We take television for granted in the same way as we take everyday life for granted … Our experience of television is of a piece with our experience of the world: we do not expect it to be, nor can we imagine it to be, significantly otherwise. (Silverstone 2000: 3)
This chapter outlines some of the recent popular debates that have been triggered by reality TV. In doing so, it firstly attempts to situate reality TV within current preoccupations about the parameters of reality TV and its broader cultural status. Secondly, it signals key generic traits of the genre that have provoked concern and/or support for its role as a democratising formula. Thirdly, we open up the popular ethical concerns with reality TV’s claim to veracity and to its ability to document ‘real lives’ and ‘real people’. Whilst we focus on the popular inflection of debates about reality TV, there is obviously no firm and fast distinction between these discussions and their foci and the more academically-framed discussions that inform the rest of this book. Discussions about ‘event TV’, for example, preoccupy all media analysts now attempting to gauge the media manipulation and marketing of television and its spillage into everyday life. Indeed towards the end of the book we signal that ‘event TV’ and its profoundly public media spectacle is indeed, as we see it, one of the futures of the reality TV formula.
The intersection of reality packages with older televisual techniques is highlighted in our discussion of ‘vox pop’. Again, the relationship between more established and revered documentary forms and the newer populist reality formula is underlined. Television has conventionally been underscored as a profoundly domestic and quotidian medium. The role of the voice of ordinary people on television has been a preoccupation of documentary makers long before its prolific introduction into reality TV. Here, we signal the extension of older media impulses to include ordinary people on screen and to validate their presence in a privileged forum. We discuss the importance of ordinary voices and signal a debate ongoing throughout this book into the potential political nature of that inclusion. Does the voice of the ordinary person on television ensure that a politicised agenda has been met? How does one identify the political: is it merely the older, more pronounced socialist/Leftist/radical impulses of particularly the Griersonian school and its legacy? Does the inclusion of ordinary voices articulating their fantasies and fears on, for example, a makeover programme necessarily mean less than that of a middle-aged couple speaking about their post-war housing conditions? How do we situate and evaluate these claims to everyday political concerns within the cultural and also media contexts in which they occur? As cultural theorists we are concerned to prioritise the ‘structure of feeling’ that we see as resonating through much reality TV. That said, as politically-concerned media theorists we also bear a certain reverence for older, overtly politicised, forms of media engagement that rooted documentary practice in (albeit flawed) desires to change social policy, uncover invisible lives and challenge an inequitable social system.
These concerns lead into our introduction of ethical debates which have focused on the ability of the camera, in a complex digital, satellite, multi-platform age, to capture the real and to represent it in all its complexity; laying bare the hidden intricacies of ordinary lives. ‘Trust’ is a key concept here and in our postmodern age trust is a raddled and embattled category. In the discussion of ‘faking it’, we signal debates covered throughout the book concerning the role and power of the camera and the powerful claims of the documentary modes to capture the authentic moment. As we will argue, documentary has enlivened and indeed informed the more populist reality TV agenda; the moral and ethical claims to authentic representation have been reclaimed by producers of reality TV. Those claims then face moral and ethical opprobrium when visibly undermined and the concept of trust here becomes shot through with the other prevailing postmodern notion of ‘risk’: ‘can we trust what we see?’; ‘does the camera always lie?’
In discussing these issues we need to define what we take as the boundaries of ‘reality TV’. The term ‘reality TV’ is a broad one. It is usually taken to refer to the surge in a variety of ‘new’ or more often hybrid genres which were launched in the late 1990s. It is also used retrospectively by some commentators to refer to programming which first appeared in the 1980s such as docusoaps and law and order formats; some of which would have originated from documentary or current affairs film units and production companies. The term is most commonly used with reference to the more recent group-challenge formats such as
Castaway 2000 (BBC1) and
The Mole (C4) and ‘24/7’ multi-platform formats such as Channel 4’s
Big Brother, Eden and ITV1’s
Survivor which could be followed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
1 We take together as a broad category reality genres which may be said to include video diaries, game shows (‘gamedocs’ or group-challenge shows), talent shows, talk shows, observational documentaries, dramatic reconstructions and CCTV and camcorder-based programming such as law and order and emergency services programming. As such we suggest that they hold in common an emphasis on the representation of ordinary people and allegedly unscripted or spontaneous moments that supposedly reveal unmediated reality.
Event TV
In Europe, the most famous ‘reality’ programme is certainly
Big Brother, which was first launched in the UK in 2000. The original Dutch Endemol format, which was first broadcast in the autumn of 1999, has been sold around the globe and has been adapted to suit the culture and temperament of local audiences. There are now more than forty versions of
Big Brother commissioned across the world.
2 In the Netherlands and in many other countries (aside from the US), it has attracted unprecedented audience figures. It is also regarded as an innovative landmark in both factual and light entertainment television programming.
3 The importance of the series lies not only in its novel format but in its status as ‘event TV’. Event TV is ‘high concept’, aiming at reaching a critical mass of viewers through high visibility and multi-media choice. As such as it is often stripped across a channel everyday for a number of weeks and is supported by multi-platform media.
Big Brother UK, for example, not only appears daily as an hour-long ‘narrative documentary’ on Channel 4 but can also be accessed on E4 with a choice of four different time lapses, on live-stream on the internet, via mobile phone texts, videos, books and radio packages. Event TV merely extends the ‘dailiness’ of what is already the daily experience of television for most television owners (Silverstone 1994: 2–3).
Referred to in the US as ‘water cooler TV’, event TV is television that attracts huge audiences and becomes part of the popular discourse of everyday life. Like soap operas, the action in shows such as Big Brother is contextualised and amplified by excessive media commentary including chat show interviews, tabloid newspaper coverage and the circulation of participants’ images as celebrities, which prompts conversation among fans about the characters and their behaviour. The British Big Brother 5, for example, broadcast in the summer of 2004, precipitated tabloid and broadsheet debate about media manipulation, broadcaster responsibility, surveillance and expert opinion when violence erupted late one night between housemates after the provocative return of two contestants who had been separated to secretly survey housemates from another room. Here the limits of realistic representation were discussed, one psychologist resigned from advising the show, regarding its manipulation as unethical and media commentators debated the decline of reality TV into increasingly confrontational and staged violent displays by contestants on shows like Big Brother 5 and Channel 4’s Wife Swap (sold to the US in 2004). However, these broader concerns are in conflict with the specific pleasures cited by reality TV viewers. For, as Annette Hill noted in her audience research for Big Brother 2000, 68 per cent of respondents expressed enjoyment at witnessing group conflict, an almost integral element of highly controlled communal living and 60 per cent also mentioned the pleasure of watching ordinary people do everyday things (2001: 36–50).
The comparison with the violence regularly erupting on soaps and its role as trigger for public debate was aired by some commentators, with both formulas compared for their topical staging of controversial events. But, unlike soaps, the talk generated on reality TV is not contingent; rather it is an essential part of the series’ success. The promotion of talk produces the anticipation, elaborate ongoing evaluations and retrospective judgements upon which the commercial success of the programme depends (Couldry 2002: 272).
4 Shows such as
Pop Idol and
Fame Academy encourage intense speculation and identification with characters so that part of the event’s success lies in the measurable responses from viewers as they phone or text in their votes to ensure that their favourite stays in the game.
5 Over the first two series of
Big Brother UK 34 million votes were cast by viewers to eliminate housemates.
6 And like other large-scale media spectacles such as the death of Princess Diana (whose 1995
Panorama interview and funeral coverage have been two of only a very few top ten factual programmes aside from the most successful reality formats) event TV involves real people rather than actors within the house itself, but also in the voting process in which the public decides who remains and who goes from the house each week.
Two formal developments set
Big Brother apart from more conventional observational documentaries (discussed in more detail in
chapters 2 and
3). The first is the adoption of a knowing style of production in which the cameras and the scripting of certain events within the house via a competitive game formula put producers and cameras firmly within the frame. This self-reflexivity extends to the housemates themselves, and as the series has developed, contestants have increasingly referred back to events in previous years; enacted minor rebellions calling them ‘TV history’ or played to the camera. In
Big Brother 5, housemate Becky (introduced halfway through the series as a newcomer to the established group), was subject of media and web chat room commentary for her overt soliloquies and her posturing to-camera when alone. Somali-refugee housemate Ahmed flirted with the anonymous voice of Big Brother in the solitude of the confessional diary room and housemates Victor and Jason were continually filmed discussing how all the houseguests’ ‘performance’ was to be gauged as ‘realistic’ or contrived for the camera’s gaze.
