ThisisBigBrother.com - UK TV Forums

Yes, I found myself liking Germaine. Didn't expect to - not because I'm not a champion of women of course - but more because I thought over the past few years she had sold out rather more than a little.

Then of course there was this article she wrote in 2001:

Watch with Brother

Almost overnight reality TV seems to have become the mainstay of popular culture. But it hasn't turned us into voyeurs - it's much worse than that

Germaine Greer
Sunday June 24, 2001
The Observer

Watching Big Brother II is about as dignified as looking through the keyhole in your teenage child's bedroom door. To do it occasionally would be shameful; to get hooked on it is downright depraved. People who like watching torture will tune in regularly to see a table dancer, an air steward, a hairdresser, a medical rep and a website designer (inter alia) struggling with the contradictions inherent in having simultaneously to bond with and to betray perfect strangers. Then, if they're in the mood, they will flick over to ITV to watch an ex-footballer, a policewoman and a property developer and the rest of the Survivor castaways face absurd and potentially dangerous ordeals on a remote island in pursuit of a large amount of money.
More than 10 million people watch these shows now every week. They visit the websites and read about the participants daily in newspapers and magazines. What does this say about them - about us - and about our culture?

Pope John Paul II has denounced reality TV as incompatible with human dignity. But human dignity has taken worse knocks than this and the churches were conspicuously silent. Religions whose hierarchs ordered the torture and murder of dissidents have historically been more concerned with the dignity of God than the dignity of man, and their swift and savage judgments were in some ways violent ancestors of the voting-off procedure.

Reality television is not the end of civilisation as we know it; it is civilisation as we know it. It is popular culture at its most popular, soap opera come to life. The celebrities who risked the wreck of their pampered egos by humiliation on Celebrity Big Brother were bowing to the inevitable. Any day now the royal family will challenge the Royle family for top ratings by exposing itself in a special Royal Big Brother. The Tories should probably let the populace help them elect their new leader via a Tory Big Brother.

Five thousand people sent videos of themselves to the UK Big Brother production team; what they wanted was less the modest prize money of £70,000 for the one person who survives all the evictions than the chance to be watched by 37 cameras for nine weeks, to be seen 24 hours a day on the Big Brother website and 21 hours a day on C4's youth channel E4.

Once in the Big Brother house the successful candidates career from one bruising confrontation to another, because politeness, that most useful lubricant of difficult interactions, is unknown to them; anyone who spares the feelings of someone else by concealing his own will be exposed as two-faced. 'Why don't you like me?' moans one. 'You make me feel stupid,' whines another, while Davina McCall screams herself hoarse with simulated excitement about these 'tempestuous' and 'turbulent' weeks.

Reality television is not very real. The situations are contrived and the protagonists are handpicked. No one on line or on TV sees everything that is seen by the cameras because what is streamed is already edited. The least real of all the reality shows must be Survivor. The middle-class middle-management types on Pulau Tiga recruited from the dead reaches of the urban middle class may be strong on strategies for people management but they are absurdly devoid of practical initiative. Watching them faff and flounder is less entertaining than irritating, especially as every viewer is aware that real ingenuity and industry are being deployed off-screen by the production crew, which must greatly outnumber the castaways, in building a spectacular tribal meeting house, outrigger canoes, rafts and wooden pinball games while facing the same kinds of logistical problems that afflict the castaways.

For it's always the case that although the people who volunteer for reality shows may all be exhibitionists, someone who is careful to remain unwatched is pulling their strings. The contestants may say what they please, but someone else will decide who, if anyone, can hear. This dilutes the voyeur's thrill, which is also dependent upon his victim's unawareness that he (more often, she) is being watched. And since the participants in reality TV have agreed to be watched, they cannot provide the same satisfaction.

In the 17 countries that have worked the Big Brother formula, the programmes have had besotted fans; though they may be sad and lonely, they are not voyeurs. They are worse than voyeurs, for the part they agree to play is not that of a helpless peeping Tom but that of Big Brother, Chief of the Thought Police. The viewers who vote for exclusions from the Big Brother house, and we are told that they are far more numerous than the people who voted for the present government, are happy to observe, evaluate and judge their fellow humans on capricious and partial evidence and condemn them to ostracism, one of the most powerful weapons in the human social armoury, just because they don't like them. In Spain, where libertarian anarchism once had a genuine chance, the denizens of the Big Brother house refused to evict anybody, but in carping, envious, class-bound Britain everyone bitched about everyone else. Not surprising then that a nonentity won at the first go-round, or that we have a nonentity government.

