I have an ambition, not worth a place on the bucket list, but one worthy of consideration for a few spare days. I would like to write a short play about a tv production team in the 1970s which is contemplating a reality tv series and see if its collective imagination could take us to where we are today.
Sci-fi and fantasy just embrace the themes consistent through the writing of millenia. It’s all good versus evil, empire building and destroying, varying analyses of love and romance. Shakespeare had most of that stuff licked in the 17th century.
How have we got to the place where so many boundaries have been eroded to the point where fantasy has become reality? Even as an adolescent teenager it would have been stretching my imagination to be naked sharing a hot tub with a naked girl I’d only just met and trying to secure her as my girlfriend in opposition to another naked bloke while a host of other naked people watched.
We have sunk or arrived in a world where we judge people from their naked bottom up in a program first featuring on their genitalia before eventually moving to their faces. In what world do we select a partner on the basis of first seeing their nether regions or contemplate marriage with someone we have never even seen before. This is entertainment.
It began in the UK in 1974 when the BBC broadcast The Family and branded it a ‘docusoap’. They sent a camera crew into the Wilkins family home in Reading and captured 18 hours footage every day. The series ran for 12 weeks. It wasn’t scripted or manipulated in any way. It was a working class family in the UK, with all their problems with money, children and relationships.
Then there was a series in 2000 when a group of adults and children were dumped on a Scottish Island for a year. Castaway featured ordinary people who volunteered for the adventure which was as much a social experiment.
In the same year Big Brother aired in the UK. Select a cross-section of the community and put them in a house together. Made sense in production terms and by introducing games or manipulating traitors, you could create all sorts of conflict.
Competing with Big Brother in 2005 was Celebrity Love Island, but it obviously wasn’t raunchy enough to maintain an audience and was pulled in 2005. However, it resurfaced without the celebs and a sexier look in 2015.
The contrast today…in almost all of these ‘reality’ shows, there is precious little reality and an awful lot of social engineering.
The ‘cast’ of each reality program is selected. There is no point in putting a dozen people on a ‘love’ island if there is no conflict. And, increasingly, why not add nudity and explicit sexuality to the mix. It’s a sort of soft porn where you get to witness the temptation of coitus without having to witness it, though I am sure that will come.
The scary or should that be scarier aspect is when the man in the street is replaced by a celebrity. Accepting the fact that the concept of celebrity has been watered down with the development of countless tv channels and limitless social media, almost every one of these series now offers some of the regulars on our tv screens as reality fodder.
Our best beloved on Bake Off or Traitors is fine, especially when their prize money goes to charity. Abusing a few stars on I’m a Celebrity is fair game, they must feel the fee is worth it.
But, we send celebrities into jungles or SAS camps to abuse them for the sake of public entertainment.
Have we forsaken reality for fantasy? Do people just watch these programmes and imagine themselves as some of these people.
It’s easy to be entertained by a star eating fish eyes, but is a naked flirting couple ‘reality’ or some form of ‘fantasy’. We can associate with the feelings and lives of soap characters (to an extent), but would be unlikely to fantasise that life. Can we not react to a naked person gradually being exposed?
What has all this to do with reading? How involved do we get with the characters in the books we read? Do we admire heroes for their mental powers and strength? Are we impervious to sex scenes?Romantic fiction achieves 28% of book sales and romantic short stories were the staple of women’s magazines for decades. Did they not see themselves in some romantic encounter or did they just enjoy reading about the lives of vicar’s daughters, teachers and nurses? Were those short stories not some sort of escape from their reality?
At the same time cosy murder mysteries have become de rigeur reading material (thank goodness).
The difference between a reality tv show and a raunchy book is simple. We are voyeurs with the tv, everything is explicit and we have to accept their values. As we imagine the scenes in a book, we manage our involvement, we stretch reality for ourselves.