Secondly, the internet and its prominence in sustaining Big Brother as media event has changed the shape of how ordinary people are perceived as media participants. On one level, the crucial role of online, seemingly unedited access to the behaviour of the houseguests 24/7 seems to underwrite the producers’ claims to ‘realism’. Here, as Mark Andrejevic (2004) has discussed, the promise of internet surveillance is compounded by the promise of full participation available through live chat rooms, official and unofficial bulletin boards, quizzes, opinion polls and often daily voting via newspaper, search engine and fan sites on ongoing aspects of the houseguests’ participation. Rather than a democratisation of the previously rather anthropological impulses of observational documentary, this participation illustrates a new level of marketing which involves the mass incorporation of ordinary lives into comprehensive surveillance naturalised as media entertainment.
The gestation of event television begins before production and depends substantially on effective marketing strategies. The American television event of the early 2000s was the heavily marketed
Survivor! (CBS).
Survivor, which in Britain followed close behind
Big Brother in 2001, is exemplary of the kind of co-ordinated public relations spawned in advance of a major reality series. Deploying a PR company specialising in generating tabloid news coverage, the ITV press office inspired 131 stories in the national press in the four weeks before broadcast and newspapers were running double-page spreads about the characters. The producer, Carlton, ran a separate press office to deal with interactive elements such as text messaging and games and the series was trailed with five on-air prime-time trailers per episode of the show, a nationwide billboard campaign and website trailers (Rogers 2001). Ostensibly, in a multi-channel environment,
Survivor did well in its initial airing with audience figures of between five and six million. But comparatively these figures were very low. Ian Johnson, formerly a public relations officer for Granada, explained that this was because the orchestration of the campaign was heavy-handed. Johnson noted: ‘People need to feel like they’ve discovered the programme themselves. Nobody – least of all the British – like to be told which contestants they should like. It’s been over processed’ (in Rogers 2001). Johnson has a point. Although event TV is fostered and sustained through marketing and publicity its success
must be seen to originate from informal mechanisms of gossip and word of mouth recommendations. Furthermore, as Hill’s (2001) audience research showed, British reality TV viewers are arguably much more cynical of factual programming in general than documentary viewers of previous decades. There was a strong suspicion voiced by respondents towards the purported ‘reality’ being filmed and recognition of the performative and highly constructed nature of the genre. While an ‘event’ is clearly different from a ‘happening’ which is more spontaneous it must not appear to be overly determined or imposed via the production company.
7Group challenge
Survivor, like Big
Brother, was founded on the group challenge but, with the cast operating under far harsher and more physically demanding conditions, it owed more to the prototypical
Castaway 2000 than to the domestic dramas of the
Big Brother house.
8 In the first British run of
Survivor 16 people were marooned on an island in the South China Seas and pitched against one another to win a million pounds – far more significant winnings than
Big Brother. Overt competitiveness, strategic alliances and tactical voting were positively encouraged and fostered a vulgar Darwinian game show ethos. The series looked good: showily produced with helicopter shots and time-lapse photography that did little to present the environment as ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ despite some of the privations endured by the subjects. It was exceptionally filmic, building to dramatic climaxes in an overtly constructed fashion. Any ethnic connotations were soon commodified into an embarrassing melange of drum and pan-pipe soundtrack, gift-shop wooden idols and stereotypical assertions about rainforest living. And any local inhabitants, assuming they had not already been excluded from the shoot, had, perhaps wisely, left the scene.
9
As such,
Survivor, which rests on an infrastructure of websites and computer games as well as its televisual presence, is a good example of the ‘generalised elsewhere’ of ‘other places’ and ‘other people’ which is fostered by new technologies that erode a distinctive sense of place.
Survivor sets the global centre-stage on national television in the home and in this way the ‘psychological neighbourhood’ takes precedence over one’s own locality, if only for a short while (Morley 1992: 280). And as David Morley argues in his account of global/local media politics, there are traceable lines of power operating in this context which promote a ‘standardised televisual language which will tend to disqualify and displace all others’ (1992: 281). The United States exceptionally favoured the American version over
Big Brother with the 2000 finale attracting audiences of nearly 50 million viewers (Carter 2000). Its status as a high-audience yield product meant that for the filming of its most recent series it was able to request a no-fly-zone above the production site to further sustain the illusion of desert island isolation. Its environment was no less manufactured than that of the
Big Brother house but it bore the exoticism and perceived privations of foreign locations and ‘primitive’ culture that belied its technological sophistication and highly controlled setting.
Series such as The Trench (BBC2) went even further in attempting to produce the ultimate group challenge but did so through the pretext of educating audiences (and the participants) about the historical experience and trauma of war. The series, reconstructing the experiences of the 10th Battalion East Yorkshire regiment in October 1916 as they fought on the frontline trenches in Northern France, largely failed in its depiction of World War One trench life. A group of men aged between twenty and forty were assembled to mirror the 24 volunteers who lived and died in the trenches 85 years before. The reality show was presented as commemoration and historical document in its attempt to construct and show the trauma of military service and it was also a group challenge as participants struggled with the simulated wartime routines. The modern-day troops were subjected to extreme cold, lack of food, constant barrages of mock gunfire and shelling, rigorous military regimentation and mild field punishment. This was an attempted implantation of the past in the present that looked to embodied experience as means of realistically recounting past physical and psychological deprivations. The footage of their two-week experience was intercut throughout with interviews with World War One veterans, recalling the real experience of encountering death, frostbite, facing their own mortality and their strategies of survival in the face of recurrent horror. Old newspaper articles and photographs of the war and the battalion were spliced with present-day footage of the volunteers. Images of the troops in recreated trenches were overlaid with sepia-toned extracts from war diaries or government war regulations in attempted authentication of the re-creation.
Bill Nichols has argued that spoken testimony often serves in reconstructions as an antidote to the visibly fictional element of historical re-enactment; the fact is that the bodies of those in the re-enactments appear as ‘extras’ ‘never matching the historical bodies’ they represent (1994: 4). The soldiers in The Trench were meant to authenticate the authorial voiceover that related the story of the 1916 frontline. The historical footage and documents appended to the current trench experience were supposed to guarantee a congruity between the two, whilst the veterans’ testimony was used to anchor the reconstructed trench scenes and provide them with appropriate solemnity.
However, the disparity between the veterans’ recollections of war and the highly reconstructed and ultimately safely monitored reconstruction was evident throughout and undermined attempts at veracity. For example, in the first episode, a death in the original battalion whilst under gunfire was reconstructed as one member of the group simply disappeared in the smoke. The effect of this mock death upon his companions was captured on film and resulted in unconvincing footage of a reality TV recruit looking dazed and muttering that the rest would have to stick together and look after one another. The aesthetic filming of the battle scenes – slow motion, sepia tints, melancholic music and hazy imagery alongside hand-held tracking shots of the cramped trenches – unsuccessfully attempted to bestow the trenches with an emotional and physical authenticity.
As these shows indicate the privations and challenges encountered by reality TV participants can range from the moderate to the extreme. Aside from
Castaway 2000, in which severe weather conditions and enduring isolation took their toll,
Survivor and
The Trench viewers could also watch characters shake with fear in a range of studio set-based scenarios. US series such as
Fear (MTV) (with simulated horror-house conditions) and
Fear Factor (NBC) saw participants shudder as they faced their worst phobias, while in
The Chair (ABC) (developed but never screened) their rising heart rates were to be monitored as they tried to answer quiz questions while receiving psychological shocks.
10 Mental stress is further larded on in
US Big Brother: The X Factor in which the contestants enter the house only to discover that they will have to cohabit with former partners often previously separated in acrimonious circumstances. Perhaps even more extremist still are the shows referred to by Mark Andrejevic (2003) as ‘ambush TV’. Programmes such as
Scare Tactics (Sci-Fi Channel), which owe more to early American prankster television such as
Candid Camera and guerrilla radio than to game shows, target the unsuspecting. Practical jokes include convincing their victims that they have just been exposed to bio-hazards or that their friend (complicit in the joke) has just died from a parasitic infection which in turn will kill them too.
11 The designation ‘reality TV’ refers to these new and emergent forms of ‘spontaneous’ and unscripted non-fiction entertainment despite the obvious contrivances involved in assembling a carefully selected group of people and re-locating them under highly controlled conditions or carefully setting up the prank. Their credibility with audiences is supposedly predicated on the ability to convey reality convincingly and the genuine reactions of ‘real people’ to highly artificial circumstances.
