It
is a truism that the numbers voting for Big Brother rivals the numbers who
participate in elections. Are these facts connected? Arguably the phenomenon
of reality TV, particularly Big Brother, is a reflection of New Labour
(post-modernist?) assumptions about the individual only existing for society
as a consumer and the collapse of ideology. As post-modernism rejects any
"meta-narrative" that suggest ideas are in part derived from social forces
acting upon individuals then the ideas that are available to "ordinary
people" will be much more impoverished than the ideas available to the
intelligentsia. So they believe that "ordinary people" are only interested
in what Channel 5 used to describe as the three Fs: football, films and
fucking.
However, because
this assumption is wrong - (in fact no people are "ordinary", and the daily
experience of work and social injustice throws up all sorts of ideas, for
example the popular rejection of the war in Iraq, or distrust of mobile
phone masts) - then the BB makers seek out individuals who conform to their
own dull prejudice of ordinary people - contestants who are dysfunctional,
egotistical and shallow, and mainly too young to know any better. The
demographic described by advertisers as "the sad, the mad and the bad".
In particular the contestants are people who have no ideas - and are
therefore far from ordinary. So "reality" TV only exists on the predicate
that the people it films are individuals lost to reality. It is noticeable
that they rarely discuss their work, or where they live, or any social
relations except very alienated interactions between semi-strangers, such as
abstract discussions about flirting or casual sex.
This is parallel
with New Labour's assumption that everyone is "apathetic" or bereft of ideas
- when in fact most people are far from apathetic about the problems
afflicting them but are disenfranchised through the well founded experience
that political activity (including voting) will make no change to their
circumstances. Ironically then the electoral process focuses on those who
are genuinely apathetic - the swing voters who will cast a vote but are too
gormless to have decided whether or not they are Tory or Labour. So,
politics becomes advertising of brands for the people who really cannot tell
the difference. (Or as Jeremy Hardy suggested - an advertising campaign for
a product called "of course it's not
fucking butter - just grow up"). It
is not the "ordinary people" who have no ideas; it is the political parties
who have abandoned ideology in pursuit of the feckless swing voter. With the
ego of the advertising executive, the Labour politicians project their own
retreat from ideology onto the voters they take for granted, and by reducing
the election to "nine out of ten cat
owners say their cats prefer a Labour government"
they depress any interest in the electoral process, as they make it
deliberately irrelevant to the day to day lives of working people. They
complain about low voter turnout, despite the fact that when the vast
majority of the population opposed war on Iraq their elected representatives
voted for war anyway - hardly the best advert for the relevance of
democracy.
What is more,
because the individuals in the BB house are further decontextualised from
any genuine social situation then BB is incapable of being subverted -
despite attempts by ex-AWL member Kat, and Germaine Greer. It's only a game
show, and the contestants who keep that in mind are more realistic than
those who seek to critique it from within. The degree of decontexualisation
is so severe that the programme makers have no qualms about selecting a
black African woman,
Makosi Musambasi, as their "unlucky" 13th
contestant who will be subjected to ritual humiliation throughout the
series, as the real life issues of racism, sexism and colonialism do not
exist in their "reality".
So why do people
watch it? Well it is interesting that when they show the highlights as
contestants leave the house they rarely include footage of the contrived
games and events choreographed by BB, but the highlights - which viewers
want to see - are the unscripted and therefore unpredictable moments. In a
world where social interaction is increasingly packaged and sold as a
commodity with a predictable outcome, then the rogue element of human
initiative is still unusual on TV. Even though the BB inhabitants are
usually devoid of talent or creativity, their interactions are still more
real than the scripted patter and canned laughter of conventional TV.
Turning on TV late
at night it is quite possible that a live chat between three semi-drunk Big
Brother hopefuls will be more entertaining to watch than pro-celebrity
darts, a disappointingly un-titillating quasi-documentary about the porn
industry, a made for TV movie starring Victoria Principal, or Jimmy Carr
listing the top 100 gastric illnesses.
