Proper Reality Television
The theme of this post is a topic that occasionally wanders across my concisiousness usually followed by the words why. The theme of today's post is: Reality Television.
Now when most people hear the phrase reality television - so called presumbly because it features real people as opposed to the fictional ones who star in Eastenders and Doctors - the two things I suspect leap almost immediatly to mind are the unfortunatly still swaying along drunkly Big Brother and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. Now I assume that none of you reading this have been living in a small cave for the last decade but if you have been you should know that the format of these shows involve a group of people being locked in a house, or dropped off in the jungle, where they are filmed taking part in various tasks in the hope of staying within the massive sociological experiment a little longer.
This is to my mind where the problem kicks in. The minute you start forcing your contestants to engage in tasks of varying degress of nastiness, it ceases to be at all realistic. While I have no trouble believing that some girl named Nancy or Buttercup would have no issue with engaing in several round of the horizontal tango with some tattoed bouncer named Damon - or to be fair possible some other girl named Rachel - having known him/her for only a matter of days, but I do have a bit of trouble beliving that under normal circumstances this would be preceeded by her eating tweleve spiders covered in chocolate. I also don't believe that she would be happy to let her escapades be filmed.
It seems to me that TV producers are under the impression that the viewing public wouldn't want to watch a programme that just shows people going about their normal day to day lives but instead must feature a regular embarrassing stunt. Of course the success of shows such as "The Only Way is Essex," "Made in Chelsea" and others of that ilk seem to prove them wrong, though obviously the people who feature in those are hardly a representation of most of the population.
Now this is a very roundabout way of proposing my own reality television show. Stick cameras in Student Accomodation and live stream the results. I'm telling you it would be a smash hit with the KFC munching public. There would be a distinct lack of gunge or evictions it's true, but I reckon the amount of interesting conversatiosn, amusing incidents and yes drunkenss and titilation would more than make up for it.
So. Who has the number for Channel Four?