The controlled but highly demanding conditions of these particular formats are indicative of the connection, not always subtle, between reality TV and psychological or social experimentation. The somewhat controversial BBC series The Experiment, which aimed to reconstruct the famous 1971 Stanford experiment which enclosed volunteers in the highly inflammatory conditions of a prison scenario, is typical rather than exceptional in this regard – simply substantiating the description of reality TV as ‘manipulated observational documentary’ (Mapplebeck 2002: 20). Innovators in reality TV have also credited other, more recent, experiments as an inspiration. The early stages of the conception of Big Brother were partly inspired by the North American Biosphere Two experiment in which a group of scientists had to subsist through their own self-sufficiency in a transparent geodesic dome. Critics of reality TV have described these conditions as that of a ‘human zoo’ or a container under pressure which forces inmates ‘inwards’, making them deal with one another continually and under highly constrained conditions.
Integral to these forms are technologies that seem to generate a ‘less mediated’ reality – promoting a sense of intimacy, immediacy, liveness or interactivity by monitoring ‘unscripted’ and ‘unplanned’ activity. They emphasise the visual over the spoken word, offering viewers ‘the relief of being able to watch rather than be told’ (Mapplebeck 2002: 19). Over the longer term, new and newly adapted technologies have frequently been the trigger for the development of new documentary styles. Since the 1960s the relative portability of hand-held cameras, changes in sound recording, the availability of home movie equipment, video and CCTV, the possibility of live web-streaming and DV cameras all appeared to liberate filmmakers, allowing them to represent reality all the more convincingly.
Vox pop in a post-documentary market
The producers of reality TV have drawn liberally from formerly established aesthetics of intimacy pioneered by documentary makers. The tight framing and shaky hand-held cameras of Direct Cinema and
vérité movements (discussed in
chapter 2) have been liberally adopted to signify an immediacy of filming and capturing of the real. Furthermore, the conventions of ‘access TV’ (to be discussed below) have been imported into the reality TV formula. However, as we acknowledge, the production of reality TV takes place in a television environment which differs significantly from the older emphasis in Britain and significant sections of Europe on Public Service Broadcasting (PSB). Producers of reality TV work in a much altered broadcasting environment from those producing factual genres prior to the 1990s. In the 1990s, the arrival of new cable and satellite channels alongside the emergence of a number of organisations with global markets altered the landscape of media production. Increasingly, factual filmmaking was about satisfying the needs of carefully targeted markets: niche channels, national and international. Countries with a PSB tradition continued to align these broader market considerations with an attenuated emphasis on serious educational programming. Certainly in Britain, up until the 1980s, organisations like the BBC clearly identified the provision of documentaries and factual programming within their PSB remit to inform, educate and entertain.
Post-Thatcher, with the landmark 1990 Broadcasting Act and the resultant increasing de-regulation and marketisation of the television arena, the PSB tradition has arguably been eroded by the impulse to produce popular programmes driven by audience viewing figures. Furthermore, huge sectors of the television production matrix have been privatised, contracted out to independent production companies and subject to market competition and the demands of networks’ commissioning editors. As Richard Kilborn (1996: 142–3) has illustrated, in the mid-1990s nations like Britain, the Netherlands and Germany, with established PSB traditions, still produced proportionately more ‘serious’ factual programming than more market-led countries. However, throughout the 1990s, performance-led criteria increasingly informed decisions by networks on their adoption of factual programming. In consequence, we would agree that more serious or educationally-driven programmes have been supplanted by the more economically driven, less demanding entertainment-led forms of popular programming. In the UK, the BBC and Channel 4 have been responsible for maintaining a distinctive factual stable. Whilst the BBC has made use of its backlist of programmes to provide specialist factual satellite and digital channels, Channel 4 has increasingly targeted a youth or middle-youth market with programmes like Club Reps and Ibiza Uncovered as well as the host of makeover or home redecoration programmes aimed at a post-Thatcherite, post-documentary consumerist lifestyle-orientated market.
Alongside this acknowledgment of market changes, we have to signal debates about technological innovation and the possible generation of new, democratised forms of TV footage. This discussion taps into broader debates about the relationship between technology, media form and cultural practice. An overview of technological developments since the 1960s suggests that the relative portability of hand-held cameras, advancements in portable sound recording, the increased availability of home movie equipment and low-gauge video and digital formats have revived the impulse of Direct Cinema pioneers to capture a raw reality. In a broader cultural sense, the spread of CCTV and the possibility of live web-streaming have all appeared to liberate filmmakers.
More lately, there has also been the suggestion that these technologies have liberated the film subject, allowing them, within the more technologically democratised forum of post-documentary television, a greater influence over the filming and editorial process and an opportunity to make more personal, authentically ‘real’ and revelatory programming. Such arguments tend to marginalise the importance of the alternative video and art-house footage produced since the 1970s by documentary and avant-garde filmmakers (discussed in
chapter 4) who were intrigued by the intimate and subjective potentials of new technology.
In mainstream television, the provision of time in the schedules for televising ordinary people originated in the earlier, arguably more overtly politicised, notion of ‘access TV’ from both PSB and more commercially-orientated television environments. Access TV’s proponents regarded the medium as a potential extension of the public sphere and a compensation for the plainly inadequate inclusion of non-elite persons in mainstream factual programming. The early model of such provision was the American nightly thirty-minute show Catch 44, a series which in the early 1970s, actively sought to represent the views and lifestyles of those outside of the limited reach of broadcasting professionals (Corner 1996: 166). Following on close behind in 1972 was the BBC’s regular access slot Open Door created by the Community Programmes Unit (CPU). It was partly inspired by comments from some factory workers who, in a current affairs interview, accused television of manipulating their message and knowledgeably challenged the role of editing in this manipulation. The CPU, albeit with minimal funding and a marginal audience, succeeded in producing a fresh and sometimes controversial strand of programming. People judged to have interesting opinions or knowledge were provided with directorial and technical help in putting their message across and they had a reasonable degree of editorial control. Filming was initially live and studio-bound and later moved out on location and used recorded material (Corner 1996:167).
From the mid- to late 1990s the CPU invigorated British schedules with new factual initiatives in the form of the BBC’s
Video Diaries (1991–),
Video Nation (1993–) and (well in excess of a thousand broadcasts)
Video Nation Shorts (1994–), all of which permitted individuals to speak straight to camera, supporting the ideals of access TV.
12 The earlier
Video Diaries gave camcorders and training to a broad cross-section of Britons, who would send in films which in turn would generate the programme ideas and themes. Diarists recorded their own stories and had editorial control, overseeing the completed projects with the guidance of a BBC producer. Producers no longer sought to find, by definition, speakers who had strong opinions, although these were certainly strongly represented and diarists were still carefully selected. While many diarists were run-of-the-mill people, others were notably eccentric, chronicling their unusual hobbies or obsessions – pointing to the extraordinary heterogeneity and otherness of a nation often regarded as homogenous. The programmes’ appeal lay in their novel format and use of technology and the way in which their use reinforced one of the unique qualities of television – a sense of immediacy. One CPU researcher commented, ‘The secret of it is that it’s immediate and it does give you one hundred percent access to somebody’s life and that’s what the charm is’ (in Corner 1996:173).
Video Nation, which followed three years later, was conceived of as a fusion between the Diaries and the Mass Observation observational anthropology pioneered by journalist Charles Madge, anthropologist Tom Harrison and artist and film-maker Humphrey Jennings in the late 1930s: ‘The aim was an anthropology of Britain in the 1990s seen though the eyes of the people themselves’ (Rose 2000:174). Again the production unit were struck by the number of times that participants said that they felt misrepresented or under-represented on mainstream television and the extent to which this was commonly felt by all kinds of people. Co-producer Mandy Rose recalls:
Gays, single mothers – sure, but also Christians, and Pagans, and housewives in Cheshire and bikers and bankers – everyone seemed to feel it. At first I wondered whether it was a symptom of … the ‘culture of complaint’. But seeing the material that people recorded, I have come to realise that they were articulating something very significant about the gap between television representation and lived experience. (Ibid.)
This realisation challenges the idea that people are predictable and that everyday life is homogenous. These projects licensed greater access of ordinary voices on television and made this type of slot a recognisable and highly visible marker of television’s continuing responsibility to its viewers to provide a public space. This commitment is still visible in the form of shorts such as Channel 5’s Vox Pop (2001) series which chronicled ordinary citizens’ responses to war in Afghanistan. While many ‘vox pop’ programmes relied on ‘interesting characters’ or personal revelation to carry the episode, others allowed the connection to be made between private concerns and the public domain.
