LoveMy affair with reality TV
Yes, they are cheap and cheesy. But here – 20 years after Big Brother changed the face of television – JULIE BURCHILL says reality shows tell us more about human nature than any Hollywood epic ever could
WhEn I think of the time before reality TV, I think of a black-and-white world of three channels, early closing and the test card of that little girl with the blackboard, forever waiting for the magic box in the corner to open up once more and steal her back from her boring toys.
I think of the approved hour of weekday children’s programmes, with the Blue Peter presenters urging you to send in your used stamps to help poor children in far-away countries; the hollywood film on a rainy Saturday afternoon which made me yearn for a life where men and women were wisecrackingly cruel to each other; the Sunday classic serial accompanying tinned cling peaches with Ideal milk — and the far-from-ideal prospect of school the next morning.
Real people on television were strictly rationed, as though we citizens might go berserk at the realisation of our sheer numbers if we saw anyone on the box who wasn’t a politician, a presenter or an actor.
When ordinary people were showcased, it was as cautionary tales. In 1970, the Man Alive documentary Gale Is Dead told the tragic story of a 19-year-old girl who had died of a drug overdose.
Four years later, the documentary series The Family followed the fortunes of the working- class Wilkins clan of reading as they bickered and snickered their way through a life so recognisably ordinary that it was, paradoxically, shocking.
I remember my mother and her friends murmuring with thrilled horror over Mrs Wilkins’s shamelessness, and wondering what the cameraman saw that didn’t make it to the screen.
Whoever dreamed in those innocent times that one day we would be watching far more unspeakable things on prime-time television?
If I had known, I believe I would have dropped down dead with self- defeating, dirtyminded anticipation.
But shocking antics aside, it was through Big Brother that we first saw real diversity in action on TV. And not diversity as the finger-wagging, fun-killing buzzword it’s become today.
By slowly watching the personalities unfold of people whose kind most of us hadn’t come across before (from transgender people to sufferers of Tourette’s syndrome), by getting to know and love them, we realised that we are united by more than that which separates us.
Let other hypocritical hacks (it’s no secret that we as a breed are the most drunken, promiscuous, attention-seeking profession ever to walk the earth) clutch their pearls over the degradation that reality TV has forced on the viewing public.
If I could watch only one type of television programme for ever more, then this would be it. For a start, reality TV covers so many bases.
It encompasses talent shows — from The X Factor and Britan’s Got Talent to Strictly Come Dancing — which cater to the very human emotions of wanting to see the underdog excel (the jaw- dropping moment that Susan Boyle hit the top note of I Dreamed A Dream in her BGT audition) and the self-regarding brought down a peg or two (Ed Balls falling over in Strictly). ThErE
are the survivalist show-offs’ series such as I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of here!, and, of course, anything with Bear Grylls or Ant Middleton. There are the Beautiful People shows — from The Only Way Is Essex to Made In Chelsea
— which act as extended adverts for online fast-fashion brands, and the pluses and minuses of Botox, fillers and vajazzles.
There are Beautiful People In Swimwear shows — Ex On The Beach — which fulfil the same promotional function for fake tan and tooth whitening.
And there are Beautiful People In Distress shows — Celebrity Eating With My Ex, Celebrities In Therapy — which appeal to our sense of schadenfreude.
Indeed, so fast and furious do the permutations come that there are even Beautiful People In Swimwear In Distress shows — the massively