[A-List] SSA: "reality" tv

["Michael Keaney" <michael011@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fury at TV face surgery show
Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Correspondent
Sunday Times, June 3 2007

THE company behind Channel 4?s Supernanny has provoked outrage with
plans for a television programme that offers disfigured patients
reconstructive surgery for taking part.

The proposal has angered doctors and charities who say the deformities
of vulnerable patients would be exploited.

The production company, Ricochet, has approached Peter Butler, who is
due to carry out Britain?s first face transplant, seeking patients with
facial deformities.

In a letter e-mailed a month ago to Butler?s charity, the Face Trust, a
producer at Ricochet said he was working on a programme about
reconstructive and plastic surgery.

The producer wrote: ?We want to offer consultation about surgery to
people who perhaps are not suitable for NHS treatment, because of
budgetary constraints, oversubscription or case suitability.

?We are looking for members of the public whose lives are being affected
by poor self-image to the extent, for example, that they are afraid to
leave their homes.?

The producer added: ?We want to offer these people not only a free
surgical option but a group therapy scheme which will improve their
self-confidence.?

Butler, a consultant plastic surgeon at the Royal Free hospital in
London, said he was deeply concerned. ?We have to be very careful to
avoid exploitation of some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

?Programmes such as the one suggested are in danger of reinforcing a
view that surgery or other interventions can solve every problem faced
by people with these injuries. It can?t.?

Changing Faces, a charity for disfigured people, received a similar
request from Ricochet on April 23.

James Partridge, founder of Changing Faces, said: ?There is a need to
ensure these sorts of programmes do not feed the insecurities about
appearance that they are claiming to address.

?As the leading national charity representing people with
disfigurements, we were approached for contributors for this programme,
the implication being that people with disfigurements may be good
candidates. Such programmes raise serious ethical questions.?

The row coincides with the furore provoked by Dutch television producers
over a medical ?reality? show. On Friday night, Endemol, the makers of
Big Brother broadcast a hoax programme purporting to show patients with
kidney disease competing for a donor organ. Endemol said it intended to
raise awareness of organ donation.

Ricochet has declined to discuss its plans with The Sunday Times,
despite a series of requests. On Friday, a director denied the company
was making a programme about facial surgery but declined to explain why
e-mails were sent to facial disfigurement charities.

Doctors and charities insist the privacy of patients undergoing facial
reconstructive surgery must be protected and that this cannot be done if
the surgery is filmed for television.

They are concerned the programme makers and the doctors who participate
may fail to provide adequate follow-up care, including dealing with
psychological problems that may arise.

*****

How bad can TV get?
The Big Donor Show was a hoax and its makers are cockahoop. But the
joke?s on them. Reality TV is as foul, sick and stupid as it ever was
Bryan Appleyard
Sunday Times, June 3 2007

So the Dutch reality TV programme, The Big Donor Show, was a Big Joke.
The dying woman ready to choose which patient should get her kidney was
an actress. The patients were real, but they knew it was a hoax. The
whole thing was a stunt to encourage organ donation. ?We are not giving
away a kidney here,? said presenter Patrick Lodiers, ?that is going too
far, even for us.?

The hoax succeeded on two levels. First, it gripped its home audience.
The Dutch got into the hysterically morbid spirit of the show by texting
their votes for which dialysis-dependent patient should get the kidney.

Secondly, it succeeded worldwide in generating stories and condemnatory
columns about the mounting excesses of reality TV. It brilliantly
exploited its audience. Clever, very.

But that?s the point. The people who make popular television today are
not the cheeky-chappy, fresh from the music hall types of the past, they
are smart, educated, media-savvy people who know exactly how to press
all the right mass market buttons.

In Britain the point man for this class is Peter ?I?m a fishwife at
heart? Bazalgette, head of Endemol, the firm behind Big Brother, the
ultimate exemplar of reality TV. It started its eighth series this week.

Bazalgette studied law at Cambridge. He is also the great-great grandson
of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, a supreme Victorian engineer who built the
Thames Embankment and the sewers that suppressed cholera in London. It
was this that prompted Stephen Fry to observe that his descendant had
negated his achievement by ?pumping shit back into people?s homes?.

Columnists from the tabloids to the heavies tend to agree with Fry. Big
Brother and, indeed, all extreme TV ? watch out for an upcoming show
that offers plastic surgery as the prize ? is routinely trashed as yet
another symptom of the onrushing end of civilisation.

Channel 4 has been the prime trashee, mainly due to the Big Brother
Shilpa Shetty-Jade Goody racism row and a fuss about its documentary on
the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The Diana row was hyped nonsense
? the documentary is sane and responsible ? but the racism row was fair
enough and Channel 4?s defence ? that it provoked debate ? was risible.

?Does that mean,? asked The Sunday Times? television critic, A A Gill,
?you bring back the gas chambers to start a debate about the Holocaust??

But Channel 4 is in deep trouble. Its revenues are at rock bottom and
BB?s hot ad slots prop up the whole operation. Furthermore, its flagrant
abuse of its public service remit makes a Gordon Brown privatisation of
the company look like a very attractive political move.

As if to rub salt into the wound, Lord Puttnam, deputy chairman of the
channel, has admitted the bright young things that run the shows are out
of control.

