BY TYRION PERKINS
The first Australian version of the television show Big Brother is finally over, but there is another in the pipeline. Channel 10 marketers did their job so thoroughly that even its news readers were plugging the show. Big Brother contestants continue to appear on other shows, even on rival channels. It was a show that was hard to miss.
While many people were curious about it, and it gained many fans, not everyone liked it. Some saw it as blatantly voyeuristic and believed that watching every intimate moment of the contestants' lives was unethical. Others were bored by the televised household's machinations.
To my mind, the worst thing about the show was its anti-social thrust. It promoted individual gain over the group. You could say sports and other game show promote this, but Big Brother went much further. The producers deliberately formed a social group, then forced its members to turn against each other.
A situation was created in which a number of people were forced to live together and cooperate. Over time, emotional ties were forged. But then, came the pain of having to nominate who of these new friends had to be evicted.
The show was purposely designed to cause emotional conflict between the contestants. The "eviction episodes" often featured the tearful reactions of the contestants.
Big Brother is not the first show to require contestants to turn on each other. Survivor and the other "reality shows" also involve voting contestants off the show.
The studio-based game show, The Weakest Link, is also designed along these lines, but it concentrates on the genre's sadistic aspects. It doesn't have the friendly talkative host common on most other game shows but a stern disciplinarian who acts vindictively throughout the show. She delights in telling all the losing contestants, "You get nothing". Interestingly, I can think of no other game show host who is a woman.
Big Brother took the public participation in housemate elimination one step further, when it gave the final decision of who was to be evicted to the audience. This was the major promotional device used by Channel 10. "You decide" was screamed at us in every advertisement. What they didn't tell us was that Channel 10 got a big chunk of the 55 cents that every caller forked out for each call.
They wanted us to see it as interactive television. It worked. An article in the Sydney Morning Herald noted that in Britain, more votes were cast for Big Brother evictions than in the national elections.
Another Sydney Morning Herald article on reported that teachers at West Pennant Hills Public were concerned that some students had used email to "vote" students out of their social group. The next day, the victims were scrutinized to "see how they coped with it". Denying that The Weakest Link had influenced the practice, a Channel 7 spokesperson said, "Kids will imitate what is popular ... it's up to parents [to control] what kids watch."
These shows not only mirror capitalism's "survival of the fittest" philosophy, but help to teach it in a practical way.
What is disturbing is that the scenario of voting each other out seems to be accepted by all. When the last three Big Brother contestants were told they would not walk out together as they had thought, but that one more had to be voted out, the fans in the audience didn't mind, they got an extra chance to vote. Channel 10 didn't mind, it had another chance to make thousands of dollars. However, the contestants were visibly upset by this extra humiliation they had to endure.
Channel 10 would argue that this is good television, full of conflict and drama. I would argue that rather than entertainment, it educates children and adults alike to accept a psychologically barbaric form of individualism.
If people accept these "games", then perhaps they will not only accept workplace downsizing more readily, but vote which work mates should be sacked each time.
Capitalists and their managers are used to this barbarism and seek to profit from it, but it destroys workers' lives. We need a society that replaces such distorted human relationships with one that is based on people caring and looking after each other.