Reality TV is controversial, lucrative and very popular. Sylvie Kerviel examines a cultural phenomenon
In 1999 the Dutch “reality television” show Big Brother, in which a group of contestants was isolated from the rest of the world and kept under 24-hour surveillance, was an instant hit. It was so successful that it immediately spawned similar programmes in other countries.
Loosely based on Big Brother, France’s Loft Story has pulled in up to 10-million viewers each evening since it began in April, attracting lucrative advertising for its broadcaster, M6, and a welter of criticism.
The phenomenon has sent TV production companies across the world looking for ways of perpetuating this rich seam of advertising revenue. New versions of Big Brother keep popping up. According to New on the Air (Nota), a watchdog that examines new TV programmes in Europe and English-speaking countries throughout the world, there are now 40 programmes designed along the lines of Big Brother.
They differ only in the degree to which they exploit viewers’ voyeuristic and sadistic urges. In each case contestants are voted out one at a time by their colleagues and by viewers until just two are left. The survivors pick up the jackpot (in the case of Loft Story, a $400 000 house).
The process of elimination creates a psychological climate that encourages depression, weeping fits, spats and dirty tricks a sure-fire recipe for good ratings.
Once the initial impact of Big Brother had worn off, TV companies had to beef up their programme concepts to maintain the public’s interest. Last year United States viewers were offered Survivor, an adventure game of Swedish origin, which involved putting a group of ordinary people on a desert island and forcing them to survive by eating worms and rats.
The programme was watched by 52-million viewers when it was first shown by CBS last August. A new version is in the pipeline in which unknowns will be replaced by celebrities. A French version, called the Adventurers of Ko Lanta, will be shown by the TF1 channel this summer.
US viewers have also been treated this year to Temptation Island, in which four married couples are sent off to an island in Belize, where a plethora of attractive young singletons awaits: their task is to seduce the newcomers and break up their marriages.
The programme enabled Fox TV to secure the top ratings in the under-50 category of viewers. It went on to devise another “game”, Boot Camp: 10 contestants are detained in a military training camp where they are put through a series of physical and psychological tests by drill instructors who scream orders in their faces. On one occasion they were deprived of sleep for 47 hours. The key ingredients of Boot Camp are not flirtation and sexual titillation, but sadism and military fantasies.
Now showing in the US is Chains of Love, in which four men, chained to each other by the wrists or ankles, are locked up in a house and observed round the clock by a battery of cameras. Their “jailer” is a woman. The men sleep in the same 5m-wide bed. They are unshackled only when visiting the bathroom. The woman decides whom to exclude, ending up with the man of her choice, with whom she shares several tens of thousands of dollars.
Although the show is blatantly sado-masochistic in spirit, it carefully avoids shocking American puritanism: once they are on their own, the winning couple wear swimming costumes in the jacuzzi and do not touch each other.
In The Netherlands, where the principle of “voluntary prisoners” was first devised, TV screens continue to be swamped by voyeuristic programmes. The latest of these, the highly successful Big Diet, coops up a group of overweight men and women in a villa that is filled with forbidden goodies and TV cameras. Appetising dishes, in particular pizzas, are delivered in an attempt to break down their defences.
The contestant who resists temptation most successfully and loses the most weight avoids being excluded and wins the jackpot of $220 000. The winnings are paid out in two instalments, half at the end of the programme and the rest six months later, but only if the winner has kept his or her weight down to the same level.
Before that Dutch viewers were treated to The Mole, a game devised in Belgium, in which 10 people were subjected to a series of ordeals in the Australian desert. The contestants included a “mole” from the TVproduction company, whose task was to make people fail their tests and to whip up animosity between participants.
Wherever they have been shown, programmes of this kind have been criticised either for their mindlessness or because they degrade people. But, with few exceptions, they have been hugely successful.
“Pro” and “anti” pressure groups have been set up. The pope, politicians and intellectuals have taken a public stance on the issue. In The Netherlands an association of psychologists lambasted the “irresponsible” nature of Big Brother when it was launched in 1999. In Sweden a version of Survivor was scrapped after one of the participants committed suicide. Animal rights associations in the US protested against the fact that the contestants in Survivor had eaten rats.
But according to Nota, only in France has a TV watchdog intervened to ask a channel to change the rules of the game. The TV watchdog insisted that Loft Story contestants be allowed two hours of complete privacy a day, and that the voting public be asked, “Whom do you want to keep?” rather than, “Whom do you want to exclude?”
Reality TV has on occasion resulted in court cases. In the US a Survivor contestant accused the producers of rigging the results. A couple who took part in Temptation Island in the hope of becoming famous sued the production company, claiming that their image had been “damaged” by their eviction from the island.
ASP, which produces Loft Story, could run into similar problems. The employment minister, Elisabeth Guigou, says she intends to check that there has been no breach of labour laws in the programme. Aziz, the first person to be excluded from Loft Story, subsequently made it to the cover of Paris Match, and is believed to be renegotiating his contract.