Reality is bad enough…..
First broadcast in the United Kingdom in 1964, the Granada Television series Seven Up!, broadcast interviews with a dozen ordinary seven-year olds from a broad cross section of society and inquired about their reactions to everyday life. Every seven years, a film documented the life of the same individuals in the intervening years. The series was structured simply as a series of interviews with no plot. However, it did have the then-new effect of turning ordinary people into celebrities.
45 years later, reality tv is a global phenomenon and most of our current celebrities have either started their career, furthered their career or ended their career as a reality tv star. The thing that baffles me is WHY anyone would NOW subject themselves to entering a reality tv show knowing that it has become a platform to show abuse, racism, bullying, homophobia, prejudice, tears, tantrums, sickness and even dying – don’t we have enough of that in our “real” worlds!
Big Brother returns this week for it 10th cycle with what I can only presume will be another set of contestants so eager for fame that they will literally make themselves hated by millions of people to get it. And is it their fault – no – it is ours. I guarantee that none of use will watch BB hoping that the contestants just sit around and laugh and chat and have lovely philosophical conversations about happiness and life. We will watch it to see who fights who, who lies the most, who is the most obnoxious and who will cause the most friction. We, the viewers have shown in our ratings figures that we are hungry for the really nasty aspects of reality, and the contestants know that. They know that they will get notoriety but at a price. That price is for them to become our personal hate figure, and they would prefer to be a disliked ‘someone’ rather than just a “no-one.”
What I want to know is who is still going to watch it or who, like me, has decided that they like no-one’s better than someone’s?