Living With Reality
Sun Herald
Sunday May 22, 2005
WE'VE watched the rapid foreplay on Big Brother 5, followed celebrities to the highwire, been kept fascinated by Donald Trump's haircuts and tastes and even been sent to the naughty corner with Super Nanny. And yet we're still struggling to find the X-factor in what we had hoped would merely be the passing fad of reality TV.
Well, it's time to give in. Time to accept we're probably getting the television we actually deserve. Watching a lusty unshaven youth grope and grub around a panting tartlet in the cause of Big Brother and Network Ten's demographics may be leading us to new pinnacles of entertainment and understanding, though it's still hard to see exactly where those might be.Does it matter? Playing party games in togas and such is unlikely to lead to utter degradation, though perhaps, with just a few additional excesses, some further gladiatorial delights and circus follies, there could be declines and falls. How soon, do you think, before we're front-page-shocked by live-to-air pornography in family viewing time? Or an execution? When will we throw our first real nutter among the kids?Our appetite for reality TV does seem insatiable, though you have to wonder if our future leaders, our politicians, the educators, our dramatists and entertainers, the network owners, executives and their families are in reality all tuning in to this timeslot-filling gimmickry.Does the PM rush home to see what BB Friday Night Live hosts Ryan Fitzgerald and Mike Goldman have planned, catch the "Logan" twins at play, worry about Nelson and Gianna, or check up what's happening in BB Up Late? I hope not.Television is not just Big Brother, of course, though Ten's $30 million-a-year set-up has not been easy to escape. There are supposed to be something like 175 reality TV shows up and running successfully around the world. Some fall into that innovative, slickly formatted or quasi-documentary basket; others into the "television of cruelty" or jiggery-pokery bag.Some have brought benefits, such as Jamie's School Dinners. Others have taken us closer to our history. We've learned to live like cavemen, pioneers and Victorian upstairs-and-downstairs folk. There have been Crocodile Dundee fantasies for the Americans and Sylvania Waters for the Brits. We've done the Clive James Japanese-TV thing in The Fear Factor, cringing as some poor souls immerse themselves in seething tanks of weevils.There has been greed and romance, with Romeos selecting their partners-for-life and a million dollars from a cheer squad of adoring mid-west Juliet wannabes. We've watched perhaps in amazement at the hype and hoopla of Australian Idol, My Restaurant Rules and The Block, where Andy Warhol's dream line has been made reality. House renovators have been made stars; plumbers have had their moment as supermen. Oh it's all so wonderfully weird, isn't it? And, weirdest of all, we're still tuned in to this so-called reality.We were offered some that seem sadistic. This week's newcomer, $25 Million Dollar Hoax, a program that asks a young American woman to pretend she has won the lottery and then lie about it to her family, is one. Wife Swap was another. Others have involved embarrassment, weight loss or facing things that go bump in the night.And there are reality TV's big winners, the series that entertain rather than preach. When they work, they work well. Mark Burnett's Survivor is their champion, though The Amazing Race, with its eccentric American rush around the airports and taxi stands of the free world, is not far behind. Never quite as successful here was The Mole . . . but it won me over. Right now it's Big Brother that is again holding our attention. The next step for that show's producers is undoubtedly to step up the ante, make sure we will keep watching. And, of course, that will be done by making the show sexier, or perhaps more aggressive, by setting off what has been described as a further sort of emotional incontinence.The hapless bunch of whackers they've gathered together for our so-called entertainment will need to behave more like soap opera characters. But it won't really matter. Reality TV is not going to budge. If you thought you could turn off the voyeurism, the dirty tricks and tacky network programming, think again. What you do need to do now is be more careful in picking and choosing what you feel is acceptable . . . and then, of course, to swiftly voice your disapproval to those you foolishly think in reality can still do something about it.
© 2005 Sun Herald
