MM
MM: Why reality TV, why now? What were the factors that
have contributed to it? From the nineteenth century
onwards the development of popular culture has been about the survival of the fittest in a difficult economic creative environment:
how does something survive and grow and make money and be entertaining to the mass audience? Reality TV is a direct response to that. For example, in the 1980s, the growth and huge success of the talk show, with people talking about themselves, arguing and debating and fighting over their emotional and personal lives became high conflict situations, could be seen as a precursor of reality TV. In the 1980s there was an actors’ strike and a big conflict around what was paid to writers of drama. And this created a wonderful gap in the market which was filled by reality TV. It also exploited the success of local news, which was a boom area in the 1980s, where we had ‘on-scene/as-it-happened’ styles of news. Throughout the 1990s reality TV took over from the talk show and became the most dominant genre in factual entertainment in America and in Britain, and we’ve seen it spread around the world with different kinds of formats like Big Brother or Idols or Strictly Come Dancing today. Now in the Noughties, we have strikes going on around writers’ pay and actors’ pay once again, and we can see the huge
growth of the reality talent show genre as a direct response to this. So it’s always a creative and economic response to a crisis going on within broadcasting.
MM: Is there a difference between reality TV on BBC and on other commercial
broadcasters? Public service broadcasters
like the BBC came in early on the more instructional observational styles of reality television. So 999 or the very popular lifestyle show
Changing Rooms were good examples of reality television which, though entertaining, also had an instructional public service element. Meanwhile the response from commercial broadcasters was much more about shows which would produce income, for example, voting revenue; that voting revenue didn’t feed back into a public service environment but into a direct commercial environment. Channel 4, being a hybrid of public service and a commercial channel, can pick a format like Big Brother where the revenue feeds back into the commercial environment of the show. The BBC has to be much more careful with the styles of reality TV that it adopts. So the created-for-TV type reality shows – especially the ‘high conflict’ shows – are more likely to be broadcast on commercial channels.
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 15
One very recent example is Living TV, one
of the success stories of the multichannel environment, producing a show like Dating in the Dark – a lovely, crazy mix of lifestyle and something to do with senses and sensory journeys. This would be almost an impossible show for the BBC to make because it’s just too risky. Whereas for Living, it’s exactly the kind of risky, sexy mix of different styles that they can get away with.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67