Reality, or perhaps more accurately, Judgemental TV
Rollerball, the 1975 movie starring James Caan, was a view of a dystopian future world that had been pacified and was under corporate control. Despite, or rather because of, the absence of war, the rulers recognised that a primitive instinct and lust for violence still existed in mankind. In an attempt to satiate this, and deflect any outpourings of frustrated violence away from sedition, the cathartic and ultra-violent sport of Rollerball was introduced. A team game, killing your opponents was an integral part of the spectacle, in much the same way as the entertainment offered up in the Colosseum of ancient Rome. Perhaps the world of Rollerball could be seen as a direct analogy to the stable and generally peaceful Roman Empire at the height of its powers. Its controlled citizens, perhaps bored and starved of excitement, were offered a kind of compensatory entertainment that appealed to their most visceral and base instincts.
Returning to the present, many prejudices – some previously even enshrined in law – are now rightly considered unacceptable: displaying tolerance is therefore seen as desirable. On dating sites for example, non-judgementalism, along with a good sense of humour (GSOH) is probably one of the commonest self-declared, or required, attributes. Gone are the days when we’d actually and metaphorically throw rotten fruit and vegetables at someone in the stocks who’d transgressed some fashionable view of what constituted reasonable behaviour.
Or have those days really gone? If they have then it’s hard to understand why inordinate fame has been bestowed on the likes of Simon Cowell, Jeremy Kyle, Gordon Ramsey or indeed anyone who supervises and ‘robustly’ judges various competitions between celebrities or members of the public. All they do, for our entertainment rather than anything personal, is humiliate soft and exposed targets.
We don’t even need someone like Simon Cowell to act as cheerleader of strident criticism. We have programmes like Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother, Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore, The Only Way is Essex, any programme about love on an island, any programme that has celebrities or the general public competitively doing anything, the Real Housewives of Wherever, I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, the Osbournes, the Kardashians, Come Dine with Me, etc, etc. We can now judge these people as harshly as we like, ourselves!
Maybe in a world of aspirational non-judgementalism, we need to judge. Who knows, perhaps the ability to assess a stranger quickly was a survival skill in the cave-dwelling days of yore. Or then again it could aid group-bonding, facilitated by a general agreement about outsiders, “they’re (wrongly) like that but we’re (rightly) like this”, serving much the same function as gossip. Is “reality” TV our Rollerball?
So the burning question of the day is, should ‘Reality TV’ more correctly be called ‘Judgmental TV’?