Reality television is nothing new. In 1968 I worked on one of the earliest examples of reality television. The programme, which was called Nice Time, was conceived as a corrective to the rather callow satire of the day. It was to be simply fun, and the fun was to be generated by ordinary people doing silly things. It was my job to persuade middle-aged ladies to slide down the banisters of the main staircase at Bury Town Hall, or retired gentlemen to tie hankies over their noses and play Cowboys and Indians dodging round the displays in a department store, while we filmed them. One day I stood in Kensington High Street asking passers-by if I could kiss them. 'I think you're very rude!' spluttered a gentleman with majestic sideburns and a handlebar moustache.

I asked a youngish man with unhealthily flushed cheeks and clothes that spoke only too clearly of sleeping rough to climb a lamp-post for a fiver. As he leapt at the lamp-post and began hauling himself up it, I could see how thin he was, and how weak, but he kept shinning up and up. I was terrified that he would lose his grip and plunge head-first to the pavement at my feet. 'Please, please stop! Come down!' I begged, ruining the sequence, but he dragged himself frantically upwards until his head was all but touching the tangle of over-head wires. When he slid down, his knees buckled and he sank to the filthy ground. I pressed the banknote into his hand and turned away before he could see my face.

My tears were tears of rage, that anyone should be in such desperate need for so small a sum, of shame that I had noticed neither how weak and hungry and tired he was nor that he was an alcoholic whose judgment was certainly impaired, and, embarrassingly, of pity. My director, then John now Lord Birt, agreed at once that we would never again persuade anyone to do anything silly for money.

It didn't occur to us then that people might do silly and dangerous things just to be on telly. Thirty years ago I don't think they would have done. And anyway most of the people we got to do silly things for fun never saw themselves on telly, because each stunt resulted in an item that was never more than three or four minutes long. Though the Nice Time events were staged in connection with a TV show, the stunts we arranged were more like the sack race, and the egg-and-spoon race, and the three-legged race on the school sports day; the day was the thing and the telly bit just the record of it.

Nice Time came after Candid Camera. Jonathan Routh, who walked through Selfridge's with his hat on fire while a cameraman walking behind him filmed the reactions of shoppers, was one of my co-presenters. The other was the late, great Kenny Everett. The three of us made fools of ourselves as much as other people did, and never made fools of any but ourselves. No one was humiliated or hurt. We were aware that well-to-do people from the home counties were unlikely to join in our japes, and that children and pensioners understood best what it was we were trying to do. By the time we were winding up the last series, even their innocence was beginning to tarnish.

In the United States reality television in the form of The Dating Game, lone parent of Blind Date, had been running on prime time since October 1966, and had been followed by The Newly Wed Game, both owned by the American Broadcasting Corporation. Though the success of the format was massive and enduring, it was not imitated in Britain until 1985, possibly because its utter tastelessness could only have been rendered palatable by the charm of Cilla Black as presenter. This is pimp television at its best and worst. Attractive girls are persuaded to dress skimpily and to talk dirty in return for the chance of taking an expensive holiday with a man they don't know. What the audience wants them to do is to fall in love, as if they could. As it is, they seldom snog and hardly ever get off together, but Cilla soldiers on, persisting in a sentimental grandmotherly fantasy that there might be a weddin' and she might get to wear her 'at. The combination of cheap sentiment, lechery and consumerism is still a winner. The producers have set up yet another Blind Date tour to find suitable candidates for a new series in the autumn. A perennial problem for the producers is the difficulty of finding straight men who are prepared to make a spectacle of themselves; too many of the Blind Date boys are only pretending to be interested in women. Big Brother II has run into a version of the same problem. The most likely people to get it on in the Big Brother house at the moment are Brian and Josh but the great British public will probably vote one of them off to avoid such an unpalatable outcome.

Over the years the TV audience has hardened. Candid Camera is now You've Been Framed, in which people come to grief in spectacular fashion. Old people and fat women tripping over toys and falling through floors or backwards off benches can wind up dead, but viewers are uninterested in follow-up. No one bothers to add a caption reading 'No human was injured in the making of this programme'. People becoming distressed or anxious or confused or enraged are simply amusing. We are no more concerned about their broken bones and torn cartilages than we are about those of Tom and Jerry. And they too seem less concerned about making an exhibition of themselves than their parents would have been.

