I hate being on TV

The early 2000s weren’t all sparkles and rainbows (the clothes were awful, for one thing); but there was a sense that — to adapt the New Labour anthem — things could get better. On TV, as Tobias Sturt observed recently, this mood translated into a glut of reality shows about DIY and home improvement, a deliriously satisfying weekly template in which ordinary couples looked around at their semi-detached three-beds and thought: ‘but what if we built a Moroccan souk in the conservatory?’ And, as Barry Norman used to say, why not.

Once the entire global supply of MDF had been wedged into the nation’s crevices, this sense of potential for improvement — of having the headspace and financial ease to think about how things might be better — was turned upon the self. How could we dress better, eat better, communicate better, relate better, parent our children better? How could we be… better? For the answers, TV turned to a strange mishmash of real-time soap opera and pop psychology.

The first British series of Big Brother, transmitted on Channel 4 in the summer of 2000, was initially presented as a social psychology experiment. Ahead of transmission we were told it would be an investigation into how ordinary people responded to artificial conditions: the impossibility of privacy, stressful ‘tasks’ and capricious restrictions on food intake and sleep. What would these things affect their behaviour and their relationships, and what could we learn from that? Each week there was a show dedicated to the observations of Big Brother’s tame psychologists, who at this point were still taking the premise quite seriously.

And then, instead of being a boring bit of social observation, Big Brother took off like a rocket. It became an insanely compelling real-life soap opera, in which producers chose narratives and meddled in ‘storylines’ (budding friendships, secret crushes, furtive unpleasantness). Those of us who started watching it out of curiosity — and I am absolutely including myself here — couldn’t look away; there is something absolutely riveting about the minutiae of human relationships, and, of course, there was a more dramatic narrative around ‘Nasty’ Nick and his ‘manipulation’ of the voting process. (To this day, I have no idea how much of this was real and how much of it was constructed in the editing suite). The viewers, for their part, quickly decided that their role was to determine which of the housemates were most deserving of punishment, in the form of ‘eviction’. Big Brother became a screaming success not because of the contestants, but because of the strong instincts it aroused in the audience.

One strange outcome was that in the first season of Big Brother, we were closely watching people who did not know that they had become massively famous. Suspended in an oblivious air-gapped bubble, the housemates thought they were being watched by the standard late-night Channel 4 audience, ie a couple of hundred thousand chin-strokers. None of them had entered the house with the expectation of shrieking tabloid celebrity; indeed, once the novelty had worn off, many of them weren’t even enjoying the much more limited exposure that they thought they were experiencing. At one point one of the housemates, Anna — who was missing her girlfriend — composed a sad little song and sung it quietly to herself:

And when I put my arms around you, you will know
You’re the only one for me
And when I put my arms around you, you will know
I hate being on TV

But we didn’t heed her warning. The social-psychology-TV genie was out of the box, and every channel soon wanted a self-improvement show that might also offer an opportunity for self-righteous gawping and judgement. How could we learn to feed ourselves more adventurously, and yet more healthily? Why, by watching Jamie Oliver put a squad of unemployed youngsters through an artificially accelerated cookery course in Jamie’s Kitchen (2002). How could we learn to feel more positive about our size 16 bodies? Here come Trinny and Susannah to explain What Not to Wear (2001); and if that means watching a woman standing in the middle of a 360-degree mirror and contemplating her back-fat while crying — well, so much the better.

The ‘casts’ of these reality shows often displayed a touching child-like quality: a willingness to learn, and a brave, open countenance as they uncovered their grotty underbellies, literal and metaphorical. But these formats presented an underlying problem: there is a significant difference between making over your garden, and making over yourself. Turning your back yard into a Zen gravel pit decorated with lanterns from Asda needn’t involve any personal revelation; it needn’t involve ugly emotions, vulnerability, and careful personal work. You don’t have to tell anyone that you’re doing this because your dad hated you. But when the format revolves around personal behaviours or difficulties, everything gets very serious, very fast.

Take the premise of How Clean Is Your House?, a reality format that featured the incredibly camp Kim Woodburn and her ‘scientific’ Scottish sidekick Aggie Mackenzie. How Clean Is Your House? was not supposed to be a show about personal development; it was supposed to be a show about tidying up. Each week the uncomfortable duo of Kim and Aggie (there really was not a lot of chemistry there) swarmed into a home to ‘show’ its inhabitants how to wipe surfaces and take things to the dump. It was clearly intended to be superficially similar to the satisfying ‘before and after’ format of Ground Force and Changing Rooms.

