Reality TV - it will never die!

[faceless]

Get with the programme
Nine years after its launch, Big Brother is down to 3 million viewers – from a peak of 10 million. Yet reality TV is as likely to drop out of the schedules as sport or the news.
The Observer,
Sunday July 27 2008

Jodie Marsh claims to be a household name, but a brief survey among my friends and family suggests that this might not, in fact, be the case. So let me explain. Marsh is a former stripper whose break - she would call it that but, having met her, I'm not sure I would agree - came in 2002 when she appeared in the ITV documentary series Essex Wives. It was about rich, tanned women in the 'Golden Triangle' of Chigwell, Buckhurst Hill and Loughton. Thanks to Essex Wives, Marsh got modelling work in a number of lads' mags (she still does this; Zoo magazine recently bought her a pair of new breasts, big as basketballs, which she revealed to the world on its cover), and thanks to the modelling, she appeared in Celebrity Big Brother in 2006, alongside Pete Burns and George Galloway. Alas, she was the first to be evicted. However, thanks to Big Brother - and here our delightfully 21st-century chain reaction reaches its effervescent climax - last year she landed her own reality series. The premise of MTV's Totally Jodie Marsh: Who'll Take Her Up the Aisle? was that Jodie needed a mate. The show was intended to provide her with one, and so it did: Matt Peacock, an ex-boyfriend of Jordan's, whom she married at an Essex nightclub, Sugar Hut, last September. Later it was revealed that this wedding was a fix, Marsh and Peacock being already quite intimately acquainted. But fix or no fix, the marriage did not last. Today Marsh lives alone in a house in an Essex hamlet and awaits her divorce. Meanwhile, she is talking to MTV about a second series, the gimmick of which she can't yet reveal, though it will not, thank God, involve childbirth: 'I like to push boundaries. I like to be outrageous. But I wouldn't do that!'

I've come to talk to Marsh about reality TV, her bewildering career being, in some ways, its ultimate product. What was I expecting? I don't know, but not this. What strikes you most about Marsh when you meet her is not her pleasure at the unexpected turn her life has taken, but her implacable anger. She likes the fees - 'It's good money, by anybody's standards' - though it is also my duty to report that she is not living like a millionaire. Her many deals with the devil have bought her a lifestyle that seems pretty regular to me: this new but small detached house could be a bank manager's, or a teacher's, or a solicitor's, for all that her towels (black) are embellished with diamanté. She likes, too, the fact that, some days, she does not have to work at all. But everything else about her day job she despises. Fame? 'I hate it.' The press? 'Vile.' The clever young things who make the shows on which she works? 'Stupid.' The public, which watches them and ensures they are recommissioned? 'We're a vicious, bitter, bullying nation.' Men, in the pursuit of whose admiration she puts so much energy? 'I hate them. Men have evil inside of them.' As for reality TV itself, there's no such thing. 'Reality TV is not real any more, in the same way that celebrities aren't celebrated any more,' she tells me, slowly, as though I am a bit dozy. 'It's produced and directed in the same way that a drama would be. It's amazing how much of it is acting. The crew push you and prod you with sticks. You're forced every day to say and do things that you don't want to do. That side the public don't see.'

Marsh is, of course, an extreme example of the dubious, flitting stars that reality TV now coughs up pretty much every time it clears its throat. It's not her artificially enhanced appearance that disturbs, nor the fact that, thanks to an expensive education (Brentford School, paid for by her millionaire builder father) and a clutch of good A-levels, this Faustian deal was not the only, nor even the best, choice available to her. It's her blithe refusal to rule anything out that slackens the jaw, especially when it comes so swift on her litany of denunciations. 'I don't think they're too fussed what it's about,' she says of MTV's plans for another series. 'But I would do anything within reason, if it was good money, bar if it was illegal.'

Ask her to talk about her private life, as the men's magazines like to do, and you might as well have called the number on a card you found lying on the floor of a Soho phone box. She is unbridled. It is as though she has something important missing: some brain chemical or other. In 2003 her close friend, Kim, was murdered by her abusive partner at the age of 22. Not long afterwards, Marsh's chihuahua, Pixie, also died. Her response? Pixie and Kim are now joined in perpetuity in a tattoo on her neck, their names forming the shape of a cross.