In the early Seventies I did a talk show in Chicago with a new black presenter called Oprah Winfrey. We were talking about consent to sex within marriage and Oprah expressed an opinion that husbands would not pressure their wives into sex and wives would not give in for the sake of peace and harmony. I turned and asked the audience, and the camera had no option but to turn with me. A hundred or so black women leapt to their feet and did hilarious imitations of their peeved husbands, yelling with laughter at each other's candour. Now we have Jerry Springer, and people admitting to all kinds of aberrant behaviour, some of it invented, just so they can get their faces on television. Back then the studio audience was simply responding to the issue under discussion, or so I think. Now they would be getting seen on TV, and what they would say might or might not be true. Oprah's producers now hand-pick her studio audience, who dress, groom and make themselves up for the occasion, and more cameras spend more time recording the performance of the audience. In those far-off days the audience was unemployed, short of cash, and looking for free entertainment. Their job was simply to applaud when told and to react spontaneously to me and Oprah. Most of what the women did and said that day was never recorded and never seen by any but those who were there at the time. (And I know for a fact that Oprah has no recollection of any of it.)

Reality television is of mixed birth; it developed out of such unscripted encounters as I have described, together with the live news broadcasts that took viewers into the scenes of accidents, crimes and disasters that had just happened, thrusting cameras and microphones into the faces of people who were in deep shock, badly hurt or dying.

Another of the progenitors of this monstrous birth is the 24/7 surveillance camera. This year many town centres will double the number of cameras they have trained on the public 24 hours a day from 60 or so to 120; the video recordings they make may be passed on to law enforcement agencies and to the media if there is any reason to suppose that the public would be interested in seeing them. We are all now on candid camera, and though we may not be smiling, we seem not to care. We should be organising mass moons in pedestrian precincts but instead we trot about our daily business unconcerned. People say, if what you're doing is not wrong you won't mind being photographed doing it. Everyone has a video camera; holidays are spent not looking at events and things but making videotapes of them.

Yet other progenitors of reality TV are the kinds of mutual ordeals rigged up by management and recruitment consultants to improve the personal skills of business people, in leadership or teamwork or whatever. Confronted with their worst nightmares, incessantly bullied and assessed, candidates for middle management have their per sonalities virtually reconstructed. They will eventually be identified once and for all as a team player (otherwise known as a stooge) or a leader (otherwise known as an authoritarian toady).

Time was when people in traditional societies were likely to express fear if someone stole their likeness to show to strangers far away. Though they cannot have known how the images would be massaged and edited, they were aware of a loss of control, of a kind of victimhood.

Having grown up without photographs, and without photo ID, they did not think of their faces as icons of selfhood, but they felt at least as uneasy about the making of replicas of an aspect of their heads as we do about giving our fingerprints or a sample of DNA. A boundary of personhood had been breached; they had become someone's stock in trade.

The full implication of this was brought home to me in Ethiopia in 1984, when photographers looking for the most harrowing pictures stuck their cameras in the faces of children who were actually breathing their last, and won prizes for doing it.

In the images that were flashed around the world the children had no names or, worse, made-up names. They were no longer people but emblems designed and redesigned to stimulate the charitable impulse. This was the pornography of charity and they were the turn-on.

When all public space is overlooked, the only realm left to explore is private space, bedrooms, bathrooms and toilets. The mainstream media were beaten to the draw on this one by individual exhibitionists who ran real-time websites, so that the heavy breathers could watch them as they slept, washed, masturbated, defecated. Artists such as Mona Hatoum put tiny cameras and fibre-optic cables inside their bodies so we could see their sphincters working

We actively seek television images of the insides of our own bodies. It takes the evidence of television to convince us that we are pregnant; when we meet our babies for the first time it is on television. The lines on the screen have to be explained to us by the operator of the ultrasound scanner before we can recognise them, but we are convinced by them as we would not be by any other kind of evidence. Television has become more real than life. La vida es sueño ; video is fact.

HOWEVER...........

She was very good value in there - intelligent, kind, and I thought generally very reasonable. She would have kept the whole experience fascinating.