The good old days of reality TV

Reality television has become a part of everyday life for those not living under a rock, or in the back of beyond. It’s got to the point now where people’s only aspiration in life is to appear on ‘Big Brother’ and become a ‘celebrity’, whilst others delude themselves into thinking they have the voice of an angel but ,in fact, sound like a choir of screeching cats. Even if the end product of a reality television program is awful, at least there’s a great entertainment factor to these shows. Who doesn’t want to see Snooki from ‘Jersey Shore’ get punched in the face? It’s the kind of stuff that makes a dreary Monday evening all the more bearable. You get in late after lectures and what do you do? You order Dominoes and watch some plastic American girls have cat fights; thus, allowing you to sleep easier at night, knowing that on the other side of the world, the girls from ‘The Hills’ have far bigger problems.

We are all familiar with fly-on-the-wall documentaries: when we the viewer are allowed ‘exclusive’ access into the celeb world. For a while, this was reality television’s dominant form. Take ‘Big Brother’, the CCTV-like format of the show makes the audience think that they are seeing real people, in a real situation, behaving like they really would in the outside world. This type of close-up viewing gave reality television the popularity it has today. Put a group of people you know aren’t going to get along in a house, lock them in there, play games with them, and film them secretly; what could be better? It’s like going to a zoo and watching the animals from the safety of a metal fence, except in case of reality television, the animals are actually the dregs of society who are there for our entertainment. We even had Dermot O’Leary pretending to be Attenborough when he started whispering about the contestants from behind a one-way mirror, observing them as they gathered around the waterhole.

Recently, however, this sense of ‘secret’ observation has started to fade. Of course, television is always mediated through one form or another; its overall aim is to make money after all. But we need to be tricked into thinking that what we are seeing is the undeniable truth. We need to be fooled. For Reality TV to succeed, the audience need to think they are the observers behind the glass screen, watching the lion try his chances with as many mistresses as possible.

In recent years, however, reality television has slipped away from what made it so entertaining. Enter the seemingly unstoppable force of TOWIE (or The Only Way Is Essex for Twitter virgins), the show with harsh Essex accents, radioactive fake tans that could attract a plane from the sky, and enough flesh on show to shame an exhibitionist. The show focuses on the lives of a select group of people in Essex: their lives, relationships, make-up disasters and fake tan. Ok, so far so good. So, it is like ‘The Hills’, or ‘Laguna Beach’? Wrong. The show is formatted similar to a soap; there is a script the ‘characters’ have to follow. I hear a resounding “well, duh!” coming. Yes, the majority of reality television is scripted, but TOWIE seems to have nothing besides the script. As a result, the show becomes too mechanical. ‘Characters’ turn up at exactly the right time, say the right thing (or wrong thing depending on the context) and then that’s a wrap. Where’s the spontaneity? Where’s the va-va-voom? Yes, I’m aware that this is the formula for shows like ‘The Hills’ too, but TOWIE seems to have the ability to draw attention to the falsity behind it. It may as well have a spin-off show following the lives of the camera crew as they film the show. And yes, most reality TV shows have the obligatory sentence saying that some scenes have been set up for our entertainment, but, with TOWIE it’s not some scenes, it’s all scenes.

Perhaps I’m being too much of a traditionalist; it’s possible that this pseudo-reality could be the next step for reality television. With ‘Big Brother’ being effectively killed off by its relegation to Channel 5, maybe the start of the Cult of Essex and fake-reality is the revamp the genre needed? For me, it’s a bit like ‘The Truman Show’ when Truman realises that his hometown is actually a giant television set; just not quite as earth shattering or life changing. Personally, I feel that when it comes to reality television, the audience should be tricked into thinking that they are directly watching these people, not through the medium of television, but with their own eyesight. Can we go back to the days of unobtrusive observation, when watching people having shockingly un-private ‘relations’ was deemed the height of sophistication?