But in one crucial way, she is absolutely typical. I've lost count of the number of times youth workers and criminologists alike have made the connection, as they discuss knife crime, between low self-esteem and anger. Well, there is an awful lot of anger among those who participate in reality TV, the majority of which, it seems to me, is the result of low self-esteem, and Marsh is no exception.

Like many of those who inhabit the twilight world of celebrity born of shows such as Big Brother, she regards the whole enterprise as a kind of life corrector, as tangible proof she is all the things she once feared she was not: pretty, lovable, popular. You don't have to take my word for it; she articulates this idea herself, the only difference between her analysis and my own being the fact that she is convinced the trick has worked, whereas I think it has simply made her problems far worse. At school, Marsh broke her nose playing hockey, an accident that won her the somewhat unwitty nickname among the boys of 'Wonky Nose'.

'I was bullied from 11,' she says. 'At 15, I wrote in my diary I wanted to be famous for modelling because they don't put ugly people on the front of the lads' mags, do they? And now I don't have many goals because I've done exactly what I set out to do.' But if the male of the species once saw her as ugly, isn't the way they regard her now equally, if not more, diminishing? She smiles patronisingly, stretching her lips to reveal her extraordinary veneers (free, thanks to Five's Cosmetic Surgery Live). 'If guys are dumb enough to judge a book by its cover, I don't want them anyway,' she snaps. At which point, she goes into the kitchen to make tea and flirt with someone on her mobile, leaving me to contemplate her collection of giant cuddly zoo animals, and the progress of her search for a new agent, carefully marked out on her desk in day-glo Post-It notes. On each one is written the name of the agent, the names of his or her famous clients - we're talking Hugh Grant here, not Jade Goody - and a comment as to how the person who answered the telephone treated Jodie's presumably cold call. Most of the latter seem to be of the 'was-not-very-friendly-call-back-later' variety, a sentiment at painful odds with the optimism of her round, girlish script. Jeez. If this life is good for a girl's self-esteem, then I'm Katie Price, and I claim my rightful place on the bronzed left arm of Peter Andre.

It's hard, if not impossible, to trace conclusively the beginnings of reality TV, but the idea has been with us longer than you may think. Even before Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which people's actions are monitored 24 hours a day and from which the most famous of reality shows takes its name, there was Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel Brave New World, in which Darwin Bonaparte, a paparazzi-style photographer, brings John the Savage such fame that crowds of gawpers gather at his home; their arrival leads first to Mr Savage's fury and later to his suicide. (Huxley, it seems to me, predicted the future more accurately than Orwell: if Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared information overload, that our culture would become so trivial it would reduce us to passive, hedonistic blobs.) But it wasn't until much later that dystopian future became quotidian present.

In television, its beginnings lay - perhaps - in Seven Up!, the 1964 Granada series which interviewed seven-year-olds from across society and then returned to see how they were doing every seven years. In 1974 Paul Watson - now an unrelenting critic of what has come to be known as reality TV - made The Family, a series about the working-class Wilkins clan from Reading. Both series had a documentary imperative, but they also gave birth, however unwittingly, to the idea that real people could become the stars of their own soap operas. Then, in the Nineties, a new genre of television sprang to life, the documentary imperative having disappeared altogether. In 1997 Charlie Parsons of Planet 24 came up with an idea that was eventually screened in Sweden, Expedition Robinson. This format, renamed Survivor, in which contestants marooned on a desert island compete to perform tasks and are then slowly eliminated, was later sold to countries all around the world, and is still running in many of them. In January 2000, the BBC launched a 'social experiment', Castaway, in which 36 people were deposited on Taransay in the Outer Hebrides, where for the next year they were to live entirely self-sufficient lives. In July 2000, Big Brother arrived in the UK from the Netherlands, where it was first broadcast in 1999. Yes, it will be 10 years old next year.

In 1999, Peter Bazalgette had recently sold his television production company to Endemol, the maker of Big Brother Holland (he was later to become chairman of Endemol UK, the creative director of Endemol worldwide and a number-one hate figure at the Daily Mail). Bazalgette was, of course, already well on his way to making reality TV, having brought us Changing Rooms, the make-over show in which the best bit was always the row at the end when the contestants found out just what their neighbours had done to their dining room. Even so, with Big Brother the Dutch had to go first before he was going to pitch the idea.