Jon Dovey (2000: 121–32) demonstrates in his detailed discussion of the
Video Nation project how these forms effectively married the confessional mode of personal revelation to broader debates relevant to the social body. Dovey’s examples include an episode in which a junior doctor, exhausted after eighty-four hours on call, expresses her exasperation and distress, saying, ‘this is appalling, this is cruelty, this is savage … Why? Why is that allowed?’ (2000: 124). For Dovey, her monologue, shot in close-up with a direct address to camera and filmed in her own home after a physically gruelling round of duty, operates in confessional mode, while also successfully intervening in a public debate about conditions in the National Health Service. Moreover, the diary form facilitates an engagement with debates of civic importance over and above what could be offered through more conventional documentary form – the impact and emotional charge of the diary lies in ‘the sense of the reality of
that moment of arriving home in such an appalling state. Moreover this impact … leaves the viewer in the position of having to make the connections’ (2000: 124; emphasis in original). These are not overtly expository documentaries. Even where they enable links to be made between personal experience and public interest they do not appear to present an argument or posit a form of action in the light of the information provided. Yet it is possible for personal voices in documentary to also effect a kind of expository function. The doctor’s video diary sits on the cusp of personal experience and social reality and the political forces that frame them both. The critical distinctions commonly made between access programming and expository documentary are somewhat challenged in this example as the opposition between the subjective and objective, between empathy and knowledge is called into question.
13These formats invite the question of whether and to what degree the presence of the camera alters the ‘self’ on show. Reminiscent of the claims of the French cinéma vérité school of documentary practice, Mandy Rose argues that the camera can instigate frankness and an essentially truthful representation. She describes a Video Nation Short in which a drunken couple called Lynne and Craig, arguing about smoking, decide to turn on the camera and record the conversation. During their talk Lynne makes the discovery that Craig is worried that he will lose her to cancer in future years. Lynne, surprised, declares, ‘but you’ve never told me that before’. Rose comments, ‘what you see is not what happens despite the fact the camera is there, but rather because the camera is there … The camera is a catalyst, in this case bearing witness to things that have not been said before’ (2000: 179). Her example is thought provoking. The situation is not entirely natural. The couple have to interrupt themselves to set up the camera and pin on the microphone, before picking up the conversation where they left off. Yet the scene feels spontaneous and its import is revelatory – the couple learn something about themselves as we learn about them. Other shows such as The Living Soap (BBC) and the subsequent Flatmates (C4 2000) tread a fine line between observational documentary and documentary as a catalyst of action. The later series Flatmates rendered this balancing act more explicit as it was based on the premise, inspired by the domestic feature-film shocker Shallow Grave, that the flatmates should interview applicants to join them in the flat-share. Executive producer Tim Hincks described this rather obscurely as ‘adding value to reality’ and hence still engendering a kind of truthfulness. He is quoted as saying, ’We’ve built a format where we can encourage real life, if you like, to happen more quickly. And it guarantees you get real drama’ (in Higgins 2000).
The availability and easy usability of recording technologies and their compatibility with confessional-style television has underscored the premium placed on the presentation of an authentic selfhood and the revelation of self within the mediated public sphere. Factual entertainment in the form of reality TV capitalised on the televisual immediacy and investment in ordinary people pioneered by the CPU among others but arguably denudes it of its political values. The look of
Video Nation had been popularised in commercials and popular programming and has become part of the new visual lexicon of ‘real life’ on television. No matter how artificial the conditions of filming in reality programming the sense of immediacy generated by the new technologies underpins its authenticity. Audiences ideally expect cameras to capture ‘real’ reactions to genuine or contrived provocations and circumstances. The premium placed on emotion as a signifier of spontaneity and truth-telling in talk shows, for example, has become part of the broader grammar of reality programming overlaying the more knowing cynicism of the contemporary television viewer.
Reality film subjects also seem happy, on the whole, to invest in this ideal. In the UK’s Big Brother 4, one of the last five contestants, Scott, was asked whom he thought should win. Seated in the diary room and speaking straight to camera he argues for Ray because he considers that Ray had been the most ‘real’, that he had ‘been himself’ most consistently during the previous two months whilst others had been ‘themselves most of the time but not always’. By authenticating Ray’s persona as real, Scott, with his gaze directed at the audience ‘out there’ is also authenticating himself. Here, the diary room set-up, which abstracts the interviewee from the communal spaces of the house and forces them to speak directly to ‘Big Brother’, is the unacknowledged guarantor of the speaker’s true feelings and views. Prompted by short questions from an unseen speaker, the ideal diarist should deliver a soliloquy revealing their true opinions or feeling. Scott’s observations also refer obliquely to the ideal of the whole, identifiable and integrated self and to the suspicion that success in the social world involves performance and the adoption of personas which by definition would undermine this ideal. In the context of reality TV, performativity is frequently condemned by film subjects and viewers as an abnegation of responsibility on the part of the participants. Part of the friction of interpersonal relations between housemates Jon and Cameron (the eventual winner) in Big Brother 4 lay in Jon’s scepticism about the authenticity of Cameron’s behaviour. In interview Jon said of Cameron:
All his friends tell me I’ve got it completely wrong, and he is a genuine guy … But my suspicion is that he was very conscious of the cameras. When we had a discussion on whether we would go out with a lap dancer or stripper … Cameron said he wouldn’t go out with one because she would work unsociable hours. There’s no way that was his real opinion, he was just keen not to offend his target demographic. (in Ritchie 2003: 264)
John de Mol, the co-founder of Endemol Productions, has argued that even the most determined contestant would not be able to mask their persona for more than a fortnight on the show.
14 Being ‘untrue to yourself’ and cheating by seeking to manipulate the game, breaks the ‘reality contract’ or understanding between programme makers and audience which underpins its credibility (Jones 2004).
15 This investment in personal integrity is often linked to audience and participant expectations of personal revelation and confession. These expectations operate within the broader framework of television culture which has, in some people’s view, valorised a ‘culture of narcissism’ and popularised psychotherapeutic discourses of personal development. As audience research has shown viewers exhibit deep suspicion towards the reality of behaviour exhibited on reality TV (Hill 2001). Part of the appeal of watching and monitoring the reality TV show then derives from watching and assessing the moments when the television performance cracks and the ‘inner person’ or ‘real self’ is unveiled. Spontaneity alongside moments of seemingly unguarded intimacy becomes ciphers of a real self operating in a produced micro-word. From this perspective, as we discuss in depth in
chapters 5 and
6, the realism of programmes including soap opera, law and order reality TV, living soaps and talk shows is increasingly calibrated by audiences against the measuring stick of ‘revelation’, emotional truth and psychological striptease (see Shattuc 1997).
Therapeutic-domestic space
In
chapters 4 to
6 we emphasise the crucial importance of ‘revelation’ as a popular framing discourse for much reality TV. Implicit in these chapters is an acknowledgment of trauma and psychological/emotional damage as core concepts circulating in contemporary culture. The revelation or media unpacking of personal damage is often staged within the domestic space and/or with real family members or temporary families of participants. Domestic labour and emotional labour become melded. The paradox of shows such as
Big Brother is that in order to satisfy their own ends of achieving media celebrity, of hopefully managing a transition from
Big Brother house to the postmodern public sphere of celebrity culture, the housemates must agree to inhabit a kind of parodic private sphere of enforced domesticity and therapeutic confession. In this sphere the housemates are forced to interact in contrary naturalistic and un-naturalistic ways; washing dishes, cooking and doing chores but also playing party games, dressing up and talking in the diary room. The pointlessness of the game is emphasised when the housemates have to spend hours cycling on stationary bicycles like rats in a lab in order to win rewards. With the subjects deprived of mass-media entertainment, restricted to one book each for the two months of their stay, audiences are treated to hours of footage of the film subjects over-sleeping, lolling round the pool and chatting in a desultory fashion. Their boredom becomes our diversion and our optional leisure time is filled with their enforced inactivity. As they ‘mark time’ their essentially boring routine, punctuated by highly orchestrated but pointless activity, becomes an uncomfortable reminder of the essentially modern condition of productive labour which still continues for many citizens. That their ‘labour’ is actually our entertainment signifies theirs as a late-modern employment rooted in the post-industrial world of service, communications and media industries. This then is not privacy surrendered to the interests of television but an exhibition of manufactured privacy and manufactured
longeur. The simulation of privacy, over a period of time, feels authentic and indeed, for the housemates, this is their lived reality for the duration of the programme. As a symbolic realm it is very far from ‘reality’ and much closer to being a metaphor for television itself – intimate, immediate, rooted in the everyday and yet highly produced and packaged for mass consumption. It is broadcast TV produced to be ‘the private life of the nation-state’(Ellis 1992:5) and defying the odds at a time when new technologies and cross-border media ownership should be fracturing television audiences and destroying ‘event television’.
