Seasons change. The solemn promises made by politicians change. But the one thing you can guarantee won’t ever change is human nature. Technology has made us almost god-like these days. We can cure disease and hurl nuclear death across whole continents, but inside we’re still the same quarelsome little apes who hit each other on the heads with clubs, aren’t we ?

What prompted this blindingly obvious thought was reading that the Dutch company which created the gut-wrenchingly tacky ‘Big Brother’ TV show is supposedly planning to screen a new ‘reality’ show in which three people with serious kidney failure will plead for their lives to a terminally ill cancer patient who has the power to grant the lucky winner one of her kidneys after he dies. Apparently the audience will be able to participate fully, sending in texts and advice to the terminally ill cancer patient to influence the decision. Great entertainment, eh ? Just when you think that TV reality shows can’t sink any lower, they come up with a doozy like this. Now common sense tells you that the whole thing is most likely just some cheap stunt perpetrated by the Dutch TV company to generate controversy and grab publicity and that the program itself is never going to make it to air, but these days you can never be too sure. And if by any chance something so truly bizarre were ever broadcast then whats the betting that the program would pull in huge viewing figures ? People would kid themselves they were just switching on with an enquiring mind ‘to see what all the fuss was about’ but really it would be just the same dirty little voyeuristic itch that makes you slow down when you pass a car-wreck, hoping to see something shocking.

In recent years we’ve seen the inexorable rise of the ‘reality’ tv show, from ‘Big Brother’ to ‘Castaway’ to ‘Pop Idol’ to ‘Jerry Springer’ to .. oh hell, the list is endless and sadly growing by the day. Sometimes its in the format of a game-show, or a chat-show, or a ‘competition’, but its always cheap and nasty. ‘Reality’ tv is, of course, anything but reality. It takes gullible, often dumb or damaged, ‘ordinary’ people desperate for their 15 minutes of fame and puts them into highly unreal situations where they can be broken down, humiliated, and made to behave badly for the voyeuristic pleasure of the viewing audience. Any notion of ‘reality’ is made even more laughable as what happens is manipulated through editing and other post-production techniques to make it as shocking as possible. Do people want to see happy, intelligent, well-adjusted people getting along ? Hell no, they want to see tears, heartbreak, anger, tension, bloody-minded bigotry. They want to be shocked. They want to watch the fly having its wings pulled off. They want to feel superior. Who’d have thought it would go this far, eh ? Can you remember years ago when we all used to shudder or laugh nervously at the crazy clips of those old sadistic Japanese game shows ? What a strange people, we used to think smugly to ourselves, to make such truly weird and degrading shit. Yet here we all are a few years down the line glued to the same sadistic rubbish on home-grown, prime-time tv. Just goes to show, folks (and this is kind of comforting in a way) that bad taste is truly universal.

It serves its purpose though, I guess. Around 2000 years ago the Roman emperors came up with a way of keeping the masses in line. Entertainment. They built the Colosseum, a huge 50,000 seat amphitheatre where they staged bloody gladiatorial contests and other ‘entertainments’ that pitted men against wild animals. Throwing Christians to the lions went down quite well, apparently. These regular gore-fests for the masses were a winning idea. Give the masses some cheap, nasty entertainment and they’ll be so titillated that they’ll forget their grievances and they won’t think too hard about the shortcomings of their rulers or the political system (note: these days the same function is served in the USA by television). Anyway what those old romans had done, knowingly or otherwise, was to tap into our age-old desire to see your fellow man suffer as nastily as possible. The same basic human instinct that had people in medieval times watching their fellows being burnt as witches in Spain, or which drew crowds of family picknickers to see the public hangings at Tyburn or Newgate in England, or which had old ladies knitting cosily in the front row as the guillotine did its bloody work in revolutionary France, or which still sees crowds attending public stonings in some Muslim countries. Human nature does *not* change. Today we may pretend to be civilized but that nasty old streak inside us has to find some outlet, so we sublimate it by watching ritual humiliations on tv ‘reality’ gameshows and chat-shows .

Which you could, of course, argue is a good thing. Willing ‘victims’ may be harmed mentally and spiritually for the entertainment of others, but at least they don’t get disembowelled. Thats progress, right ? But what happens when boredom sets in, as it inevitably will ? What happens when the ratings start to slip ? The profit motive has absolutely no conscience. So will we start to see the tv companies getting ever harder and more extreme as they strive to shock and titillate ? Are we going to see the electric chair dragged out again and dusted off for public pay-per-view TV executions ? Do you really think there *wouldn’t* be a huge audience if they did that ? Or should we maybe have poor people whose kids need operations but who aren’t covered by medical insurance having to make their pitch on TV so the viewers can text or call-in votes ? There’d be some tears and heart-warming moments there, I bet. And how long, I wonder, before some bright TV exec comes up with the idea of throwing Christians to the lions on prime time TV ? Hey, it worked before, didn’t it ?

Joe Hack

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