'Holland is a very odd country,' he says. 'Anything is permissible so long as it is permitted, if you see what I mean. I don't think anyone here would have had the guts to pitch it, and even if they had, no one would have had the guts to commission it. Then in September 1999, The Times ran a feature about it [the Dutch Big Brother]. I saw the cutting, and I thought: Well, I've got to pitch it now, otherwise someone else will rip it off.' There was, though, something in the air. The Blair Witch Project, which had been marketed in a revolutionary internet campaign that suggested the movie was based on real events, thus quietly building fan groups even before its release, had recently been a smash hit, producing the highest-ever profit-to-cost ratio for a film. Thanks to the internet, mobiles and multichannel television, the relationship between audiences - or consumers, as they were now to be called - and media output was changing. But this wasn't only about interactivity.

'With multichannel television, there is a huge need to be more compelling and to do things more cheaply, and this kind of television delivers drama-style ratings at a quarter of the price,' says Bazalgette. 'With the old documentaries, you sent out a filmmaker and you didn't know what he would come back with. That's no good for prime-time schedules. You need a format, so that you get [you are guaranteed] a story, a hero, a resolution.'

I meet Bazalgette at his Notting Hill home, which has the proportions of a small embassy. As of last year, he is no longer the creative director of Endemol, and thus is no longer involved with Big Brother, and perhaps this is just as well, because he is very, very tired of talking about it. I want to know where we are on the trajectory of reality TV. Although The Apprentice, the fourth series of which has just ended, attracted a 'season finale' audience of 9.3m, the network that screens Big Brother Australia has just announced it is dropping the show, and there are persistent rumours about its future with Channel 4 in the UK.

But when I ask him if we have passed such television's high-water mark, he is dismissive. 'I'm going to try and be gentle with you,' he says. 'But I think that is a completely ridiculous question. No one comes to me and says: have we passed the high-water mark of news or sport?' No, but they would be perfectly justified if they did. 'Reality TV is just one of the ways we now make television. Will there be more next year? Less? Quite possibly. But it's here to stay.'

Well, there are an awful lot of fag ends around, tired and monstrous hybrids. 'That applies to every genre. Is it any different to trends in novels? New ground gets broken once a decade, if that. In the early Nineties, people said we had seen it all [in television]; then between 1990 and 2000, television was upended and reinvented. This decade that hasn't happened. But maybe these things go in cycles. When it comes down to it, there are three rules for any reality show, and they are: casting, casting, casting. When the recent series of The Apprentice started, I thought: can I watch any more of this? Then the whole thing exploded, with these wonderful characters, and it confounded all my expectations.'

How insidious has the effect of reality TV been? 'My answer to that is: it's just television. I honestly would not take it too seriously. Come on, give me a break! Reality TV has reflected society, not led it. The fads of young people, what obsesses them, what interests them, their lingo; it has reflected that. Big Brother is no more or less significant than any other programme, today or tomorrow.'

Isn't that a little disingenuous? 'Am I downplaying it? It's fantastically significant in some ways, but they're all to do with the media. American networks never used to buy programmes from Europe; they didn't think we had anything to sell them. Now they're all Anglophiles. It has also been significant in terms of multi-platforms. But it hasn't coarsened society. The psychologists [he names two very well-known ones] who constantly opine about the wickedness of it: why do they do it? Because they want to be on television! And there is nothing wrong with that. But to hear them saying it's wrong when that is what drives them! I say: a little more self-knowledge is required. Most people, from adolescence, want to show everyone they are special. Big Brother is partly about that, and that's not a new phenomenon.'

So if Bazalgette had a nephew who was considering taking part in a reality show, how would he advise him? 'I'd ask him: are you an extrovert? Do you feel the need to do this because you have a burning ambition to be recognised? If that is something you really want, I'd say go for it, but bear in mind you may fly too close to the sun.'

Not to sound like a class warrior, but does that mean that reality TV is only for a certain kind of person? 'Yes, it is for certain kinds of people! People with a burning desire to get their mug in the media. It's not for sensitive souls.'

During the years Bazalgette spent helping to mastermind Big Brother, didn't he ever have a crisis of confidence, a moment when he thought: this has gone too far? 'Look, most of the controversial things were a storm in a tea cup. Is Jade a bully or a racist? We're in recession, there is war in Iraq, disastrous situations in Darfur and Zimbabwe. Let's keep a sense of perspective, I'd say.'