The
Big Brother house is unlike the majority of British homes. The modernist house is open plan, with large windows, encouraging free movement and a psychological openness of personal expression. Brightly-coloured sofas and footstools, open kitchens, dormitory-style bedrooms and the garden filled with low-level seating and a pool which enables play but no serious exercise underline the pre-adult world of
Big Brother. The only parental figure is, of course, Big Brother, a figure both absent and all controlling through continual surveillance. The house is open to Big Brother’s and our inspection and its design underscores this exposure. As Jean Baudrillard notes, the ingeniousness of these modern interiors is that they suggest a simple functionality but examined closely, just like the traditional compartmentalised arrangements of more conventional homes, they also offer a reliable image of current familial and social structures. In contemporary interior design walls have disappeared, rooms are no longer a refuge and the gendered and generational hierarchy of conventional family life is swept away. The housemates, most of them of the ‘youth’ generation, live in an undifferentiated zone where they share bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen space and leisure space without distinctions of role or responsibility, ‘rooms open into one another, everything communicates’ (Baudrillard 1968: 313). As a metaphor of Western society, the house points to the current transformation of the public sphere into a realm where respect for hierarchical structures is in decline and where social aspiration and mobility is increasingly ratified through public, media-driven recognition.
The futuristic aspect of the house invokes modernist aspirations of domestic living for the affluent classes – they occupy a faux utopian ideal of a ‘self-sufficient sentient space that satisfies all the needs of its residents’ (Spigel 2001: 385). Despite the vaguely futuristic and unstructured gloss to the house it perpetuates an inherently conservative ideal of domesticity as inward-looking and privatised. It is congruent with Lynn Spigel’s description of developments in domestic architectural design in which ‘the home of tomorrow has historically been imagined as a kind of fetish space that typically appears disembodied from the surrounding town and city’ (ibid.). As Spigel notes, even the expanse of glass walls in contemporary design are not theorised by architects as conduits of connection to the neighbourhood but rather are conceptualised around voyeurism, exhibitionism and surveillance (2001: 386). This becomes literal in the Big Brother house where the large windows emphasise both the housemates’ consenting insularity and their subordination to the public gaze.
The boundaries between the house and the outside world are also highly controlled and policed and recall Peter Weir’s 1998 feature film The Truman Show in which the protagonist Truman Burbank learns that his whole life is being filmed and orchestrated for the benefit of a global reality TV show. When Channel 4 built the external set for the final episode of Big Brother 4 it masked the noise of construction from the housemates with amplified recordings of crowd noise which further recalled the confined militaristic entertainment of British holiday camps and served to heighten the anxiety of the housemates. The amplifiers outside introduced the world as an extension of their highly-controlled environment and underlined their subordination to Big Brother; like gladiators the housemates waited inside and could only imagine the reception awaiting them. The crowd noise also symbolically reinforced the notion of their future success as the achievement of recognition within mediated social space rather that outside of it.
Light entertainment/lite entertainment?
While film subjects are expected to be ‘straight up’ and ‘open’ with viewers and fellow contestants the programmes themselves can be elaborately knowing and intertextual. Many of them are overtly self-reflexive; paradoxically drawing attention to their own artifice even as they purport to represent reality. A variety of formal strategies highlight this. The colluding glance between documentary subject and camera, the use of the diary room in
Big Brother where participants speak directly to camera, the airlifting of contestant Cameron in
Big Brother 4 from the UK to the African
Big Brother house and the recent appearance of minor celebrities in shows such as
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here and
The Club are all differently articulated examples of reality TV as a self-conscious project. The unannounced introduction of celebrities into
Big Brother houses, such as former footballer Diego Maradonna in Argentina and the rock band Status Quo in Norway, also foreground the heightened media status of the contestants themselves and their isolation from normal life.
Audiences have little difficulty in handling the postmodern quality of such televisual encounters as they are, albeit in fresh formats, the natural outcome of the cross-fertilisation of television. Hybridity has always characterised factual filmmaking’s refashioning of older forms for the modern television market and the boundaries between fact and fiction have never been clear-cut. As early as the 1960s, drama series such as Z Cars (Granada) deliberately foregrounded their basis in fact and in everyday life, constructing themselves as hybrid drama documentaries. Ground-breaking drama-documentaries such as Cathy Come Home and later fly-on-the wall series such as Paul Watson’s The Family, both discussed in this book, provide evidence of the complex ways in which the representation of everyday life is re-articulated through the changing factual and fictional codes and conventions of realist documentary televisual representation. As Janet Jones argues in ‘The postmodern guessing game’, since the mid-1990s we have witnessed a further degree of experimentation and cross-fertilisation in fictional television formats with drama and factual television freely drawing on one another’s lexicon of codes and conventions to create ‘new viewing experiences’ (Jones 2000: 76). In the early 1990s drama series such as This Life, ER and NYPD Blue deployed the editing patterns and cinematography usually confined to documentary. The documentary-style was a prevalent motif signalling everything from social realism to psychological realism. This practice continues to flourish with more recent controversial drama series such as Tony Garnett’s The Cops which further extends documentary codes; indulging in muffled sound, fast editing and awkward framing that forces the viewer to watch the action through frosted windows and the like.
There is also in the UK another tradition of light entertainment whose popularity demonstrates a public appetite for television that has elements of spontaneity and surprise and which is also overtly self-referential. The most enduring of these are shows using amateur or discarded film footage or ridiculous foreign adverts packaged to be talked through by an ironically amused presenter.
Auntie’s Bloomer’s (BBC1),
TV Nightmares and
It’ll be Alright on the Night (both ITV) used television production outtakes that revealed prop failures or actors’ gaffes.
You’ve Been Framed (ITV) and
New You’ve Been Framed (ITV1) pioneered the use of home video footage which also subsequently appeared in leisure and consumer programmes such as
The Real Holiday Show (BBC 1995). Other top-twenty programmes on terrestrial channels during the last decade included
Before They Were Famous (BBC1) which showed early, usually embarrassing footage of current celebrities, the
National TV Awards and the
British Soap Awards. Nostalgia-based series recalling early leisure programming such as
The Way We Cooked and
The Way We Travelled (both BBC2) recycled older programmes from earlier decades. These often critically-neglected programmes suggest a willingness by audiences to view television talking about itself and embrace the knowing complexity and hybrid adaptations of television which point forwards to the substantial success and more importantly to the likely market longevity of reality TV.
Most of the above genres have been subject to trenchant criticism of a lowering of standards. Stepping back from the forms themselves, it is useful to consider what documentary theorist Bill Nichols has referred to as the ‘domain’ of documentary. He notes that documentary may be located within a broader set of ‘discourses of sobriety’ (1991: 3). These ‘nonfictional systems’ which include education, welfare, science, politics, economics and so on, are part of the mechanisms of power; they are ‘instrumental’ in the sense that their implementation has real effects in the world. By association, documentary has become a privileged form within the media with connotations of seriousness (sobriety), public responsibility and truthful representation. These discourses continue to occupy a primary position in the hierarchy of non-fiction representation including in documentary, news and current affairs. The placement of items on television news, the news values apparent in the ‘quality press’ and the scrutiny still afforded to ‘serious’ documentary making are all evidence of this positioning. The ‘routine structures’ of news and current affairs coverage still depend on ‘primary definers’; the institutional producers of news and events such as the courts, parliament, research establishments and industry (Hall et al. 1978). These in turn help set agendas in which issues of public concern and the public interest are paramount.
The perceived degradation or ‘dumbing down’ of documentary and news tends to occur when they partially or entirely occupy, or rather are incorporated into, another domain altogether, not of ‘sobriety’ but of ‘human interest’ or light entertainment. In this domain the set of discourses speaks of the private sphere, of individual experience, of the local and the particular, of consumption and even of the excessive, the vulgar and the personal. A number of the features common to reality programming have triggered accusations of ‘dumbing down’ and more broadly, reality TV has been regarded by some cultural commentators as symptomatic of a culture in decline. Reality TV’s lexicon of emotion, intimacy, immediacy and the everyday (much of it derived from soap opera and confessional forms such as daytime chat shows) and its emphasis on the private, previously feminised, realm of home, relationships and service industries distances it from the Reithian ideal of public television. This ‘feminine’ aspect, together with its playfulness, technological innovations and generally youthful audience appeal, addresses a public often excluded or alienated from ‘serious’ factual programming. A newspaper journalist speaking on the programme
Big Brother, Small World (C4, 2001) lamented that the series had not tried to ‘push the envelope’ in terms of the intellectual discussions undertaken between housemates. He likened its appeal to the experience of listening in to other people’s banal gossip on public transport – ‘no better’ than that. The patent lack of ‘seriousness’ of
Big Brother becomes most starkly apparent when, on very rare occasions, the producers decide to inform housemates of events in the outside world. In September 2001, a week before the finale of the US
Big Brother, hijacked planes were used to attack the World Trade Center. One housemate, Monica, was directed to the diary room to be told that although her close family were fine, it was known that her cousin Tabitha, who worked in the Center, had not yet been found. Monica, clearly profoundly moved, asks viewers and family not to worry about her and said that she would pray for everyone. This scene transmuted
Big Brother from the commonplace to the strange, the introduction of a more ‘real’ reality – that of terrorism and destruction – highlighted the show’s artifice and lack of sobriety.
