by Jimmy Nightingale

Created on: September 04, 2008   Last Updated: December 29, 2008

Reality TV is an edited version of reality.

The sad fact is that reality is often very boring. Or should I say that it is a few interesting moments strewn amongst a lot of mundane and boring ones. In a way, it is a bit like space. The universe is a massive place. Scattered throughout it are tiny pin-pricks of matter. Heavy elements make up just 0.03 percent of the universe by volume. If you equate heavy matter with the interesting bits in Reality TV programs, you will get the picture.

Reality TV is supposedly meant to entertain. Sometimes that is a bit questionable with such dubious titles as "Amish in the City" (five Amish teenagers living in a house with six "mainstream" American teenagers), "Bug Juice" (not about ingesting vile beverages made from insects, this is more a child exploitation show about kids' experiences at summer camp), "Scariest Places on Earth" (hosted by Linda Blair, need say no more about this one), "Miami Ink" (set in a tattoo parlour), "Wife Swap" (as the name suggests, no conjugal rights involved in case you are wondering), and "Ice Road Truckers" (follows a bunch of truckers around Canada's frozen north).

Reality TV dates back to Michael Apted's "Seven Up" series in 1964. This pioneering program provided an insight into the lives of fourteen children and Apsted has re-visited and re-interviewed them every seven years since. The latest incarnation "Forty-Nine Up" was released in 2005. Although officially credited as the foundation of Reality TV, this genre didn't really take off until the early 1990s. I'm ashamed to say that it was an Australian show, "Sylvania Waters" in 1992 (about a train-wreck of a family in Sydney's southern suburbs), that sparked the deluge of reality series that seem to show no signs of ending.

Probably the best known of the reality TV programs is the hugely successful "Survivor" franchise. This involved putting a bunch of Americans in exotic locations to fend for themselves (all warm locations I assume to maximize the length of time that female contestants would be scantily clad), submitting them to challenges in teams and as individuals. "Survivor" was successful because of its dog eat dog mentality. With the thankful exception of violence, it showed human beings at their most entertaining - squabbling, petty, jealous, lying and outright mean and nasty. I wasn't naive enough to believe that people weren't being quoted or portrayed out of context, but I did believe that we were seeing things that actually happened

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