Bazalgette accuses Big Brother's critics of cultural snobbery. 'They don't like popular culture very much. There is a deeply Calvinistic streak in Anglo-Saxon culture. It goes along the lines of: if I'm enjoying this, it must be bad. It applies to sex, food, wine, intoxicants - and it certainly applies to television.' This is unfair. It is possible to disdain Big Brother and yet still to enjoy pop music, crime novels, or soap operas. Besides, our Calvinistic streak is almost nonexistent these days; how else to explain our little problems with credit cards and binge drinking?

If, as it stumbles towards its 10th birthday, Big Brother is indeed about to expire, it will be as a result of its audience's boredom rather than its collective conscience, and the same goes for every other reality show, including whatever Jodie Marsh does next. But this is not to say that it's pointless to examine our consciences, or for us to worry about its long-term effects on the schedules and our psyches. Television is still one of the ways the nation talks to itself, and it does influence us; that's why we have watersheds, Ofcom and, if you want to be satirical about it, academics (even if they haven't done a great job with reality TV so far. Researching this piece, I read three academic books on the subject, and they were all dire).

For what it's worth, here are some of the things I worry about: that reality TV subtly encourages us to think lightly of a surveillance society at a time when civil liberties are being undermined; that it blurs the line between authenticity and performance, truth and fiction, at a moment when, politically speaking, we need to keep our wits about us; that it feeds our obsession with presentation; that it reinforces class, gender and racial stereotypes. And the more that reality TV becomes, as Bazalgette has it, just a regular part of our everyday entertainment, the more I worry about these things.

Jonathan Bignell, professor of television and film at the University of Reading, has written that Big Brother 'relies on personal confession and the centrality of the body and sexuality as the key to the expression of identity'. So where does this leave the emotionally continent and the fully clothed? Are they without an identity? Oh dear. I sound really po-faced, don't I?

'I understand the queasiness,' says Boyd Hilton, the television editor of Heat, a magazine whose pages you sometimes feel would be awfully spartan without reality TV. 'But didn't you also feel queasy when you saw Paul Watson's film about Alzheimer's disease? You should feel queasy. This may sound pretentious, but I do think Big Brother can be helpful. Take Alex [De Gale, recently kicked out of the Big Brother house for bullying]. I sat there watching her, and I thought: This is what a lot of people her age with her belief system are like - a lot of anger and demanding respect, and yet being so disrespectful. Broken Britain and all that stuff, people like her who are so weirdly angry, all that is reflected in Big Brother. I just don't meet these people [in real life], and the fact that she was thrown out and ostracised was a good thing. The horrible people never win out. The transsexual guy, the gay guy, the funny black guy: they're the ones who win.'

Hasn't he ever had any doubts? 'The Shilpa Shetty/Jade Goody racism was horrendous, but I still thought it should have been on television. It showed a level of casual racism that doesn't get talked about.'

What about some of the more unstable contestants, like Shahbaz Chaudhry who, during Big Brother 7, threatened to commit suicide and eventually left the house after admitting that he suffered from mental health problems? 'Yeah, that is true. They had had a boring year, so the next year they had to cast more wildly. That was awful. But we're past that. There was the question: could Big Brother survive without extremes? But, in fact, it is working really well for them this year.'

Hilton loves Big Brother and would watch it even if it was not such an important part of his job, so perhaps it is just wishful thinking on his part when he says he believes Big Brother can keep going more or less indefinitely (Channel 4 has a contract with Endemol for a further two series, but contracts, as we all know, can be weirdly flexible). But he concedes that this is an interesting time for the series. 'It's a big decision for Channel 4. If they axed it, they'd get so much acclaim from the intellectuals and it would protect their public service money. But they also know it is a must-see show for 16- to 28-year-olds. To get rid of that would be a huge thing. My hunch is that they will keep going. Even if they don't, someone else will snap it up: Sky or Five. I can't envisage another reality show so big, though remember it doesn't get as many viewers as Midsomer Murders. The difference is, people care about it. The Sun has a four-page Big Brother pullout every day; no one is going to buy a newspaper for its Midsomer Murders coverage.'

