MM
Love it or loathe it, there’s no escaping it – Reality TV is everywhere. MediaMag interviewed Annette Hill, Professor of Media at Westminster University, academic guru and fan of the genre, on why there’s so much of it, its impact and appeals to audiences, and where it’s going. Along the way she raises important issues about its ethics and morality, broadcasters’ duty of care to its participants, and its role in television’s survival of the fittest.
14 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
An interview with Annette Hill MM: How would you define
reality TV? To define reality TV is the million
dollar question because it really resists definition. We could say that there are two broad elements of a genre that make it reality TV: an
observational strand, where you follow people around and see what happens, and a created strand where you make a situation work in front of the television, almost like made-for-TV reality. Both of those strands always rely on a mix of fact and fiction, of popular elements of documentary or news, combined with popular elements of lifestyle or talk shows and even little bits of drama like melodrama or soap opera. The wonderful thing which makes reality
television so interesting to study is that it blurs the boundary between factual programming
like news and documentary and fictional programming like soap opera or melodrama – and it works precisely because it blurs these boundaries. So when you study it, it’s quite difficult to pull apart the crucial key elements that make something more factual or more entertaining. But if you look at examples like 999 there’s a very clear instruction; you can see it’s coming from a much more documentary frame, where you want to teach the public to improve their knowledge of something quite specific. Shows like The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent on the other hand are lovely examples of programmes with a minimal amount of instruction and information; they are much more about working in an entertainment/drama frame, where the audience is brought into the entertainment to make a difference to the outcome of the story in the end. Reality TV is a hybrid of the two things coming together.
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