?We?re dealing with programme makers of a different generation. The way
they see themselves regarded by their peer group is in terms of how
controversial they could be.?

But, of course, the flip side is that the bright young spawn of
Bazalgette know exactly what they are doing. They thrive on the tabloid
trashings because they see what else is in the tabloids ? massive
coverage of Big Brother and any reality shocker they can dream up.

The tabloids announce the barbarians are at the gates and then encourage
them to keep raping, looting and pillaging with sexy pix and in-depth
interviews. No wonder the bright young things think their job is to
deliver ever more powerful shocks to their audience. It pays the bills.
Money doesn?t talk, it swears like Jade Goody.

Programme makers, said Bazalgette, ?are sharpening up the way that TV
programmes are presented . . . they are learning what tabloid newspapers
have always done?. This is precisely wrong ? they are remaking tabloids
in their own image.

If they ever do engage with the trashings, the pop-elitist defence is
always the same ? we?re giving the people what they want. This is, of
course, ridiculous. It implies that, before Big Brother, viewers were
sitting around thinking, ?Hmmm, now what I?d really like is a show about
a bunch of dysfunctional freaks stuck in a house for three months.?

The truth is that the show and its popularity are an invention of its
makers. They choose to make it, they are not compliant servants of
popular taste. They don?t like to hear this because it jerks them out of
their cool, postmodern amoral-ity by dropping the moral buck right back
on their desks. But let?s get real: you did it, you?re responsible.

There are plenty of signs that they notice this awkward fact. Some time
ago, Davina McCall, the BB presenter, was on Top Gear. Jeremy Clarkson
scorned the whole idea of BB and said he never watched it.

She said he should take more interest in ?popular culture?; what she did
not say was: ?It?s a great show, you should watch it.?

Is she reluctant to say it?s a great show? And is calling it ?popular
culture? just a way of saying that it?s not for smart people like her?

And, of course, at the back of all this, there lies the threat that you
will be guilty of elitism if you persist in criticising the taste of the
audiences and participants in these shows. Such is the subtle
condescension of the new elites.

But, aside from disseminating moral illiteracy, are these people
actually doing any harm? Are the critics guilty of what John Lloyd in
the Financial Times called, in response to Fry?s shit-shovelling remark,
?pious claptrap??

The answer is to return to my point that these shows are not natural
products of some preexisting mass appetite, they are deliberate
inventions. The Big Donor Show worked both as reality TV and as a hoax
because an audience ? and a worldwide population of outraged columnists
? had been created that understood all the conventions. All these people
were primed for exploitation and they were duly exploited. Bazalgette
admits this.

?The whole thing needed to rely on the highly prejudiced coverage TV is
getting at the moment. This thing was designed for those prejudices and
those prejudices worked wonderfully . . . it was a perfectly executed
campaign.?

Er, but the ?prejudiced coverage? is what you rely on for your ratings.
Oh, never mind.

That, in the Dutch case, trickery was involved does not dilute this
point about audiences. That it worked proves how effectively an audience
has been invented and, like a paedophile?s victim, groomed.

But, as the cast of the latest BB demonstrated in horrific detail, it is
not just the audience that has been invented, it is the protagonists.
People like this did not exist before BB with its penumbra of celebrity
culture was born.

The (literally) bottomless, shrieking, preverbal twins Sam and Amanda
only look, sound and act like that because they have been taught to do
so. They have been told that this is what you should do ? it is what you
must do ? if you are young and pretty. In another time, another place,
another culture, they would have been different people with different
aspirations. The rest of the cast ranges from the pathetic to the
brutal, all are inventions.

Idly we may think these people are somehow representative, but, in fact,
they are chosen by a savagely cynical process ? exposed in detail in the
Daily Mail yesterday ? in which sexual hang-ups, prejudice and hatred
are the criteria for a Big Brother victim. This makes a mockery of
Bazalgette?s absurd posture of innocence about the whole process.

?It?s whatever happens,? he said yesterday, ?when you put 12 people
together and you don?t know in advance what it?s going to be, whether
it?s Nasty Nick?s strange behaviour in 2000 or Jade losing it in January
2007.? Yeah, right.

But, however you dress it up, these people are victims. Commenting on
the plastic surgery show, Peter Butler, head of the UK Facial
Transplantation Research Team, said: ?We have to be careful to avoid
exploitation of some of the most vulnerable people in society.? Quite
right.

But it?s not just plastic surgery wannabes that are vulnerable, it is
all the people made so needy, so dysfunctional, so devoid of dignity, so
morally hollowed out by celebrity culture that they actually want to be
in one of these freak shows.

You are, if you want to be on BB, sick and stupid and you have been
sickened and stupefied by the very culture from which BB springs.

Doubtless Bazalgette will thrive on such statements and doubtless the
liberal conscience will continue to squirm about the rights and wrongs
of admitting that what is supposedly working-class culture is, in fact,
disgusting beyond belief, an endless, savage vacancy.

But it is as well to remember how at ease we are with censoriousness
when it comes to smoking, drinking and obesity. We have no trouble
anathematising such things.

These shows poison the imagination and exploit vulnerabilities in ways
far more harmful than a 20-aday habit. They must be hated; it is our
primary defence against the encroaching delusion that fame, money and
shrieking, bottomless blondes are the only contemporary reality.


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