This is probably the first (and certainly the last!) time I have introduced one of these columns with one of my own speeches, but I promise you it’s relevant. Twenty years ago, I was invited to deliver the prestigious annual McTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival – one of those events attended by all the great and good of the television world. I considered myself neither great nor especially good, but I agreed because I did have something to say. Something I thought was important but also pretty controversial and might not be welcomed by many of the big broadcasting bosses in my audience.
With the benefit of hindsight, I was right. It was so controversial that some of my audience walked out and the following morning The Guardian, no less, made it the lead story on its front page. It described it as “a powerful case against the corrupting influence of reality television… railing against a tide of mind-numbing, witless vulgarity”.
Bear in mind that so-called reality television was in its very early days. Big Brother had exploded onto our screens and, in only a couple of years, had become the biggest thing on the box. Nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I hated it. I told my audience that what was being produced was having a coarsening effect on society that “turns human beings into freaks for us to gawp at”. I painted “a depressing picture of the damaging effect on participants and viewers of programmes such as Big Brother and Wife Swap”, while asking: "Can we really argue that the mind-numbing, witless vulgarity of so much of this stuff has no effect?”.
I did make one concession to the broadcasting bosses seated in front of me. I conceded that “the good television of today is probably better than the best television of the old days”. But I added: “The bad television of today is worse. It is not only bad - it is damaging, meretricious, seedy and cynical”. I described reality television as ‘so-called’ reality because “reality implies authenticity and honesty, and whatever some of this stuff may be, it is not authentic and it is not honest”. And I added: “This is not just bad television in the sense that it is mediocre, pointless, puerile even. It's bad because it is damaging”.
My reason for returning to that speech twenty years on is not just to mark the anniversary but to pose the question: are we getting the quality of television that we deserve and has the effect of reality TV been to help coarsen society? Or is it all just a bit of fun?
It's easy to forget what an enormous effect one single programme could have in a very short time. Big Brother was a sensation. It became easily the most talked-about programme in the land. The audience was vast and its influence on other programmes has been even greater. It seemed everyone wanted to be in the house, no matter how much ridicule and abuse they knew they would be subjected to. Here’s how one of the ‘guests’, Nikki Grahame, explained the allure. She was 24 years old and worked on a skincare counter in Harrods. She told Ralph Jones of Esquire magazine: “I'd never felt special in my whole life before Big Brother. I'd never felt I fitted in or belonged anywhere really until then. But finally I did. I just wanted to turn my life around and do something extravagant and exciting and go on an adventure. There was nothing bad in my life at the time. I just wanted more, you know?”
This, wrote Jones, was the allure of Big Brother: “Simply by living in a house with a dozen strangers and having your every moment filmed for a few months, you had the chance to become more than you used to be. You could win £100,000, leave behind the drudgery of a day job, and live life as a star, blinded by the light of paparazzi cameras. Grahame had seen it happen to six seasons' worth of contestants before her, and she was one of hundreds of thousands who queued up for some of the same treatment. She didn't even need to win. (She didn't win.) She just needed to be memorable. She just needed to be liked.”
Around ten million people watched the first Big Brother final. As Jones described it: “Eviction nights, and the final in particular, were colossal live events. For a second, as they opened the door of the house, they could hear the crowds cheering and booing and hissing and after four or five weeks suddenly they started talking about the fact that maybe people were really watching this programme.”
It’s true that there was a brief honeymoon period when everyone was talking about Big Brother and it was mostly being showered in praise. Indeed, it won an Innovation Award at the BAFTAs. But, as Jones noted, that was a time when contestants were “innocent and unsullied by expectation”. However, as he wrote much later, there is “a risk of being seduced by a false nostalgia. Many of the people I interview talk about contestants in subsequent seasons simply applying to become famous. In the first episode of season one, however, Nicola, one of the contestants, looked at the camera and said, “I applied for Big Brother 'cause I want to be famous and I also wanna be rich”.”
The Guardian accurately described my speech as “much more than another swipe against Big Brother”. It said: “[I] was concerned with the desensitising effect of violence, bad language and misery in EastEnders, the ritual humiliation of people who take part in programmes such as Wife Swap, and the trivialisation of serious subjects”.
I confessed at the start of my speech that it was not based on my own experience as a TV viewer. Indeed it was five years since I’d even owned a set. Instead I had asked 16 controllers of the main TV channels to select the ten programmes they were most proud of and I would watch them. And there was, indeed, some brilliant stuff: superb drama such as The Second Coming and The Lost Prince, documentaries such as Pompeii and Bloody Sunday, comedy such as The Office and Ali G, and history programmes from the likes of Simon Schama and David Starkey.
All that was to be expected. What astonished me was how many of the big TV bosses sent me tapes of programmes such as Banzai, Breasts Uncupped and Nip/Tuck. To which my reaction was: if they really think that sort of rubbish is the best, God knows what they think is the worst.
Twenty years later, what’s your view?
Perhaps you think we have yet to see the worst. At this point I am tempted to quote Mary Whitehouse, the most famous of all ‘clean up TV’ campaigners. When Big Brother was riding high, she said television was on a “downward moral spiral… Foul language and fornication would become routine if nothing were done to stop it”.
Well, nothing was done and Big Brother spawned a seemingly unstoppable flow of reality television, much of which has proved massively popular. Love Island, for instance. Or The Apprentice. You may love those programmes or hate them, but the bigger question is whether they – and many, many more like them have served to coarsen the national debate. Whitehouse was obviously right about foul language. F***ing – once virtually unthinkable – is now as common on mainstream television and radio as it once was in a military mess. Fornication barely raises an eyebrow. The very notion of ‘respect for our elders’ or authority in general has largely disappeared.
You may say ‘so what?’ Manners change over the generations. Always have and always will. Should we still observe the manners of the Victorian age? Return to a middle-class son addressing his father as ‘sir’?
But perhaps I was simply hopelessly out of touch when I described much reality television as a tide of “mind-numbing, witless vulgarity”. I justified it on the basis that reality implies authenticity and honesty. And whatever some of this stuff may have been it was not authentic and not honest.
But surely reality television makes up a relatively small proportion of the output? That’s true, but hasn’t their influence been out of all proportion to their number? And isn’t there a risk that they erode the distinction between the public and the private and risk turning human beings into freaks for us to gawp at?
True, Big Brother has gone – for the time being at least. And in its place are new ‘reality’ shows. One of the newest is bizarrely entitled The Underdog: Josh Must Win. A houseful of typical reality TV types compete to be voted the most popular housemate. But one of them - Josh - is different from the others because the whole thing is a sham, even though he doesn’t know it. Nor does anyone else. In the words of the critic Rebecca Nicholson, “Ultimately, it’s all artifice and performance”.
To which many would say: isn’t that what so much popular TV has always been about? And does it matter?
Let us know what you think.
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