[James]

Reality TV in the raw, warts and all

MEDIA STUDIES

Brian McNair


IT HASN’T been a great year for the big players of reality TV. Big Brother bored the pants off we viewers, as well as the housemates. Pop Idol has seemed interminable, with only the ‘will she, won’t she win it’ debate around Michelle keeping the tension levels up.

Speaking as a member of a household where the recorded output of Will Young is cherished, it gives me no pleasure to observe that the sparkle has gone out of the format. Fame Academy was more interesting, for all its bad press, exposing to the world a genuinely talented young woman who also happened to be a lesbian. Alex Parks will be around a little longer than David Sneddon managed, I suspect. The vogue for making C-list celebrities out of ordinary people is passing.

I rarely find myself agreeing with Piers Morgan, and his recent Channel 4 series was an extraordinary piece of doublethink from a tabloid editor. However, The Importance of Being Famous accurately conveyed the sense that we are, as a culture, growing tired of the celebration, of celebrity for its own sake, independently of whether that which is celebrated has any foundation in talent or real achievement.

But in another sense, reality TV in 2003 vindicated itself as a place in the culture where positive, empowering stories about the capacity of ordinary people to transform their lives for the better could be told. Changing Rooms started it and returned this year with a new look and a new presenter who wasn’t Carol Smillie. The mother of all makeover programmes continued to hold audiences with the now-familiar idea of cost efficient domestic refurbishment.

Elsewhere in the schedule, though, much more profound transformations were taking place in people’s lives. Programmes such as How Clean Is Your House? On paper, and given the way it was trailed, with genuinely scary close-ups of writhing creepy crawlies and other horrors, this promised to be prurient voyeurism of the kind the critics of reality TV are always banging on about. Oh look, see how manky these inadequates are, and gloat in the knowledge of your superior personal hygiene.

But it didn’t quite pan out like that. What we saw were people under all kinds of sympathetically described pressures, often living alone and in need of some friendly advice to help them cut through the detritus of years of brushing things under the carpet. Most of us have been there, even if it was only in student bedsitterland.

And who couldn’t identify with the transformative effect on these people’s lives that soap, water and a clean living space could have? Who wasn’t moved as the subjects saw with their own eyes the results of the firm, but in the end supportive, advice of the show’s rubber-gloved presenters?

Then there was Life Laundry. Some professed not to get it, but this was reality TV at its most poignant and empowering. It featured individuals and families who, because of divorce, bereavement, illness or some other trauma, had allowed their homes to become mausoleums of loss and longing. Into these homes went an initially bossy but once again ultimately sympathetic ‘life counsellor’ who made them go through everything they owned, pile it up on the lawn and throw most of it into a crusher: old photographs, teddy bears and all.

After that - a process which often provoked fierce resistance - the subjects seemed released from years of suppressed anxiety and grief, ready to move forward in their lives. It was more gripping than most TV dramas, and a damn sight cheaper to make. Transformative and demonstrative too because most viewers would see in Life Laundry a bit of themselves, and the way in which the clutter of life gets on top of us all. Bin it, move on, don’t get trapped in the past, was the positive message of the programme.

Transformation was also the theme of those reality strands where people got to try out new careers, and even whole new lives. People were given a month to become a stunt man in the movies, or a racing driver, or a club DJ, or a competitive surfer. Amazingly, these secretaries and travelling salesmen succeeded more often than not, dispelling as they did so the myth of difficulty which most professional groups use to intimidate outsiders.

If so-and-so could pass as a leading fashion photographer after only four weeks training, we were bound to wonder what was so difficult and special about it in the first place. I’m not suggesting they try it with brain surgery, but I do like the idea that so many allegedly skilled jobs could be performed by any halfway competent person with a few weeks’ hard graft and a good teacher.

Even more inspiring were those people who sold up and moved to new lives overseas, giving up the lucrative but exhausting rat race to open chalets for tourists in the Swiss alps, run hotels in the Spanish interior or sell day-glo hairpieces on Australia’s sunshine coast. They lived the dream, and it was exhilarating to watch as they overcame adversity and disaster to emerge, if not triumphant, at least satisfied with their achievement.

These programmes showed the power of human beings to transform their circumstances in ways so fundamental that most of us would pale at the thought of it. And they showed the possibility of failure too, as in the couple who saved for two years, sold everything, uprooted their children from school and decamped down under for a new life, only to give up and come home after four months, to an uncertain future.

We dream, and with no greater intensity than in the dark mid-winter, of the idyllic life on a tropical beach or in a French village, and magical transformations of who and what we are. The best of reality TV in 2003 showed not just that positive change is possible, but the huge costs involved in trying, and sometimes failing. That’s reality, and what greater public service could prime time TV hope to perform?

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