untangle. It may
be fun to watch men and women stumble through the hardships with a fat lens over
their shoulder, but is this not a case of television spreading its empire? And in
so doing, is television imposing its own shorthand on the “real” world—its typologies,
quick characterizations, game-show dynamics and ad breaks?
“I suspect that the greatest flavoring of life that comes from these shows is a kind
of knowing cynicism,” says Gitlin, “an embrace of the idea that everything is staged,
that feelings are shallow, that the difference between life and simulation is insignificant.”
Not a voyeuristic hell then, but a televised format to daily life: that may be reality
TV’s main message. Or, as one man said of his Big Brother housemates: “we’re so close
. . . well, I feel we are.”
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