Wading in a shallow world of reality TV

Reality TV is one of the more interesting oxymorons in the English language. It may meet the Star Trek description of "Life, Jim, but not as we know it", but it could scarcely be further from what most of us term reality.

Before you can have so-called reality television, you have to interview thousands of people in the hope of engineering the most volatile and entertaining mix, put them in situations guaranteed to cause stress and conflict, shoot hundreds of hours of tape and then edit the highlights for consumption. That is, if there are any highlights. It could hardly be more contrived.

There are two basic sub-divisions within the genre. One is where you wall up 10 or more people in a house where they are cut off from all their normal supports and then present them with mindless set pieces which they have to carry out. The other is to pit contestants against each other in some kind of survival scenario. What they both have in common is the relentless theme of competition.

Both types of reality TV claim to feature ordinary people, except for Celebrity Big Brother, which was even more bizarre than the "normal" Big Brother. One would have to ask whether actually wanting to take part in reality TV disqualifies a person from any claim to ordinariness. Most of them seem in search of fame, however fleeting. The more canny are in search of careers.

So why is it so fascinating? My guess is that they appeal to that basic human instinct to analyse and criticise, or in other words, to gossip. Chatting about the neighbours in a pre-television era not only provided entertainment but operated as a source of social control. There were strong social mores and the fear of being gossiped about was one powerful way of enforcing those mores. Those gossiping were also bonded by the exchange of information and comment. As society becomes more atomised, aside from in our workplaces, we hardly know each other well enough to gossip. Reality TV provides us with a topic of conversation, a chance to gossip about people we all apparently know.

The big difference, though, is that while gossip enforced the social mores in a time before TV, this kind of gossip does exactly the opposite. It stretches the boundaries of what is and is not acceptable behaviour. Gossip had its limits. It had to be hidden under a discreet facade, and observation of others was often covert. Reality TV teaches us it is not rude to stare.

We are invited to be as bitchy as we like because such involvement is good for ratings. We enact a 21st century version of social ostracisation by voting to eject those we dislike, and if they cry it is all the better.

Nasty and destructive as gossip can be in workplaces and communities, reality TV thrives best if we indulge our nosiness and vindictiveness without the boundaries which are enforced by dealing with real people. It may all be billed as just a game, but games can tell us interesting things about ourselves.

Years ago, I was involved in a training weekend which used a trading game called Star Power. The odds are stacked against one group of players from the start because of the way in which resources are distributed and the rules enforced, but the participants do not realise this at first. How people played the game was more than revealing. Within 10 minutes, one participant, a priest who had been expelled from South Africa for opposing apartheid, had started organising the group which was discriminated against into a form of passive resistance, refusing to play the game by the unfair rules. Meanwhile, another participant was merrily lying and cheating, persuading others to lend him their resources under false pretences so that he could get very rich indeed.

In some sense, anyone of us who watch these programmes are participants in the game, because without us it could not happen. Perhaps the only way these programmes reflect reality is that they are based on very modern assumptions.

Celebrity is all. Yet as a notion, it too has been subverted. Once, to be a celebrity required maintaining a careful distance, buffing and polishing the illusion of having some innate superiority which demanded an awe-struck acknowledgement. Yes, it was hypocritical, but the newer version of celebrity is often quite vicious. Celebrities are not really celebrities until they have demonstrated some astonishing weakness which can be gleefully seized upon.

As for so-called ordinary people, far from being in some sense superior, reality TV peddles the notion that being known for being known is a good enough reason for fame. Brian Dowling has wit, charm and probably some potential as a TV presenter, but basically his function is to underline the idea that any of us are potential celebrities, and that that is a good thing.

Likewise, competition is seen as good in itself. This is especially true of the survival-type programmes, where ordinary human decencies are major obstacles to success. Winning is all, because the prize is not just cash, but celebrity.

Reality TV has to push new boundaries all the time, or else it will lose viewers. Its close cousin, the fly-on-the-wall documentary, has already told us more than we ever wanted to know about the sex lives of tourists. Not that reality TV is averse to such attractions. The Dutch version of Big Brother featured a couple having sex, although the British version seemed to specialise in people endlessly talking about it.

Apparently as a genre it is already in decline, particularly in the United States, where frantic producers have made so many different versions that it has lost its appeal. For those of us still addicted, what does reality TV tell us? It may reflect, at the risk of an even greater oxymoron, new depths of shallowness, but maybe it just shows that some of us need more reality and a little less television.

bobrien@irish-times.ie