Shilpa

[dianeduane]

The TV news often runs in the background while I'm working, and today it seems there's a ruckus kicking up about the  treatment of the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty in the (British) "Celebrity Big Brother" house. (Also surprising is the amount of  airplay Sky News is giving this: I suppose it's a diagnostic of sorts. It'll be even more diagnostic if Fidel Castro discorporates suddenly and the news mix remains the same. [That said, the story of his "grave condition" is being denied from various directions, so it's entirely possible that Fidel isn't going anywhere just yet.])

...At first glance the BB situation looks to me like a class issue. Take a crowd of C-list meta-celebs such as they've got in there at the moment and put a millionairess in with them, and it's likely to produce a fair bit of friction. This is the only chance some of those people will ever have to spend a prolonged period with someone so much more powerful and wealthy than they are; as a result, they're making the most of it (for some rather ugly values of "most").

(sigh) Meanwhile, I don't know about everybody else, but I can't wait for "unscripted drama" to run its course. Electrons are dying for this?

Comments

[scarfman]

When most tv shows really make their money in reruns (and, more recently, in the home video market), I used to be complacent in the knowledge that tv execs would stop making reality tv despite low productions costs when they discovered that viewers weren't interested in reruns of shows whose whole point is the cliffhanger Who's going to win the contest?. Then, about two years ago, F/X started running Fear Factor reruns. I say, now or soon, look to "amateurs" on the web for cutting-edge screen drama (the only problem with that, of course, being that the plethora of choices means there'll be few or no runaway hits).

[zellion.livejournal.com]

Well, I certainly hope it does too. As someone who reads too much sci-fi, things like Big Brother really creep me out because it reminds me too much of the "lifeloops" in Orson Scott Card's "Capitol". Or any dozen other scary sci-fi dystopias.

[ateji.livejournal.com]

One good thing as far as the lifeloops go...the US is still too prudish to put Arran Handully's sex life on prime time TV. ;)

[zellion.livejournal.com]

Well no, not prime time. Not yet.

[http://users.livejournal.com/inkista_/]

On the one hand, I too heave a sigh and wish for bad-taste reality to go away. On the other, I carefully note airdates and times for new episodes of Faking It (UK), The Amazing Race, and Project Runway. I've never watched Survivor or Big Brother, and for me reality is at its best when it's mostly about only mildly hyper-real situations and not dependent on super-sized stress extruded by artifical means. And there is that set of shows that walk the line between documentary and reality which I love (I just bought the first two Year at Kew dvd sets from Amazon.uk). I think reality is here to stay, and like everything else, it follows Sturgeon's Law.

[sshi.livejournal.com]

On the subject of BB-type things, I was told this evening about a Scrap Saturday type program running on RTE Radio 1 this week in the afternoons, featuring a fake BB-type set-up, with the voices of Michael Jackson, David Norris and some completely unintelligible Gaelic player from Kerry, who is dubbed with Stephen Hawking's voice machine. Sounds like it may be worth listening to (apparently this afternoon they got MJ drunk and singing Irish trad songs).

[xnamkrad.livejournal.com]

RTE have done a few reality type shows, but as they only show an hour or two a week, and hence all the crap is out, they were worth watching.

[miss-next.livejournal.com]

Germaine Greer wrote an article in today's Guardian on the situation, and I detected a considerable note of jealousy behind that, too. She finds Miss Shetty really annoying, but the reasons she gives for finding her so annoying don't hold up under close scrutiny.

I was interested to learn that some of the tension in the house has arisen from the fact that Miss Shetty can *gasp* cook. Some of the other inmates are apparently jealous because she is able to have exactly the sort of food that she likes, since she knows how to prepare it perfectly. I should like to think the experience will inspire them to learn to go and do likewise once they are released, but somehow I doubt it (there is something about the mere mention of BB that makes me unusually cynical).

Germaine Greer does have some good points, though, and the one that really sounded as though it made sense was that the entire show is deliberately set up to bring out the worst in the contestants. I've never seen it, but from what I've read about it already I had pretty much deduced that. It's scary.

I'll try to find a link to the Guardian article if you are interested.

[conductrixvitae.livejournal.com]

Oh please yes let the age of reality television come to a belated end! Why? When there is so much good drama just waiting to be made do they waste our time and energy and their money on excessive mindless drivel.