The promotion of factual programming as an ‘entertainment’, ‘diversion’ and as part of ‘youth’ programming rather than serious programming is underscored not only by its distance from the ideal of serious factual TV and its coverage in the tabloids but also through the television channels’ own marketing strategies. For example, Channel 4’s Autumn 2001 marketing catalogue which was inserted into television listings magazines, promoted the season’s factual programming through the humorous (but certainly not witty) re-conceptualisation of documentary as popular culture. A documentary with the working title of
Skinny Birds was promoted with a mock-advert for a Barbie-style ‘Slim Suzy’ doll with the sales slogan ‘she binges – she vomits – includes: scales – unrelenting feelings of inadequacy’.
16 An alternative series about Tuscany was promoted with the words: ‘intimate access to a variety of ordinary and extraordinary Tuscans’ lives, this three-part series reveals the often disturbing truth behind the region’s romantic popular image’. Here the conventional scenes usually featuring on a holiday souvenir wall plate are replaced by airbrushed images including a priest manacling a women to a chair for an exorcism and police restraining a Nigerian prostitute – all accompanied by the ironic commentary ‘cultural scenes from this ancient Italian Utopia’.
As signalled above, this explicit transformation of ‘quality’ television factual formats and topics into popular programming is symptomatic of the greater transformation of television documentary production departments into departments of factual or even in the US ‘alternative’ programming. It is also a salutary reminder of the extent to which even more serious documentary has to re-brand itself in the factual entertainment marketplace. Disputes arise about how to understand these changes within the still-influential legacy of the Reithian project in Britain and the continuing debates about the long-term consequences of increased commercial competition in the marketplace both domestically and globally. Perhaps because of these programmes’ popularity with audiences they have been heavily debated in the press and on television. They are at the centre of heated discussions on tabloidisation, censorship, media responsibility and so on. In 1998 comedy scriptwriter Andy Hamilton in the Huw Weldon Memorial Lecture queried whether the ‘new’ phenomenon of docusoaps and hybrid genres arising from CCTV footage represented a dumbing down of British television. His concerns have been echoed by cultural commentators such as Germaine Greer, Salman Rushdie and television industry insiders such as broadcaster Chris Dunckley. Dunckley has gone as far as to assert that the popularisation of reality TV ‘has all the attractions of bear-baiting, the stocks and public hanging’ (2002: 46); others have referred to it scathingly as ‘car crash TV’. More broadly, the perception has been voiced that the sheer volume of reality programmes from the late 1990s onwards has diluted the quality of provision overall. When Lorraine Heggessey took over as controller of BBC1 in October 2000 she marked her inauguration by arguing that too many cheap-to-make docusoaps and makeover lifestyle programmes were leading to a stale and predictable schedule (McCann 2000). As Brian Winston notes, despite the many valid arguments that could be made in defence of the docusoap the industry was remarkably silent and rather shame-faced in the face of accusations about quality in this regard (2000: 55).
Peter Bazalgette, the chairman of Endemol UK, has been the most prominent and influential challenger to the critics of recent popular television genres. Bazalgette already had to his credit new leisure and makeover shows including Ready, Steady, Cook (cooking game show), Changing Rooms (house makeover game show) and Pet Rescue (docusoap) before launching Big Brother in the UK. In his 2001 speech ‘Big Brother and beyond’, given at the Royal Television Society Conference in Cambridge, he set out to prove, with reference to schedules and film clips, that the provision of quality television and choice has dramatically improved. Moreover, he argued that multi-channel provision could only mean an improved service for viewers. He accused critics (or the ‘miserable brigade’) of elitism based on a dislike of the popular and of youth cultures and suggested that the ‘sheer humanity’ of reality TV and shows such as Big Brother which featured characters of varying sexualities, ethnicities and classes constituted a celebration of the youth generation’s tolerant attitude. Bazalgette’s position is that reality TV is the launch pad for a new form of television culture which is ‘more real, real people and real language’ than its predecessors. Bazalgette’s only caveat is that the regulation of multi-media reality streaming into the home is increasingly ungovernable to the extent that parents will need to be their own monitors and regulators.
Bazalgette’s nod towards regulation of the reality TV format can be extended to signal the closer scrutiny applied to factual programming in general and documentary coverage in particular since the 1990s. Whilst the proliferation of faked incidents on documentary and current affairs coverage highlighted by journalists since the late 1990s has fuelled a contemporary scepticism of broadcasting realism per se (Kilborn 2003: chap. 5), there have been specific public anxieties focused on the potential vulnerability of those appearing in reality TV shows. As the next section reveals, this anxiety has extended beyond the content of the shows to the potential fakery of the pre-production process itself.
The Great Reality TV Swindle
WANT TO RAISE YOUR PROFILE? New Reality TV show seeks contestants! One year, £100,000. If you’re characterful, resourceful and energetic mail
nrussian@nrussian.freeserve.co.uk
In early 2002 the above advert appeared in the press. Producer and director Nik Russian gathered 30 contestants together for a year-long reality TV project to be broadcast on Channel 4. During the next two months the contestants, many of whom had resigned from their jobs and left their homes, underwent rigorous auditions and psychological selection processes before signing legally-binding contracts. A camera crew was in place and the auditions were held in an upmarket banqueting suite on a private island on the Thames River. It was not until they discovered what the first challenge was to be that some contestants suspected that the project was a hoax: without food, shelter or financial backing three teams had to compete to be the first to raise £1 million. Some disillusioned team members left immediately and others lingered on, sleeping on friends’ floors, not quite believing that there was nothing to it all. When Russian turned up at a team house they locked him in and called a local television news station which covered the story.
Bizarrely, however, this was far from the end of the tale. A production company decided to cover the fiasco as a factual programme genuinely pitched at Channel 4. Broadcast in December 2002, The Great Reality TV Swindle revealed the full extent of the deception and charted the reactions of the housemates to their dilemma. The production company Christmas Television drew on archive footage from the fake show, quizzed the contestants about the often heavy financial and social loses incurred by the hoax and finally pursued the culprit to his own front door to confront him with the fraud. Caz Gorham who was responsible for the real documentary was quoted as warning future reality TV applicants, ‘when it comes to television, you should be very careful what you wish for, because things can come true in a way that you never imagined’ (Smith 2002: 17).
This hoax is exemplary in the way it foregrounds many of the questions and criticisms aimed at the group-challenge reality show in particular and reality formats more generally. Exceptional though it is, it neatly brings together a number of the concerns often raised in relation to the genre. In exaggerated form, it invites discussion about the ethics of factual television and the exploitation of film subjects, and of their aspirations as participants in celebrity culture within a post-documentary context. It also dramatises the ongoing and usually taken-for-granted reflexivity of reality TV itself; which is often a platform for television to talk about itself. Gorham’s warning that we should be careful what we wish for spurs the question of what it is exactly that contestants expect from their participation in such enterprises. John Corner (2002) suggests that the appeal of shows such as these is that they provide a new kind of ‘experience’ for the participants, an ‘experiment in living’ which offers new challenges and insights. The highly contrived and monitored circumstances of series such as Castaway, historical reconstructions such as The Trench and The 1940s House (C4), and the explicit psychological experimentation of The Experiment certainly point in this direction. Adverts for subjects to take part in The Experiment asked readers ‘do you really know yourself?’ and suggested that participation would ‘change the way you think’ (Brocks 2001). Contestants frequently refer to the expectation of gaining new ‘experiences’ and insights. A former participant of The Living Soap, one of the earliest reality house-share formats, who had reservations about her time in the house still conceded: ‘But it was a great experience … I was from a protected, middle-class background but living in the house made me a lot more aware of people’s different backgrounds’ (in Midgley 2000).
