So the Dutch reality TV programme, The Big Donor Show, was a Big Joke. The
dying woman ready to choose which patient should get her kidney was an
actress. The patients were real, but they knew it was a hoax. The whole
thing was a stunt to encourage organ donation. “We are not giving away a
kidney here,” said presenter Patrick Lodiers, “that is going too far, even
for us.”
The hoax succeeded on two levels. First, it gripped its home audience. The
Dutch got into the hysterically morbid spirit of the show by texting their
votes for which dialysis-dependent patient should get the kidney.
Secondly, it succeeded worldwide in generating stories and condemnatory
columns about the mounting excesses of reality TV. It brilliantly exploited
its audience. Clever, very.
But that’s the point. The people who make popular television today are not the
cheeky-chappy, fresh from the music hall types of the past, they are smart,
educated, media-savvy people who know exactly how to press all the right
mass market buttons.
In Britain the point man for this class is Peter “I’m a fishwife at heart”
Bazalgette, head of Endemol, the firm behind Big Brother, the ultimate
exemplar of reality TV. It started its eighth series this week.
Bazalgette studied law at Cambridge. He is also the great-great grandson of
Sir Joseph Bazalgette, a supreme Victorian engineer who built the Thames
Embankment and the sewers that suppressed cholera in London. It was this
that prompted Stephen Fry to observe that his descendant had negated his
achievement by “pumping shit back into people’s homes”.
Columnists from the tabloids to the heavies tend to agree with Fry. Big
Brother and, indeed, all extreme TV – watch out for an upcoming show that
offers plastic surgery as the prize – is routinely trashed as yet another
symptom of the onrushing end of civilisation.
Channel 4 has been the prime trashee, mainly due to the Big Brother Shilpa
Shetty-Jade Goody racism row and a fuss about its documentary on the death
of Diana, Princess of Wales. The Diana row was hyped nonsense – the
documentary is sane and responsible – but the racism row was fair enough and
Channel 4’s defence – that it provoked debate – was risible.
“Does that mean,” asked The Sunday Times’ television critic, A A Gill, “you
bring back the gas chambers to start a debate about the Holocaust?”
But Channel 4 is in deep trouble. Its revenues are at rock bottom and BB’s hot
ad slots prop up the whole operation. Furthermore, its flagrant abuse of its
public service remit makes a Gordon Brown privatisation of the company look
like a very attractive political move.
As if to rub salt into the wound, Lord Puttnam, deputy chairman of the
channel, has admitted the bright young things that run the shows are out of
control.
“We’re dealing with programme makers of a different generation. The way they
see themselves regarded by their peer group is in terms of how controversial
they could be.”
But, of course, the flip side is that the bright young spawn of Bazalgette
know exactly what they are doing. They thrive on the tabloid trashings
because they see what else is in the tabloids – massive coverage of Big
Brother and any reality shocker they can dream up.
The tabloids announce the barbarians are at the gates and then encourage them
to keep raping, looting and pillaging with sexy pix and in-depth interviews.
No wonder the bright young things think their job is to deliver ever more
powerful shocks to their audience. It pays the bills. Money doesn’t talk, it
swears like Jade Goody.
Programme makers, said Bazalgette, “are sharpening up the way that TV
programmes are presented . . . they are learning what tabloid newspapers
have always done”. This is precisely wrong – they are remaking tabloids in
their own image.
If they ever do engage with the trashings, the pop-elitist defence is always
the same – we’re giving the people what they want. This is, of course,
ridiculous. It implies that, before Big Brother, viewers were sitting around
thinking, “Hmmm, now what I’d really like is a show about a bunch of
dysfunctional freaks stuck in a house for three months.”
The truth is that the show and its popularity are an invention of its makers.
They choose to make it, they are not compliant servants of popular taste.
They don’t like to hear this because it jerks them out of their cool,
postmodern amoral-ity by dropping the moral buck right back on their desks.
But let’s get real: you did it, you’re responsible.
There are plenty of signs that they notice this awkward fact. Some time ago,
Davina McCall, the BB presenter, was on Top Gear. Jeremy Clarkson scorned
the whole idea of BB and said he never watched it.
She said he should take more interest in “popular culture”; what she did not
say was: “It’s a great show, you should watch it.”
Is she reluctant to say it’s a great show? And is calling it “popular culture”
just a way of saying that it’s not for smart people like her?
