At the news that Endemol were planning a show where a terminally ill woman decides which recipient she’d like to donate her kidney to, I was shocked but unsurprised. It may have been a hoax but it wasn’t unthinkable. Reality TV’s come a long way since the early pantomines. I still remember the first Big Brother, seven years ago. How different things were then: just consider the innocence of a national audience who were enthusiastically prepared to watch an eleven week show where the runner-up spent much of his stay in the house fondly tending to a chicken.
That just doesn’t cut it today. Reality TV now is faster, nastier. I write this as eleven women in a converted house filled with strip lights and hidden cameras are currently brewing an oestrogen timebomb to levels that would fail a Hans Blix inspection. We’re no longer content with the bright lights and bubbly furniture. We want grit, hell and pissing rain. We want scrumpled fivers and Mayfair traders. We want limos splashing the tears of a crying contestant into the gutter. Dragon’s Den, The F-Word, Kitchen Nightmares – today’s shows are played for high stakes with the kid gloves off. Out with the cute sets, in with a cold fist of realism slamming you in the stomach like a Monday Morning you didn’t want to wake up to.
Yes, ‘nasty’ reality shows are cleaning up right now. Shows depicting people working all hours of the day for shitty bosses, going demented with stress and dreaming about money have proved enormously successful with a population, strangely enough, that spends its life working all hours of the day for shitty bosses, going demented with stress and dreaming about money. Ah, us Brits and our Protestant work ethic. Blame it on that drizzle that hammers like a headache on the windows of our offices… Because right now the most popular of these reality shows is – of course – The Apprentice, where a bunch of marketing consultants all but mud-wrestle one another in the nude for the chance to stack the toilet paper at Amstrad.
The Apprentice is all about money. You want money? Then you’ve got to do anything. Screw over your co-workers. Blame them in the boardroom. Come on, man, friendship is for pussies. This isn't friendly competition – this is a full-blown gladatior arena, and if Sugar suddenly ordered them to strip naked and ride around on enraged bulls hurling bloodstained scythes at one another they would. Or was that last week’s task? No wonder it gets high ratings. It certainly ticks all the boxes. Satisfies a widespread desire for personal wealth at any cost? Check. Contains semi-pornographic glimpses of obscene wealth for frustrated middle-managers to masturbate to? Check. Packed with macho, swaggering business-speak? Check. That’s why it’s got the loyal attention of a nation of undergraduates doing ‘Marketing’ or ‘Business Studies’ or any of the other subjects shorn of all traces of humanity to train a compliant workforce of cell-centre operatives to spend the next fifty eight years of their lives selling holiday insurance through an earpiece.
And how satisfying it is! All that ritual humiliation… Personally I love the way the odds are always stacked absurdly against the participants in each task, like selling icecream within the sub-zero penguin tank at London Zoo, or being given a pocket full of 50p trinkets and being forced to hassle the entire executive board of Goldman and Sachs to buy them. And just watch the way the slightest sidecrack from Sugar is met with a round of sycophantic laughter from the contestants, who obviously have their tongues so far up his arsehole that they could regurgitate his digestive tract. Go on, watch it. It’s hilarious.
But is there something problematic about all this deliberate nastiness? Sugar’s barking, Ramsey’s abuse, even Simon Cowell’s pantomine put-downs – great TV, but I’m not sure what it says about the people who want to watch it. All of these shows are based on some kind of dizzying hierarchy distance between slavish contestant and whip-cracking boss, a hierarchy the shows enthusiastically glamorises. See that fleet of cars? See that country house? All that could have been yours too… Now get back to licking that floor clean, you fucking loser.
Screaming abuse at stressed-out employees while a camera’s shoved in their face – now that’s cool, isn't it? Look at Gordon, look at him go. He nearly made that girl cry! How entertaining. Oh, who’s he starting on now? It’s that tired looking one, that mother of two. What did she do? Grated too much parmesan on the Cattucini?? Five seconds late with the Fettucini cutlets? You stick it to her, Gordon! How enjoyable to watch a rich middle-aged man reduce a failing employee to tears!
And all this in an age where school bullying achieves national headlines. Hmm. What was that one about the woman donating her liver again?
