In recent months a scandal has been hovering over British TV less like a dark cloud and more like a gigantic malevolent weather system. An El Nina of bad editorial decision-making and audience exploitation. This scandal began with the revelation that a number of TV shows such as Big Brother, Blue Peter, Richard and Judy, and Saturday Kitchen had been getting people to phone in in order to win prizes or influence the direction of the show only for the prize to be non-existant and the editorial decision to have been made ages before.
However, in recent weeks and following the BBC's attempts to make it look as though the Queen had stormed out of a photo session and Newsnight's questionable editing of a piece about Gordon Brown it has become increasingly clear that questionable editorial decisions are not limited to rigged phone-in competitions, they extend to the actual content of so-called documentary and reality TV shows. An excellent Guardian article by Janine Gibson and Stephen Armstrong spills the beans.
This morning the Today programme even saw fit to comment upon it, begging the question as to when the manipulative editing media weather system will come to hover over Big Brother's increasingly desperate attempts to keep Charley Uchea in the house.
Aside from Big Brother's most recent attempt to protect Charley by surreptitiously moving the nominations day from sunday to monday and depriving Chanelle and Ziggy (Charley's main antagonists) of a nominatiion, there has been a series of weird twists of fate that have managed to save Charley from the public vote despite her being by far the most frequently nominated housemate.
Charley has seen nominations against her voided in "punishment", evictions made into fake evictions, endless favourable edits and even an attempt by Davina to silence a crowd that was chanting "Get Charley Out". Indeed, Charley's episode of cognitive dissonance that changed "Get Charley Out" and a full-scale booing into "people of all nations came together with we love Charley banners" even morphed into Charley claiming that she had a special task given to her by Davina but this conversation was left out of the highlights show, as was Charley's revelation that she had been coached in the diary room before her fake eviction.
In the past, Big Brother has relied heavily upon careful and not so careful editing in order to protect certain housemates and preserve story-lines. However, what is most interesting about Charley's case is that the producers seem to have realised that no amount of favourable editing can save the South East London It Girl. If Charley goes up for eviction then Charley goes out, regardless of how much she's coached, regardless of how much she's edited and regardless of who she is up against. So the producers have had to become more sly...
It is worth noting that Big Brother's various punishments are never the same twice. In past years this has been seen as Big Brother being sadistic or capricious but this year housemate punishments have been ruthlessly used to further story lines and to generally service the editorial needs of the producers. Should any heavy editorial lifting be required then Big Brother on the Couch can be drafted in to tell us all what is "really going on" and a number of plants in the Big Brother's Big Mouth audience can similarly drive home certain ideas (indeed, BBBM features a lot of familiar faces... do these people not have jobs or homes?). There are even rumours circulating that when Seany and Gerry entered the house and were asked for their nominations, Big Brother refused their initial choices on the grounds that they were bad justifications.
In short, there is nothing in the least bit real about Big Brother. The events we see in the Highlights programme frequently have only a tangential relationship to what is really going on in the house. The relationships and events in the house are as artfully conceived as those of any fictional soap opera. As an example of "reality TV" Big Brother is a joke... its producers have no respect for the demands of the genre and believe (quite possibly correctly) that Big Brother is bigger than mere Reality TV.
The question we, as an audience, have to ask ourselves is do we even care? after all, apparently Dean O'Laughlin's book, written in the wake of the 2001 series of Big Brother revealed that Big Brother inquires about possible nominations beforehand so as to be able to work out which way the wind is blowing. Even if you watch the live feed you'll notice that it is muted or blanked so frequently that it suggests that housemates spend huge amounts of time swearing and making libelous claims, whereas in fact they are probably talking about the inner workings of Big Brother that we never see such as what exactly they get told in the diary room.
I think we should care for two major reasons :
Firstly, Big Brother still includes expensive phone voting - They have picked up a lot of wiggle room on this issue following their decision to donate some of their takings to charity but the fact remains that the unspoken contract between viewer and programme implicitly states that we the viewers decide who goes out and who stays in. By protecting Charley from the public vote, Big Brother are breaking this promise and thereby robbing their viewers of control. If Big Brother is to have its story-lines entirely decided by the producers then let the mode of elimination reflect that and let's stop with the increasingly fraudulent phone voting.
Secondly, Big Brother sells itself on the basis of it involving real people. If it had writers come up with a drama that included similar plot lines to this series then they would not get a third of the viewers. Indeed, Channel 4 spectacularly binned their evening soap Brookside a number of years ago after plumetting viewing figures. People watch Big Brother because it is supposed to be real... by manipulating who comes up for the public vote, Channel 4 are effectively making the series less real. There are any number of great dramas that could fill Big Brother's slot.
The solution is to vote with your feet and stop watching or, if you can't manage that, either move from viewing the programme to downloading it using a bittorrent client (therefore robbing Channel 4 of trackable ratings numbers) or just stop voting thereby robbing the programme of its other means of gaging success; the vast numbers of votes they receive.
Take your Reality TV back and don't let the producers drag you around by the end of your nose!
Comments