MM
somehow make a difference in their lives. And it’s an uphill struggle, and in some ways it doesn’t matter if he succeeds or not because we want to see him struggle and go through the process. And, in fact, as the show unfolds what we begin to see is people initially reluctant to join a choir coming together and becoming more and more enthusiastic and making the community mend in some way. A wonderful feel-good story, with a fantastic character and a set of supporting characters within the community that make the story an amazing emotional and personal journey.
MM: Can you talk about the moral panics around reality TV, and why it’s become so
contentious? As a new genre, reality TV
introduces a whole set of new and controversial elements into the existing media environment. It’s a new style using different kinds of
techniques and technologies across the multi- media, multi-platform environment, all of which are unfamiliar and which can therefore feel scary and frighten people. And their responses often emerge as moral arguments and highlight a fear that something new can threaten the current state of the quality of television. So some of the biggest and still most dominant discussions about reality TV are precisely that it’s trash TV, junk food TV. Reality TV as junk food TV has become such a dominant discourse in society that even viewers who watch it are repeating the same arguments back to us. And that’s a natural reaction to something new. Also, because reality TV is controversial in
the way it mixes different things, it often makes mistakes and can produce something that’s terrible as well as something brilliant. And these concerns are not only about the quality of the content – is it good? – but about the impact of the content on the audience. Those are assumptions about the moral impact of a genre on an audience which just don’t take into account the audience themselves. We have to take these recurring concerns about reality TV and put them into a much bigger social, political, economic context and add some balance to it. We have to make sure that we talk to people who watch the shows, and to people who make the shows, in order to make an informed evaluation of reality TV. It’s here to stay, and we have to learn to deal with it, to understand it, to analyse it and predict where it’s going in order to make sense of it.
MM: Let’s take an obvious example – Jade Goody and the racism row. Could that be seen as a positive learning experience for audiences and
for broadcasters? The elements of bullying and
accusations of racism within Celebrity Big Brother had an immediate impact on the public. The thousands of complaints that came
through from the public clearly showed that the
issue of respect and disrespect was uppermost in their minds. They knew that this was something that was not okay, and that fair treatment not only of the celebs in Big Brother but of people more generally, is really, really important. So there you have something negative going on in a show that actually set up a much broader dialogue, in a much more positive way.
MM: In your research you’ve argued that reality TV is, by definition, a genre which requires viewers to view and
debate critically. Reality television is very much a
people-orientated kind of genre. It is about emotional relations, social relations, the way we communicate, the way we don’t communicate.
It draws people in and forces them to take a position, often a critical position, often by imagining, would I do that in that situation? Would I behave in that way? In some ways it provides a kind of safe space in your own home to watch the social relations, the way people fight and argue and love and hate, and so on. It’s what we might call a second order experience of intense social communication; but from a distance, when we’re not actually there live with these people. I think it encourages viewers to be critical of people in the shows, and then to be critical of themselves: ‘how do I feel watching the show, you know, do I feel good about watching something like Big Brother? Do I feel good about my opinions about Jade Goody? Is it okay to have these opinions?’ It brings up quite complex and messy moral issues which are difficult to resolve. So it invites the viewer to be critical, for sure. What reality TV does is bring up a moral issue
and make people confront it and say, well, what kind of position are we going to take? Whether it resolves the issue for people is another matter.
MM: What about the broad- casters themselves? What is their duty of care? Should there be more exercise of control?
Well, the policy environment for
the treatment of ordinary people in reality TV is a fairly light-touch policy. And that’s enough for some programme-makers; they feel that,
if people have signed an informed consent where they allow the programme-makers to film them in difficult situations and the programme- makers have the end choice about how that’s represented on screen, then that’s enough. And that comes from the documentary tradition where signing an informed consent allows the film-maker to create the story out of what they see unfolding. The problem is with the created- for-TV types of reality shows, especially the talent shows, which include a lot of ‘humiliation TV’, signing that informed consent isn’t necessarily quite enough. I think the editorial policy will have to catch up
with the development of the genre, and with the way people participate in reality TV shows. When people go into these talent shows, they know the formats but, at the same time, they’re really not prepared for how programme-makers will make them look at the end. Take an example like Brat Camp, where
you have parents at the end of their tether, with teenagers with serious behavioural and emotional problems who supposedly go to a camp that’s going to fix them – fix their behaviour – in some way. This is a show that is absolutely about a high crisis situation. And you do feel for the families who are having to cope with a teenager who’s really exhibiting quite extreme challenging behaviours. One debate with the programme-makers is about the fact that, in order to make the kind of show we like to watch about high conflict situations and
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 17
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