MM
a sadistic future?
There’s a strange world of bizarre factual programming out there, from live autopsies to erotic hypnosis. And when reality formats kick in too, things get really strange. Richard Smith surveys some of the world’s more extreme examples of reality TV, and wonders what they tell us about audiences and ethics.
Not content with killing culture as we know
it, reality TV is at it again and it doesn’t care who it takes down with it. It is the quintessential televisual Marmite: you either love its novelty or you want to chase it off your land with a shotgun. It is breaking taboos in ways we haven’t seen, in countries we haven’t even heard of. Gone are the days of Big Brother race rows and here are the days of a genre that bathes in its own torturous taboos. How can reality TV cover new ground when
so much has already been covered? How about depriving contestants of sleep and the last one to finally snooze wins? Been there: Shattered (Channel 4). How about watching relationships crumble with a live lie detector test? Done that: Lie Detector (Live TV). How about chaining one
62 MediaMagazine | December 2009 | english and media centre
man to five women and voting one person off each week? Nothing new: Chained (E4). With so much terrain already covered, reality TV is in a desperate state. Japanese television exhibited one effect of
this desperation with Nasabi where one man (Nasabi) was locked in a room naked, alone and in a tiny flat with nothing to eat. He was told he was taking part in a TV project but was not told he was broadcast to seventeen million Japanese viewers. Nasabi could only win food through magazine competitions and could only leave once he had won prizes to the amount of five thousand pounds (One Million Yen). One year and three months later, he managed it. Is this imprisonment a sign of things to come? Should compromising our human rights be used for entertainment? Or be so entertaining? The world of fiction occasionally explores the
grim future of reality TV with classics such as The Running Man (1987) and Battle Royale (2000) addressing the notion of death as the ultimate mainstream entertainment. Both The Truman Show (1998) and Ed TV (1999) take a lighter look at the genre but there is one text that stands as a profound warning. Series Seven: The Contenders (2001) is a satire about a media-saturated culture and is set in the immediate future where five contenders are given no choice but to participate. A television crew follows each of them as they are given a gun and told that they kill or be killed.
In a society where the media holds dominion, the contestants battle it out to the delight of the viewing audience who accept death, gore and violence as mainstream entertainment.
Prank TV At its simplest, reality TV is friendly and fun
but the prankster show has mischievously shifted over the past few decades, from Beadle’s About and Trigger Happy TV where light-hearted pranks are played on the public to Jackass and Dirty Sanchez where their immense physical pain is our immense joy. The USA have stepped it up even more so with Scare Tactics where contestants are set up to believe, amongst other things, that they are legitimately going to be killed at the hands of a psychopath (actor). Similarly Enfarto (Mexico) translated as ‘Heart attack’ tricks unknowing victims into facing the possibility of their own death. The audience gets to witness this real terror and sits back laughing in their voyeuristic armchairs. It is this move from friendly prank to spiteful bullying that raises questions about our notion of contemporary entertainment. Ultimately though, the shows exist because there is a demand for them to exist. Criminal Russia (USSR) continues the theme
of death and investigates murders with one twist: the murderer takes us through his crime. Crime scenes are revisited and weapons are reconstructed as the murderer jumps into the spotlight to give us a step-by-step account of
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