Reality TV - The 21st Century Freak Show
Thursday, 30th April 2009, 13:59

If you know anything about me it's that, aside from sport and films, I basically don't watch television. There are the odd TV shows that I'll tune into but generally what passes for popular culture is a mystery to me. When I was watching the extended version of Have I Got News For You there was a piece on a middle-aged woman being sneered at and mocked before demonstrating that she could sing, which seemed to make it all better. There was some debate over a possible make-over following a quoted line about the state of her eyebrows. This got me thinking whether we, as a society, have moved on a great deal in the past century or two.

Time was that people with odd talents, appearances and behaviour patterns were put in carnivals, sideshows or a circus and labelled ‘freaks'. It seems that the dingy freak circus of the sort portrayed in The Elephant Man has moved to prime time television with judges and a studio audience.

Furthermore, ‘normal' people are selected to spend weeks together in a house shut off from outside communication from their every move being scrutinised and broadcast live before being put up for public vote. Z-list celebrities travel to the Australian outback and humiliate themselves for public amusement in the hope of resurrecting a flagging career.

In a similar vein, people who think they have a skill put themselves up to be mocked, sneered at and humiliated on stage for the entire world to see in the hope of making it big.  If this weren’t enough, there are the ‘chat show’ formats where people are invited on to be torn apart by the studio audience.  Robert Kilroy-Silk arguably started it in the UK with Jeremy Kyle apparently perfecting the art of insult and character assassination turning it into something more akin to the Christian being thrown to the lions in the Roman Amphitheatre.  On the other side of the pond, you have Maury Povich, Geraldo and, the king of them all, Jerry Springer.  The weirder the guest the better and if the paternity test identifies the wrong person and a fight breaks out, all the better.

There was a period last year when civil wars, genocide, famine and other massive news stories were shunted off the front page and the main bulletin because of the furore around the ‘Strictly Come Sergeant' when a (once?) respected political commentator was all over the news because he couldn't dance very well!

As I said at the start, I barely watch television but this failed to escape my attention. Aside from the first Big Brother, I have never watched one of these shows but, from what I've read and the brief clips I've seen, it just seems to me that the sideshow has moved to the mainstream.

Posted by David Beckett