Clearly, the attainment of continuing media celebrity or at least the chance to enter the media industries is part of the attraction for some people and speaks most directly to a youth audience already oriented towards public visibility as a marker of personal success. Several of Russian’s subjects wanted to work in the media and had they succeeded, they would have been following earlier precedents. The first
UK Big Brother winner, Craig Phillips, went on to work in daytime home/lifestyle programming and
Big Brother 3’s winner Kate Lawler presents Channel 4’s breakfast show
RI:SE. Participants in
Celebrity Big Brother and
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here spoke openly about how media coverage of their exploits might rehabilitate their image or revive their flagging careers. The perceived importance of publicity cannot be overstated and the paradoxes of reality programming are also the paradoxes of the modern mediated public realm. John Hartley summarises this beautifully when he says:
while they don’t exist as spaces and assemblies, the public realm and the public are still to be found, large as life, in the media … the popular media of the modern period, are the public domain, the place where and the means by which the public is created and has its being. (1992: 1)
From this perspective, the performance of citizenship is only verifiable when it is enacted through the media and contestants’ desire to engage with the media at a highly visible level makes perfect sense within this logical framework.
Caz Gorham’s warning to be careful what you wish for might well have resonated with contestants in other ways as debates continue about the degree of ‘fairness’ deployed in the representation of reality subjects. As readers will learn in later chapters, these debates have been ongoing since the onset of observational documentary. More recently, the highly respected current affairs programme
Panorama (BBC, broadcast 12 November 2000) considered the issue of fair representation in reality TV to be an issue worthy of serious debate (and was itself accused of dumbing down for its pains). When interviewed on the programme,
Big Brother contestant Melanie Hill complained, ‘we had no idea what they were going to do with all the footage and what they did was manipulate it into our little stereotypes’. The use of stereotypes or, more charitably, of a range of representative characters, is part of the casting process. Participants of the earlier and critically-panned docusoap
The Living Soap, many of whom went on to successful media careers, were selected for a range of stereotypes and placed into a house together. It took some time for housemates to work out why they had been selected. Nadia Agar-Smith recalled: ‘At one point the cameras were rolling and the director said “How do you feel about your parents’ divorce?” I couldn’t believe it, I realised then they wanted someone from a broken home’ (in Midgley 2000). This perception that particular types are sought out by producers can lead to a degree of cynicism about the whole procedure of not only contestant selection but also of the editing, presentation process and future media aspirations. Narinder Kaur, a contestant in the 2001
Big Brother UK, who felt obliged to leave her original job but could not subsequently break into the media industry, stated, ‘I was portrayed as the mouthy, bitchy one. I don’t know what’s worse: being Asian in this country, being a
Big Brother reject or being a woman, sadly, I’m all three.’
17While media celebrity may be the ostensible reason for the high number of applications to partake in reality programming there are, of course, less clear motivations and these, together with the undoubted pressures of the filming process have led to serious concerns about the well-being of contestants. The psychological complexity of film subjects’ involvement in reality television and the potential psychological damage to those taking part was harshly pinpointed by the events of the Swedish prototype of
Survivor, called
Expedition: Robinson (SVT) which first ran in 1997. Located in Malaysia,
Expedition gathered eight men and eight women and left them largely to fend for themselves in the now familiar manner for a cash prize. One amongst the group was 34-year-old Sinisa Savija, a half-Croatian and half-Serbian refugee, who was studying law in a small town in Sweden. Savija was apparently quiet, very keen and, although he was hugely excited about appearing on the show, seemed to accept his rejection after only four days on the island philosophically. Only a few weeks later, in July 1997, he committed suicide, nine weeks before the first edition was broadcast. The show’s producers, fending off accusations by his family, implied that Savija already had mental health problems before he joined the show. His wife contends that it was his expulsion from the show that had damaged him. She claimed that he felt degraded as a person. Whatever the case, the fact remains that the programme, like many others, is a kind of popularity contest that a refugee, who only speaks the language haltingly, is unlikely to win. The eventual winner, a policeman from Stockholm called Martin Melin (police officers seem to do very well on Survivor-style programmes), clearly articulated the dynamics of the programme. Melin, who became famous overnight following his win, commented:
It’s a social game, that’s how it works. I think I won because I was friends with everyone … It works the same way as it does in the country as a whole. If you are a refugee and you don’t know the language and the culture – well you’re not in the group. You’re different. (In Addley 2002: 2)
This corroborates the suggestion that winners usually exhibit a quiet confidence; those that act like winners are most likely to win.
18Aside from the problematic exacerbation of individual traumas or phobias etc that are an integral part of incarceration in many of the enclosed worlds of reality game show formulas, there are broader questions here about the way that reality TV highlights and legitimates cultural discourses of interiority and also social interactivity that are a feature of late-capitalist therapeutic culture. Reality TV presents both surveillance and incarceration within a rule-bound micro-world as the mediated route to witnessing or experiencing authentic moments of self-revelation and/or emotional revelation. The opportunity to ‘find oneself’ or to ‘experience’ the incarceration and public monitoring is presented as a legitimate justification for appearing on shows like Big Brother. When debates about exploitation are raised, programme producers invariably refer to the amnesty of participant consent. However, the ethical concerns of preserving participants’ rights and self-respect are balanced with the production’s requirements to edit and repeat footage. Here the speed of selection processes for many reality TV shows and the volatile nature of the independent production sector accentuate long-held ethical difficulties of factual treatment of ordinary subjects and their potential exploitation.
Alongside the representation of reality TV participants is the related issue of audience perception of them. Audiences are now over-familiar with the extended debates in which the subjects of
Fame Academy or
Big Brother agonise over which of their companions has the most fans. But the film subjects who encountered reality TV as a new genre would have had little idea of what they were taking part in and there is likely to be a sensation of powerlessness in the face of technologies and media coverage over which they had little control.
Expedition participant Savija was quoted as saying, ‘They are going to cut away the good things that I did and make me look like a fool, to show that I was the worst and that I was the one that had to go’ (in Addley 2002: 2). The degree of autonomy and editorial control exerted by film subjects over their own image is dependent upon the negotiations between them and the production company and especially in the early years of reality TV both parties might be forgiven for a certain amount of naïvety in this regard. Programme makers themselves might be excused too for failing to anticipate the possible traumas involved in public failure or success.
Individual filmmakers may well be quite scrupulous in their dealings with film subjects. Mandy Rose describes how the drunken couple of Video Nation were given the chance to veto the footage that they had chosen to film of themselves. Victoria Mapplebeck, who conceived and directed Channel 4’s first documentary/web convergence series Smart Hearts (2001), in which the subjects Brendan and Claire who were in the throws of a disintegrating marriage, were filmed for television and the internet, argued that the couple had complete editorial control. Indeed, says Mapplebeck, they would, quite militantly, limit access to filming when they chose. She also provides a number of other examples where film subjects have refused to play the game, including an example from the South African Big Brother, in which contestant Brad, frustrated at being unable to walk away from the house, storms into the diary room and yells at Big Brother, ‘I’m not your fucking hostage, your playmate, your puppet. Your rules Big Brother, not mine. Open this fucking door or I’ll knock it down’ (2002: 28). Other incidences include participants undertaking roof-top protests until they are permitted to see their families and a very irritated Fillipo in the Italian Big Brother allowing Big Brother thirty minutes to explain why he should remain in the house. It is unclear why this refusal to play in itself constitutes ‘control’ over the filmmaking process. Participants’ ability to foil the production is not the same as being able to contribute constructively to representation and seems a somewhat feeble defence by media practitioners against accusations of exploitation or emotional voyeurism.
This exposure of raw emotion by contestants such as ‘Bad Brad’, suggests Mapplebeck quite approvingly, is what makes series such a
Smart Hearts and
Big Brother ‘hard core’ and a cut above lesser productions. Like pornography (her analogy) they both provide extensive ‘access’ and the opportunity to ‘look’ at their subjects unchallenged.
19 Far from signifying film subjects’ control over the conditions of the production these moments of rage, despair and so on, arguably signify a loss of control. It is the sight of film subjects ‘losing it’ that is the guarantor of raw emotion; the equivalent of the pornographic ‘money shot’. Laura Grindstaff, writing about the exhibition of emotion in talk shows, also uses the analogy and unpacks it further:
The money shot is the focus … ordinary people’s willingness to sob, scream, bicker and fight on national television. The analogy to pornography is both deliberate and fitting. The climax of most sex scenes … is the moment of orgasm and ejaculation offering incontrovertible ‘proof’ … of ‘real’ sexual excitement and prowess. Pornography thus performs a kind of low-brow ethnography of the body, part of the documentary impulse … Like pornography, daytime talk exposes people’s private parts in public. It demands external visible proof of a guest’s inner emotional state. (1997: 169)
Mapplebeck’s example of the exposure of Nick Bateman, the housemate who ‘cheated’ on Big Brother, as ‘hardcore’ reality TV is rich in the detail of his visible humiliation. Having been confronted by his fellow film subjects:
Nick retreats to the bedroom and breaks down. The cameras zoom in. This close-up of Nick Bateman in tears is now a TV icon. He was a broken man, emotionally undressed … To this day I have not seen a documentary subject so exposed in such a sensational way … No voiceover, nothing to distract the viewer, you are looking at a man stripped aware to his lowest point, broken and unmasked and live to the nation … This is emotional pornography with an IOU. You the viewer are implicated. (2002: 28)
And of course, there is more to this than meets the eye. When working-class Liverpudlian builder Craig discovers Nick’s duplicity and confronts him (together with the other five housemates) it becomes clear that, whether they wish it or not, Craig and Nick have become emblematic stereotypes of contrasting English masculinities. Nick, who was privately educated and worked in the City, said in his defence:
I just want to firstly apologise to you all for my actions. I’m not going to justify them but will give my reasons. I come from a big family and we tend to compete. I spent ten years at boarding school where people are constantly trying to put one over on you and I worked in an environment where people would stitch you up without batting an eyelid. (Gray 2000)
Following the exchange Craig’s sister described her brother as a ‘national hero’, saying ‘what happened could win him the show. Nick is an ex-public schoolboy with all that expensive education and Craig just wiped the floor with him. There is no way he should be voted out now’ (in Lister 2000).
20 The confrontation episode generated the highest rating for Channel 4 since 1995. It also revitalised the media debate about the extent to which film subjects might be exploited. John Beyer, Director of the National Viewers and Listeners Association, was quoted as saying, ‘the danger of programmes like this is they assume that individual privacy can be cynically surrendered in the interests of novelty television’ (in Lister 2000). John de Mol does not deny the exploitation but argues that reality TV is far from unique in this regard:
We only exploit as any programme-maker exploits – be it in a game show, or even a news report which interviews the relative of someone who has just died in a plane crash … The people we cast are carefully selected, 100 per cent capable of understanding what they are getting involved in, and do so to satisfy their own goals. (in Carter 2000)
21
Nick Bateman recognises this more than most, defending his actions in retrospect by arguing that he thought he was in a game show. It certainly could be argued that just as the contrived format and borrowed televisual grammar of reality programming cannot be condemned for being non-real, neither can film subjects be criticised for being deceitful or untruthful but rather should be regarded as operating on another level of the real, as part of the ‘textualisation of public life’ (Hartley 1992: 2). While the cases of Savija, Bateman and Kaur are patently different from one another in many respects, their reception by the media (together with others who have attracted opprobrium such as Jade Goody, discussed in
chapter 6) has prompted concern about the potential psychological damage of enduring sustained media attention. Speaking at the International Television Festival in Edinburgh in August 2000 psychiatrist and ubiquitous media pundit Dr Raj Persaud observed that Bateman had been portrayed as a ‘freak’. He noted that the contestants’ ‘full complexity’ fails to emerge in the shows, which is potentially problematic and psychologically stressful.
Faking it
‘Can we trust what we see? Reality TV – Real or Rip-off?’
– Krishnan Gurumurthy on Think TV
The Nik Russian ‘swindle’ discussed above and the assertion by John de Mol that most television is game-playing are salutary reminders of the various levels at which reality TV may be understood as faux, fake or hoax. But stepping back from this we can acknowledge that even at the broadest level of representation questions have been raised about the production of the visual image and its approximation to reality. As Arild Fetveit has argued, there is a growing paradox evidenced in the increasing distrust of photographic images which the public knows can be digitally manipulated and the proliferation of certain visually-dependent fields of representation such as reality TV to which we repeatedly turn for truthful representation. Part of the explanation lies in the ‘increased compartmentalisation of credibility’ (Fetveit 1999: 797) in which audiences will take programmes on trust within certain generic and institutional contexts. This is fairly indisputable, as audiences must be guided by the truth-claims of programme makers and the contract entered into by the established conventions of genre. Fetveit also suggests that there is a psychological investment in believing in reality TV. We have lost the sense of ‘connectedness’ that was immanent in the pre-digital (less easily faked) photographic image between viewer and subject as the direct causal relationship between photographic subject and their representation is increasingly undermined. Arguably the appeal of reality TV lies in an attempt to reclaim what seems to be lost after digitalisation, to connect with other subjects across time and space (1999: 798). More broadly, our ‘contract’ with these formats is that we will accept them on their own terms as successfully realist genres; as representations which are the logical extensions of more than a century of endeavours to mechanically reproduce reality.
Historically, the photographic image, with its assumed indexical relation to the real, foregrounded the ethical status of factual representation: that which claims itself as a record of reality bears a certain weight and duty to the object of its fixing gaze and to its credulous audience.
22 This ‘duty’ has not always been well served and the public has become increasingly sensitised to fakery and reconstruction. Crucially, the photographic text’s status as evidence and as adequate representation of the real has been called into doubt. The onset of digital culture in the 1990s further undermined the assumed relationship between photographic modes of representation and the capturing of reality. Digital culture, for example, challenges fundamental assumptions about the essence and function of the photographic image as ‘true’ representation. Digital information is essentially malleable and consequently, through techniques of electronic montage and manipulation, can radically alter the reality it represents. What we once trusted as ‘pictures of reality’ can be seamlessly and undiscernibly edited and modified. The rise of digital culture has fostered a broader scepticism towards factual media representations and their claims. Both the mechanism of representation and the world being represented are revealed as highly managed and intangible: reality is a chimera on the techno-cultural horizon.
Having noted this, it would be simplistic to argue that technological determinism has, in any measurable sense, simply
increased the distance and lack of connectivity between the pro-filmic/photographic event (referent) and representation. Instead audiences are occupying a differently articulated relationship with non-fiction representations within digital culture, experiencing a ‘fundamental transformation in the epistemological structure of our visual culture’ (Timothy Druckney quoted in Robins 1996: 41).
23 One aspect of this transformation, initiated by televisual production, has been a familiarisation with the technical possibilities of image manipulation. John Ellis notes the fundamental changes to the imagery of factual programming since the 1980s in television culture. Production staff seized on the graphic and interpretative possibilities afforded by digital image manipulation to layer visual information with the aim of enhancing viewers’ understanding and ordering of the incoherent world – the ‘raw data of reality’ – into interpretative frameworks (Ellis 2000: 100). Television’s pervasive use of captions, image mixing and morphing has accustomed viewers to the more graphic aspects of digital image manipulation. The frequent use of digitised imagery has engendered knowing audiences who are visually literate in television’s ‘working over, placing and processing of the witnessed fragments of the real’ (2000: 101). The fact that the televisual image is used as a malleable object rather than a ‘picture of something’ is an accepted aspect of televisual vocabulary. In news and current affairs, for example, visual tropes and graphic accessories complement narrative discourse and straight photographic imagery:
Wars become maps, the economy becomes graphs, crimes become diagrams, political argument becomes graphical conflict, government press releases become elegantly presented bullet points … Digital image technology has at last given television the potential to use images to provide more than mere wallpaper (which is still a common term for images which accompany words without adding any further meanings). (2000: 97–100)
Ellis suggests that this signifies a representational maturity in which television is ‘no longer tied to its mimetic base’, but instead it uses photographic imagery ‘as a springboard’ to routinely reconstruct and reinterpret the factual referent (2000: 101). The displacement of straight photographic images by digitised interpretations has become one of the defining characteristics of the state-of-the-art factual programme maker, news editor or magazine programme editor. They are characterised by their readiness to adopt digital techniques and their skill in rendering such techniques unobtrusive (2000: 95):
The frozen image of a refugee is treated to make a high-contrast background to a list of bullet points on the news; slow-motion bleached out images of holidaymakers provide a background for specific images on the programme menu of a travel show. These are summarising images, encapsulating experiences or ideas for a grazing audience. (2000: 96)
Ellis illustrates one aspect of digital popularisation: an accretion of interpretative discourses of which the image is but a part. Yet, we would contend, people still hold a residual respect for the seeming raw or unembellished image of events – without graphs, morphing and stylistic treatment – albeit possibly accessed by digital means. For, despite the increasing recognition that new media technologies can manipulate and distort the real, they are also looked to as a conduit into other people’s real worlds – ‘multi-media reality’ in Bazalgette’s terms. And despite popular scepticism about the representation of reality evident in debates about fakery in factual programming there has not been a wide-scale rejection of realist modes of representation by audiences. Paradoxically, if the proliferation of electronic media platforms has challenged epistemological structures, it has also reinforced the popular investment in ontological realism. For the display of the self on the internet and on reality TV has, if anything, actually re-invoked the cultural emphasis on the individual subject as the guarantor of ontological knowledge. The individual subject is given primacy to the extent that, in some forms of digital culture such as websites and camcorder programming, he/she even participates in the production of new economies of realism.