And, of course, at the back of all this, there lies the threat that you will
be guilty of elitism if you persist in criticising the taste of the
audiences and participants in these shows. Such is the subtle condescension
of the new elites.
But, aside from disseminating moral illiteracy, are these people actually
doing any harm? Are the critics guilty of what John Lloyd in the Financial
Times called, in response to Fry’s shit-shovelling remark, “pious claptrap”?
The answer is to return to my point that these shows are not natural products
of some preexisting mass appetite, they are deliberate inventions. The Big
Donor Show worked both as reality TV and as a hoax because an audience – and
a worldwide population of outraged columnists – had been created that
understood all the conventions. All these people were primed for
exploitation and they were duly exploited. Bazalgette admits this.
“The whole thing needed to rely on the highly prejudiced coverage TV is
getting at the moment. This thing was designed for those prejudices and
those prejudices worked wonderfully . . . it was a perfectly executed
campaign.”
Er, but the “prejudiced coverage” is what you rely on for your ratings. Oh,
never mind.
That, in the Dutch case, trickery was involved does not dilute this point
about audiences. That it worked proves how effectively an audience has been
invented and, like a paedophile’s victim, groomed.
But, as the cast of the latest BB demonstrated in horrific detail, it is not
just the audience that has been invented, it is the protagonists. People
like this did not exist before BB with its penumbra of celebrity culture was
born.
The (literally) bottomless, shrieking, preverbal twins Sam and Amanda only
look, sound and act like that because they have been taught to do so. They
have been told that this is what you should do – it is what you must do – if
you are young and pretty. In another time, another place, another culture,
they would have been different people with different aspirations. The rest
of the cast ranges from the pathetic to the brutal, all are inventions.
Idly we may think these people are somehow representative, but, in fact, they
are chosen by a savagely cynical process – exposed in detail in the Daily
Mail yesterday – in which sexual hang-ups, prejudice and hatred are the
criteria for a Big Brother victim. This makes a mockery of Bazalgette’s
absurd posture of innocence about the whole process.
“It’s whatever happens,” he said yesterday, “when you put 12 people together
and you don’t know in advance what it’s going to be, whether it’s Nasty
Nick’s strange behaviour in 2000 or Jade losing it in January 2007.” Yeah,
right.
But, however you dress it up, these people are victims. Commenting on the
plastic surgery show, Peter Butler, head of the UK Facial Transplantation
Research Team, said: “We have to be careful to avoid exploitation of some of
the most vulnerable people in society.” Quite right.
But it’s not just plastic surgery wannabes that are vulnerable, it is all the
people made so needy, so dysfunctional, so devoid of dignity, so morally
hollowed out by celebrity culture that they actually want to be in one of
these freak shows.
You are, if you want to be on BB, sick and stupid and you have been sickened
and stupefied by the very culture from which BB springs.
Doubtless Bazalgette will thrive on such statements and doubtless the liberal
conscience will continue to squirm about the rights and wrongs of admitting
that what is supposedly working-class culture is, in fact, disgusting beyond
belief, an endless, savage vacancy.
But it is as well to remember how at ease we are with censoriousness when it
comes to smoking, drinking and obesity. We have no trouble anathematising
such things.
These shows poison the imagination and exploit vulnerabilities in ways far
more harmful than a 20-aday habit. They must be hated; it is our primary
defence against the encroaching delusion that fame, money and shrieking,
bottomless blondes are the only contemporary reality.
Additional reporting: Dipesh Gadher and Jane Szita
A brief history of car-crash TV
1954 BBC adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 leads to questions in parliament
over subversive nature
1962 That Was the Week That Was criticised for lampooning Establishment
1965 F-word used for first time on UK TV by Kenneth Tynan, the writer,
in a live debate. BBC issues apology
1976 Sex Pistols unleash a torrent of profanities during early evening
interview with Bill Grundy on Thames TV
1994 Anna Friel and Nicola Stephenson share first prewatershed lesbian
kiss on Brookside
2001 Brass Eye spoof on paedophilia leads to 1,000 complaints to
Independent Television Commission. Only Last Temptation of Christ, in same
year, has sparked more
2002 Channel 4 cameras watch Professor Gunther von Hagens perform first
TV public autopsy in Britain
2005 BBC bosses receive death threats after showing Jerry Springer: the
Opera, despite 47,000 complaints accusing it of blasphemy
2007 More than 50,000 viewers protest over racist bullying of Shilpa
Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother by Jade Goody, right