The problem was that people who let their homes get epically dirty or messy tend to have much deeper problems. If you haven’t so much as washed a mug for six months, we’re probably not looking at a skill issue. In the random episode I found on YouTube, the voiceover announces that Angela’s house is ‘letting down the neighbourhood’: ‘this is a RAT HOLE’ shrieks Kim, writing ‘FILTH’ in the dust on the TV screen. Angela’s ‘lazy’ husband David complains he’s being ‘pushed out of the door’ by the mess, over footage of him calmly watching telly in a small tunnel he has made between mountains of crap. But Angela’s fundamental distress keeps breaking through. Blink and you’ll miss it, but we learn that she is a full-time unpaid carer, and sleeps on the sofa at her mum’s house. In the opening ‘video call’ describing her predicament, she openly admits to feeling depressed.

How Clean Is Your House was a deeply uncomfortable watch because the underlying difficulties experienced by its participants were so extraordinarily visible, and so resolutely ignored. This wasn’t a show about cleaning; it was a show about distress and rubbernecking. The whole thing was a grotesque mangle of serious problems, inappropriate solutions, and irrelevant blather about E. coli bacteria.

At the other end of the problem/solution scale was the BBC’s The House of Tiny Tearaways, in which clinical psychologist Dr Tanya Byron invited families to live in a childproof ‘home’ for a week so that their children’s behaviours could be observed and addressed (which almost always meant observing and addressing the parents’ behaviours). The Tiny Tearaways house looked creepily like the Big Brother house, and was similarly full of two-way mirrors and fixed cameras. And, like Big Brother, it gave a lot of space to its subjects; each week in the house was given six hours of transmission time.

I found Tiny Tearaways utterly addictive; I only meant to watch one episode, and instead binged an entire series of 18. You quickly become genuinely interested in the subjects (both children and adults), and when Byron intervenes to address something problematic, it is extremely cathartic. Byron did proper therapeutic work (including off-camera follow-up) with the families, and most of the parents seemed to gain a genuinely improved understanding of where they’d gone wrong. She stoutly defended the show on this basis: ‘the current glut of reality programming is all about social psychology [but] you have endless programmes with people who are deeply unqualified giving advice to incredibly vulnerable people.’

No: the real problem with Tiny Tearaways was that the children themselves could not possibly have consented to any of this. Inescapably, part of the enjoyment was of the ‘look at that little shit’ variety; tantrums had by other people’s children are always glorious, as are other people’s parenting mistakes. This mean-mindedness — of which, to be clear, I am absolutely guilty — is bad enough when turned on adults.

Early on one week, one of the ‘tearaways’ rips off her mic pack and runs away from it; she is pursued by her mother, who is anxiously explaining that she must wear it at all times (this has clearly been spelled out by the production team in no uncertain terms). This kid — who also quickly susses out the precise locations of all the cameras — has understood the deal, and she does not consent; and this is one piece of behaviour, curiously, that none of the adults in the house want to address. Later in the week, aware that she is being observed and judged in moments of distress, she sobs: ‘What’s this place called?’ ‘London,’ her mum says. ‘I hate London then,’ she cries: ‘I hate that lady [Byron], I hate everything in this house and I hate everything in London.’ In other words: she hates being on TV. Smart kid.

This mistake — of shoving unwary people, and most particularly kids, into the judgement panopticon — was largely generational. Gen X parents have been absolutely terrible at shielding our kids’ privacy in an age of ceaseless public self-revelation. Newly captivated by our own potential as content-production units, we mistook our children for wholly-owned subsidiaries. Millennial parents, in my experience, are much savvier about all of this. And people who had access to the social web in their teens are also much savvier about the audience; they understand that any personal content, however heartfelt or authentic or vulnerable, carries the risk of an outsized and hostile public response.

Perhaps the self-improvement/punishment bubble truly burst with the public disgrace of Jade Goody, who had won the third series of Big Brother in 2002. When she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2005, her racist behaviour towards the eventual winner (the actor Shilpa Shetty) — as well as the creeping suspicion that she was herself extremely damaged — seemed to prompt some reflection. ‘Ordinary’ people were slowly learning that these shows could be life-altering in a bad way. Twenty years later, the only people willing to take part in reality soaps are fame-seeking missiles, and the audience understands these shows as wholly artificial (not that that stops them judging). Our experiments in mass social psychology produced — as Dr Tanya would say — some real learning. It’s just that none of it has felt very improving.

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Of course, even before reality shows, there was still plenty of social rubbernecking on TV: