30th May 2009. A ten-man strong dance troupe stands side by side next to an unassuming woman in her late forties - all are waiting in anticipation with nervous faces spread across the stage. After an excruciating build-up, the word “Diversity” is belted through a microphone, and the dancers go crazy in celebration. This was the moment Diversity beat Susan Boyle in the third series finale of Britain’s Got Talent. Both finalists would become household names, epitomising the success of one of British television’s most popular shows this century, seeing an average viewership of over 13 million at the time.
As that viewership has more than halved up to the present series, it is clear that the prominence of Britain’s Got Talent as a pillar of Saturday night entertainment is fading - see if the average person can name this year’s winner. Along with it, many other shows, such as The Apprentice and The Jeremy Kyle Show – one with crumbling ratings and the other being axed – have also witnessed a steady decline as the century has unfolded. This type of television, which I have dubbed ‘exploitation-reality TV’, should never have had a space on our screens to begin with, and its dwindling should be a relief to contestants and viewers alike.
I use the term exploitation-reality TV, because the format employed in the production of these shows is, by its very nature, exploitative. Of course, a more romantic take can be taken to shows such as Britain’s Got Talent, giving a national stage to a talented singer such as Susan Boyle, who may otherwise have never been given the opportunity to seize the fruits of her talent. But for most appearances on the show, things don’t look so glamorous. Most of the run time is taken up by the audition process, and within these episodes, almost all contestants are destined to fail. One doesn’t have to be too familiar with the show to remember Simon Cowell insulting a contestant in any number of ways, with the other judges – as well as the audience – cackling along, pointing the finger.
This format is displayed most acutely on The X Factor, infamous for its many audition clips in which the judges antagonise the contestants to produce often very extreme reactions. One duo of friends, Abby and Lisa, were provoked by the audience leading them to have a physical fight on stage. Another hopeful participant, Ariel, whose eccentric persona led to ridicule by the judges including Cheryl Cole labelling her ‘scary’, tragically took her life a few years ago. Despite the clear vulnerability of these people, who are broadcasted to an audience of millions, such audition moments garner the most traction and publicity for the shows; they could not exist without them, and herein lies the major issue.
Stripping down this set-up to what it actually is, public humiliation, you begin to wonder how in the age of mental health awareness, this has gone on unscathed for so long. For whatever reason these types of contestants go onto The X Factor and the like, who – with no disrespect – may lack the talent they think they possess, this model of laughing at those with a diminished sense of self-awareness feels almost medieval. Examples such as fruit thrown at someone locked into wooden stocks or mocking ‘the village idiot’ come to mind. A similar but more subtle format is adopted by the entrepreneur-reality show The Apprentice, where contestants are intentionally enlisted not due to any business savviness, but more so based on their ego-driven personalities, causing fiery bickering which makes for ‘good TV’. Once again, it’s easy as an audience member to sit back and laugh, removed from these people by a television screen, commanding a sense of better-ness.
Through the 2010s, these shows began to diminish in viewership and ratings, yet they still persisted in their exploitative nature, nonetheless taking advantage of people again and again in the vicious production machine. Sadly, it would take the most drastic impact, in the loss of human life, before people would really stop and realise what such shows were capable of. In the space of nine months between 2018 and 2019, two Love Island contestants – Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassistis – took their own lives following online harassment and bullying after appearing on the show. These tragic incidences highlighted the grave mental health effects that such a show can have on everyday people who are elevated to celebrity status in the space of weeks, and the overblown public scrutiny that this is accompanied by. While public opinion began to shift, still the show carried on, with seemingly empty promises from producers to better protect their contestants. A few months later, yet another incident of a similar nature occurred, as Steve Dymond took his own life after appearing on The Jeremy Kyle Show and failing a lie detector test regarding infidelity. Due to the inextricable link between the show and Dymond’s death, ITV – who you may have noticed are the broadcast studio behind most of the previously mentioned programmes – were forced to axe the show, a move overdue since the airing of the very first episode.
A scrutiny of The Jeremy Kyle Show is something that deserves a whole book, and a harrowing exposé released recently on Channel 4 covers its evils in detail. To summarise in my own words, it was a show hosted by a privately educated member of the establishment, who disguised his disdain for working-class families as what he deemed harsh but fair paternalism, entirely exploiting the needs of people in positions of extreme vulnerability, and fuelling antagonism. Its core draw, I would argue, is very similar to all other exploitation-reality TV, with its rawness pushing it to an even greater level of public humiliation. The damage the show has caused, including even more deaths than that of just Dymond, is irreparable; you can only hope viewers of the show and others like it used the news of the show’s axing as a point of reflection, to consider whether the hours of ‘entertainment’ were really worth it.
It seems, though, with the fall of The Jeremy Kyle Show, the attitudes towards exploitation-reality television are shifting in the right direction. While conventional television is also following the same general decline as viewers opt for streaming services, the replication of exploitation-reality TV is nowhere to be seen on Netflix and the like. Of course, the reality genre isn’t going away any time soon, as we see regurgitations of the same tired dating shows pumped out year after year. I suppose, though, we can rest easy knowing that an era of malice and carelessness in digital form is coming to a close, as we switch back over to our regularly scheduled mindless garbage.
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