What about other reality shows? 'Well, they're phasing out the Wife Swaps and the other makeover shows. But I'm A Celebrity... is here to stay, and Jordan [who has her own ITV2 reality shows] will go on being the face of ITV2.'

What about the BBC? 'Reality is not a word we use a lot inside the BBC,' says Elaine Bedell, the BBC's controller of entertainment commissioning. 'It's not part of the language. The Apprentice is our key reality brand, but really what we mean is unscripted drama. You put ordinary people in a precinct as you would a drama and you manipulate them, you use a lot of dramatic techniques; but when you film, it's observational documentary.' She puts the continuing success of The Apprentice down to the fact that it is beautifully produced and edited, that its quality is so patent. Viewers relish these values as much as they do on-screen conflict. But although The Apprentice involves no audience participation (there is no public vote), she agrees that viewers' expectations have changed. Partly this is generational. 'There is a sort of philosophical point behind this, which is that young people are used to living their lives in a very transparent way. My kids put stuff on Facebook that I might draw the line at myself. Their lives are lived very obviously. They've grown up with CCTV. Their sense of privacy is not the same. That's why these programmes appeal: there's something uninhibited about them, a sense of abandonment that the younger generation accepts. The BBC would be mad not to take that into account and reflect that back. It's important that people see a reflection of things that go on in their own lives.'

But it is also the case that, thanks to Big Brother et al, audiences 'have an expectation that they have an involvement, some kind of influence on the outcome. That's a very powerful relationship the viewer has with the programme. You have to find new ways of using it.' This is not always easy.

Bedell has been working on a talent show for BBC3 that began life on the web; viewers were simply asked to post their particular talent. 'It was quite odd for an ex-editor like me, because you effectively hand control of the show over to the community. It's very democratic, but you do arrive at a point where you think: I would quite like a producer to have a hand in this,' she laughs. 'We're trying things. There are formats you can sleepwalk through: that weary derivativeness. We've got to put in take-out value.' Of reality's wider effects, she will, like Bazalgette, say little. 'We should be wary of making too many grand claims for television, full stop.'

When Big Brother was first a hit, everyone tried to get in on the act, and a lot of very awful shows came our way. The Farm, created by the Swedish company Strix, in which 12 people are stuck on... a farm (here, it ran on Five, and featured Rebecca Loos doing something gruesome to a pig); Back to Reality, which put ex-reality stars together in a mansion (also on Five); Celebrity Love Island, starring bored Z-listers in bikinis and swimming trunks (ITV). I could go on with this list for some time. All these shows, to varying degrees, flopped, for the simple reason that they were not very good. Meanwhile, elements of reality TV seeped into other more traditional genres: talent shows and documentaries. Many of these programmes - Hell's Kitchen, say, or Wife Swap - were a success. But they could not be re-commissioned indefinitely, and I've noticed the shelf life of even the best new shows grows ever shorter. I love Mary, Queen of Shops, in which retail guru Mary Portas visits awful boutiques and gives them hell, but after two series, I already wonder: how many more naff T-shirts can I watch her sneer at? On digital channels with airtime to fill, and in America, where a writers' strike and now a possible actors' strike mean the networks will increasingly rely on reality, the hybrids grow ever more preposterous. Only the other week, Living UK began screening something called Diet on the Dancefloor, which is basically the deformed bastard child of Strictly Come Dancing and Living's earlier weight loss series, The Biggest Loser. In this fog of awfulness, a show like The Apprentice shines like a beacon. No wonder Elaine Bedell is so proud of it. But not even Alan Sugar can keep pulling them in for ever.

So where does this leave the future of reality TV? I'm not sure, beyond its being desperately in need of some new ideas. This is certainly what my friend Jodie Marsh thinks. Back at her ranch, I am now drinking tea while she rants about the hateful middle-class types who run television. 'Why don't we take you to this kids' park, they said, where there's a Father Christmas? We'll dress you as an elf and you can talk to the kids. Well, I knew what they wanted straightaway. They would have found the one mother who said: "She's not fit to work with kids, cos she's an effing slag!" No, I don't think they're clever types at all because, mostly, they turn out these flops. They need to be much cleverer.'

Jodie Marsh and I may not have much in common, but on this last point, at least, we are agreed.

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Quite a hefty read, but worth a go...

[Kezza]

Very interesting read - thanks for the post.