Reality TV : What’s happening?

"We certainly expect to see real people in somewhat strange situations, and we expect to watch them, safe in the knowledge that they are unable to watch us back."

The audience take great satisfaction out of watiching others lives- voyerism

"It seems clear why producers make reality TV: these programmes are relatively cheap to make, certainly compared to drama, and they appear to guarantee audiences."

The audience

"The success of reality TV is partly due to the increasingly voyeuristic nature of the society in which we live, and in part due to the obsession with celebrity and everyone wanting to be one. I would also argue that we are living in a much more ‘open society’; not open in terms of freedoms (in fact we have less freedoms), but open in terms of the ‘nothing is sacred’ philosophy."

This is why people are more willing to be on TV, because its acceptable to spill your whole life out onto tv.

"I know that there is a huge voyeuristic component attached to my own and others’ viewing. I’m watching people in odd situations, with their warts and all in full view, but they can’t see me watching them. Do I watch because it makes me feel better about myself, because I think I am not like them?"

This explores the uses and gratifications of identification or lack of it. People use these reality texts to explore their lives and their own vaules.

"Firstly, reality TV appears to have arrived in our schedules at a time when soap operas were becoming more and more realistic: very naturalistic acting/characterisation and realistic storylines and issues"..."producers could see that the next step was to use real people and see how they react, hence the title docu-soap when they were first screened."

Instant success – no talent required

All four categories of Uses and Gratifications research: (Diversion, Personal Relationships, Personal Identity, Surveillance), can be applied to reality TV.

"There is no doubt that we use reality TV as a form of escapism, it certainly helps you forget about the stresses of the day when you can see people having a much worse day than you have had.

Reality TV performs the function of companionship through identification with television characters, and there is no doubt that there is sociability

In discussion: everyone was talking about BB5. In terms of personal identity, comparisons are a relatively natural thing to make: we either take the stance that we are better than the participants, or we want to be them.

And finally, it is a source of information about the world, not just from a psychological perspective, but also from finding out about a particular way of life – for example, Airport, Property Ladder etc."

Reality and post-modernism

To quote Baudrillard: Art (or popular culture) today has totally penetrated reality.

He meant that the border between popular culture and reality has vanished as both have collapsed into the universal simulacrum. There are four stages to this:

• It is the reflection of a basic reality.
• It masks and perverts a basic reality.
• It marks the absence of a basic reality.
• It bears no relation to any reality whatever – it is its own pure simulacrum in which the distinctions between ‘real life’ and its media representations have become blurred.

"Reality becomes redundant and we have a hyper-reality, in which images breed with each other without reference to reality or meaning. Though a little abstract, it is possible to apply this to reality TV in the sense that we watch the shows because we believe we are watching real people; which in fact in a postmodern sense is nonsense. They are not real anymore; they are not even in a real situation anymore. In real terms, once you see the mediation process involved, you are aware that it is not a real situation."

Tina Dixon is an Examiner for AQA.

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 10, December 2004