Steve Irwin was an unassuming, unexpected star of TV. The documentaries he made were point and shoot. They fell into a reality TV category because anything could and did happen. Sure Steve planned
what he was going to shoot, but he did it in a different way to other
wildlife shows like David Attenborough. We watched Steve because we knew at
any moment, due to his reckless daring, he could be attacked and genuinely
hurt.
As his fame and ratings grew, so did the risks he took and
eventually, in a quest for extraordinary shots, he swam with stingrays and was
speared to death.
It almost went unnoticed in terms of the culpability of the
television lens spurring him on. And, to be honest, Steve was his own producer
making his own decisions so there was little window to point any finger of
blame except at Steve.
But his quest for adventure and ratings is a symptom of
death by TV, something that is surely going to become more recognizable in the
future.
We have truckers driving on treacherous roads where we watch
because they may go over the side and die, or drive over a crack in the ice and
die.
We have people risking their lives in the name of daring
journeys or surviving horrific circumstances that they have placed themselves
in to gain ratings.
We have little girls being pushed by mothers to fulfill
their own faded or unfulfilled dreams in a quest to win pageants and we sit and
watch the little dress up dolls, knowing full well, because of the parenting,
in many cases we are watching the first chapter of very tragic lives.
Producers seem to be seeking out people who are living lives
that are clinically diagnosable for the entertainment of those at home.
They are finding others who have been born and bred to abhor
certain types and then couple them with these hated adversaries and thrust them
into circumstances where they are made to live together, and it’s all filmed
for our amusement as they co-exist.
THIS WEEK:
Meet the Reynolds, a
family of Neo Nazis who live on a secure and guarded compound in the rural
wilderness of forgotten land. They rise at six thirty every morning and school
their children on the best methods to defend themselves against all intruders.
Mum Mary-Anne keeps their cement bunker shipshape and rotates the canned
supplies, feeding her ‘God warriors’ on canned food that is about to outlive
its 15 year use by date.
In the Davis Junior
household, an African American Jewish family, they love to sing and dance and
celebrate diversity. Eva encourages her children to embrace foreign cultures
and live alternative lifestyles.
But today, their lives
are about to change when these two mothers trade places on Wife Swap.
Wife Swap knows people tune in to see a train wreck and one
day soon that train wreck is going to take a life. It may sound melodramatic,
but real lives are being challenged, changed and destroyed on these shows.
It’s easy to argue that in many cases the changes and
exposure to a new culture or lifestyle helps and expands the minds of
people who may never have come into contact with such influences otherwise, and
these points are valid. In many cases the setup and payoff is enlightening for
everyone involved and for the audience. But pushing for ever increasing diverse
intermingling, often clearly chosen to annoy the different households, will
eventually lead to something going horribly wrong.
Already there is a case in the UK where the aftermath of the
show, well after filming had completed, left one wife declaring her lesbianism
and her husband, Simon Foster, taking his own life. There’s been little
coverage of what’s become of the two children involved.
I would be interested in a follow up Wife Swap show to find
out how many couples have divorced and how many of them laid the blame in part
or whole at the feet of the show that disrupted their lives. Maybe these
results are for the best. Maybe some of those involved were liberated from
oppressive lives they didn’t have the courage to get out from under… but we’ll
never know because producers have better sense than to highlight the danger and
damage done in their quest for ratings.
No-one seems to really care. The producers are slick and the
spin doctors savvy enough to keep the virtue of the entertainment front and
centre. But the line between interesting voyeurism and something far more
sinister was well and truly crossed some time ago.
When will the first death occur on Bridal-plasty? Law of
averages says it will happen. Any doctor will confirm that a general anesthetic
carries a risk and patients have, can and will continue to die from
complications of both anesthesia and surgery. On every episode of every plastic
surgery show, people go under the knife under full anesthetic. So it’s not a
matter of if but when this first televised tragedy occurs. The producers and
networks will spin it somehow, or bury it, and even worse, the ratings will
spike because of it, but someone’s going to die for the sake of onscreen
entertainment.
Many years ago a young man, Scott Amedure, famously
confronted his long time gay crush on the Jenny Jones show, a contemporary of
the Springer show. Humiliated, the man Scott revealed he had a crush on waited
until they got home and shot Scott dead.
So how much responsibility does TV have? How much
responsibility do we as an audience have? On drama shows there are time slots
that dictate exactly what subjects can be explored and even which topics cannot
be explored, but how does fly on the wall reality TV deal with this issue
especially now that some of it is live to air?
Can a producer who puts a pitbull and a kitten in the same
cage plead innocence because he didn’t know what the outcome would be?
Update - June 3 2013 - Two stars of the Discovery Channel show Storm Chasers were among the 10 people killed by tornadoes that rampaged through central Oklahoma on Friday, unsettling the highly risky cottage industry of tracking tornadoes and forcing the media to rethink how they cover deadly twisters.
Tim Samaras, 55, a leading storm chaser and founder of the tornado research company Twistex, was killed in the Oklahoma City suburb of El Reno along with his son, Paul Samaras, 24, and Carl Young, 45, a Twistex meteorologist, according to a statement from Tim Samaras' brother, Jim Samaras.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/world/discovery-channel-storm-chasers-among-10-killed-by-oklahoma-tornado-20130603-2nkhe.html#ixzz2V7Tc1EDK
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