Reality TV shows are Aesop's fables for modern times

Brian Sewell
03.07.09

Among the great and good, the wise and wonderful, there is a tendency to condemn reality TV.

It exposes the worst in us, they argue; it urges us to identify with talentless opportunists who are duplicitous, manipulative, selfish and cruel, who, to achieve unworthy ends, lie, cheat and dissemble, bully and boast - a wretched example to the young.

Addicted to it - now that The Apprentice is over for another year, I have taken to From Ladette to Lady as my methadone - I argue the contrary case that to anyone with half an ounce of moral instinct, reality TV is the modern equivalent of Aesop's Fables and Sartre's Huis Clos, and that in drawing morals from such programmes they are every bit as instructive as examples of how we should behave in what is left of our still fundamentally Judaeo-Christian society.

We live in a post-Thatcher, post-Blair, society that, for all its good intentions, has for a quarter of a century been fertile ground for greed, arrogance and vanity.

The recent stripping-away of its genteel camouflage has been an appalling revelation. We know now that bankers are no longer grave and incorruptible old worthies dedicated to responsibility and service but young and utterly irresponsible adventurers cunning enough to feather their own nests with our money.

We know now that our MPs, once esteemed as selflessly dutiful, have sold their devious little souls for the drip-drip pilfering of petty cash.

We throw up our hands in astonishment and disbelief at the pay-offs and pensions of the first and the fiddled expenses of the second, but should we not have recognised this cloud of moral turpitude for what it was the moment it first appeared on our television screens?

Did we see Big Brother and The Apprentice only as entertainment? Were we watching them - and the deprivations and discomforts endured by delinquent adolescents in boot camps and young men pretending to be the National Servicemen of half a century ago - only as amusement?

Were we, the audience for these, much the same as the grinning, mocking, shouting audiences of the 18th century around the stocks, the pillory and the gallows, satisfying some primordial appetite for torment and cruelty as a source for schadenfreude?

There can be little doubt that, in many cases in which the public could vote for the exclusion of a vile candidate who deserved to be thrown out, they recognised that in the torment-cum-entertainment sense, to do so would greatly impoverish the programme.

One notable candidate for whom they should have had some sympathy, Jade Goody, they refused to rescue with their votes, hoping that this ignorant child in a woman's body, so stressed that, in truth, I feared for her sanity, would suffer more and more humiliation.

In the sense that reality TV reveals as much about the audience as about the participants in shows, perhaps the great and good are right - the audiences for Britain's Got Talent were happy to bay for blood.

It tells us something of the judges, too. Consider the contrasts offered by Dragons' Den, with millionaires ranging from the benign and grouchy to one not in the least embarrassed to announce himself the most beautiful man alive.

Consider the presenters of Cardiff's Singer of the World, an upmarket Britain's Got Talent, so seduced by the blonde prettiness of a commonplace soprano that they swept aside a most remarkable counter-tenor, rare, intelligent and wonderfully beautiful of voice, while the people's prize went to a fat adolescent tenor who played Pavarotti's yelling game with opera-pop.

Consider Alan Sugar, always judging success not by an honest margin on good value given to the customer but on extortionate profit; what does that tell us of his morality and what are his apprentices to learn from it? And now that he is in the government, what does it tell us of the naïvety of Gordon Brown?

Reality TV may remind the great and good of Christian martyrs in the Roman Colosseum, the hapless victims of the gladiator, the ravening wild beast and the downturned thumb, but for the ordinary bloke, quietly observant, it opens windows on real people in a real world.

All these programmes are cluttered with the bells and whistles of professional television, the habitual formulae of car-shots, irrelevant urban vistas from the helicopter, the sunset and the flight of birds - even of Ants and Decs of various sorts, and, as though there is too little material to fill the hour's slot, episodes are topped and tailed by a time-consuming reprise of the previous programme and a glimpse of what will happen in the next.

Broadcasters take scrupulous care to ensure that only the most disparate and unsuitable candidates are selected - how much improved The Apprentice would be if every one of the jostling boys and girls was a worthy candidate for the promised job and the winner, measured only by dubious profit, was not just the least worst of them.

The sane man can only conclude that television as we know it now is unfit to make reality TV.

Reality TV should be tauter, tougher and more purposeful than it is now - it should, indeed, be the very best of television, for with it, if we choose to see it so, we are kept well-informed about the society of which we are a part.

We are enlightened about the captains of commerce and those who would usurp them. We see how impossible it is for random groups to form the 18th-century ideal of "a self-regulating society of equals" when greed, ambition and amour-propre are the driving forces of every individual.

We see how education in any real sense has been debased, how the old virtues of unselfishness, decorum and decency have been abandoned.

Big Brother shows us freakish monsters of a kind of whom we might otherwise know nothing, and even From Ladette to Lady has its points to make, as often about the dreadful harridans pretending to be ladies as about the ghastly girls they educate.

As the older examples begin to wither - Big Brother is now a feeble ghost of what it was at first and The Apprentice has obviously run into the sand - new examples of the genre must be encouraged, for in the mirror it holds to our souls we glimpse society as it now really is.