Source: news.scotsman.com
(Excerpt):
Sun 11 Jan 2004
By Brian McNair,The Scotsman
"Big Brother" began to move reality TV away from this simple model of fly-on-the-wall documentary. It still had ordinary people as its stars, but there was nothing remotely realistic about the setting. An artificial environment was created, and challenges introduced to test the participants as if they were human guinea pigs.
That was a large part of its appeal to viewers, who were transformed into God-like observers of a psychological experiment about the evolution of human community. The millions of us who watched it witnessed individuals blossom, leaders emerge, scoundrels reveal themselves, with a proximity and degree of detail we could never experience in real life. We were the seeing eye, and Big Brother was a microcosm, a real little Britain.
But then it went off the boil. In series four the contestants were bored, and boring, and audiences yawned. So Endemol, the creators of "Big Brother", came up with "Shattered." Where "Big Brother" threatened its participants with little more than the loss of a few pounds if they failed a challenge and had their weekly food budget cut, here they were literally being tortured, in the sense that any human rights organisation would define that word. Not only were they prevented from sleeping, the producers came up with all manner of ingenious devices to try to get them to sleep. Sadistic is what it was.
Shattered was presented as a ‘sleep study’ in the best tradition of experimental behavioural science, but that was disingenuous. Did we learn anything of value about our fellow human beings from the exercise, other than that they get dopey and argumentative when deprived of sleep for up to seven days? Duh.
And what’s the point of such knowledge to the average viewer, as opposed to the average Baathist? In Big Brother we saw human growth and development, which is genuinely educational and nearly always life-affirming. Here we saw individuals with no time for any kind of personal development, simply because they were too busy staying awake.
Doctor Trisha McNair (no relation), who sat on the ethics panel advising the Shattered producers, laid out with great care in a Guardian article the lengths to which she and her colleagues went to ensure the propriety of the programme. She also revealed the programme’s raison d’être, if more explicitly than the producers might have wished. "Together," she wrote, "we had to examine how far the producers could be allowed to torture their participants in the name of entertainment."
Let’s assume the appropriate ethical codes were followed. The question is: why would anyone want to torture anyone else in the name of entertainment? And should they be allowed to, even if the informed consent of the tortured has been given? And what about the ethics of we viewers, without whom none of it would happen?
I was reminded of that bizarre case going through the German courts, in which it appears that a man freely consented to be killed and eaten. Does the fact of that consent make the act less than murder?
I was reminded too of Stanley Milgram and his famous experiment in which members of the public were persuaded to administer electric shocks in the name of scientific research (the shocks, and the victims’ tormented cries in response, were faked, but his subjects didn’t know that when they caused them to happen). Milgram’s point was that ordinary people will do extraordinarily cruel things to their fellows when encouraged or allowed to by an authority figure.
This wasn’t a popular finding in 1950s America, where people thought of themselves as generally decent. Watching Shattered made me feel a bit like that, as if I had been duped into colluding with something that wasn’t quite right.
But hey, Shattered was only a game show, and not the first to prove that one person’s self-inflicted torture is another’s prime-time TV. Chris Evans did it all the time, and what’s David Blaine about if not masochism as mass spectacle?
The last series of "I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" had participants pouring buckets of creepy-crawlies down their trousers, then crawling through rat-infested tunnels. Whatever turns them, and us, on is fair enough it seems, as long as nobody gets hurt and there’s an audience for it, which there clearly is.
Let’s not dignify it with the label of science, though, or even reality TV, and let’s admit that there’s a bit of the sadist in all of us.
(Excerpt):
Sun 11 Jan 2004
By Brian McNair,The Scotsman
"Big Brother" began to move reality TV away from this simple model of fly-on-the-wall documentary. It still had ordinary people as its stars, but there was nothing remotely realistic about the setting. An artificial environment was created, and challenges introduced to test the participants as if they were human guinea pigs.
That was a large part of its appeal to viewers, who were transformed into God-like observers of a psychological experiment about the evolution of human community. The millions of us who watched it witnessed individuals blossom, leaders emerge, scoundrels reveal themselves, with a proximity and degree of detail we could never experience in real life. We were the seeing eye, and Big Brother was a microcosm, a real little Britain.
But then it went off the boil. In series four the contestants were bored, and boring, and audiences yawned. So Endemol, the creators of "Big Brother", came up with "Shattered." Where "Big Brother" threatened its participants with little more than the loss of a few pounds if they failed a challenge and had their weekly food budget cut, here they were literally being tortured, in the sense that any human rights organisation would define that word. Not only were they prevented from sleeping, the producers came up with all manner of ingenious devices to try to get them to sleep. Sadistic is what it was.
Shattered was presented as a ‘sleep study’ in the best tradition of experimental behavioural science, but that was disingenuous. Did we learn anything of value about our fellow human beings from the exercise, other than that they get dopey and argumentative when deprived of sleep for up to seven days? Duh.
And what’s the point of such knowledge to the average viewer, as opposed to the average Baathist? In Big Brother we saw human growth and development, which is genuinely educational and nearly always life-affirming. Here we saw individuals with no time for any kind of personal development, simply because they were too busy staying awake.
Doctor Trisha McNair (no relation), who sat on the ethics panel advising the Shattered producers, laid out with great care in a Guardian article the lengths to which she and her colleagues went to ensure the propriety of the programme. She also revealed the programme’s raison d’être, if more explicitly than the producers might have wished. "Together," she wrote, "we had to examine how far the producers could be allowed to torture their participants in the name of entertainment."
Let’s assume the appropriate ethical codes were followed. The question is: why would anyone want to torture anyone else in the name of entertainment? And should they be allowed to, even if the informed consent of the tortured has been given? And what about the ethics of we viewers, without whom none of it would happen?
I was reminded of that bizarre case going through the German courts, in which it appears that a man freely consented to be killed and eaten. Does the fact of that consent make the act less than murder?
I was reminded too of Stanley Milgram and his famous experiment in which members of the public were persuaded to administer electric shocks in the name of scientific research (the shocks, and the victims’ tormented cries in response, were faked, but his subjects didn’t know that when they caused them to happen). Milgram’s point was that ordinary people will do extraordinarily cruel things to their fellows when encouraged or allowed to by an authority figure.
This wasn’t a popular finding in 1950s America, where people thought of themselves as generally decent. Watching Shattered made me feel a bit like that, as if I had been duped into colluding with something that wasn’t quite right.
But hey, Shattered was only a game show, and not the first to prove that one person’s self-inflicted torture is another’s prime-time TV. Chris Evans did it all the time, and what’s David Blaine about if not masochism as mass spectacle?
The last series of "I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here" had participants pouring buckets of creepy-crawlies down their trousers, then crawling through rat-infested tunnels. Whatever turns them, and us, on is fair enough it seems, as long as nobody gets hurt and there’s an audience for it, which there clearly is.
Let’s not dignify it with the label of science, though, or even reality TV, and let’s admit that there’s a bit of the sadist in all of us.
