So 'Big Brother' is in town again...

This seems a good time to look at the first Australian 'Big Brother' - the one that gave us concepts like the bum dance; "the dancing doona"; unknown numbers of babies called "Zac"; a new 'Neighbour's' star; and a gay man, sometimes talking about sex, but just generally being a nice person, on prime time television at 7pm every weeknight for almost two months… not to mention the phenomenon that was Sarah Marie.

Oh yes, and the guy that won. Ben. Yeah..
 

What's in a name?

Now I hope this time around we don't get the endless sniping over whether it should be allowed to call itself "reality tv"… because it's edited, you see, so it's not real. And because people are performing, so they're not being real.

Personally, I like the name "reality tv" because that's the whole thing about reality: it is performed, and it is edited.

We are constantly constructing and reconstructing our identities and roles by the way we relate to others and the way we perform ourselves within these relationships. (See Judith Butler for instance on the performance of gender.(1) )

And editing, I would argue, is precisely the distinction between what a Lacanian would designate "The Real" and what we tend to think of as "reality" (2) . Or between what quantum physicists might refer to as "the quantum soup" that we inhabit, and the world that we see -- that is, the events we have made sense of, and turned into reality (into something we can operate within) by a whole complex process of filtering and interpretation.

In reality, we are always focussing on some things rather than others, always ordering things in narratives. We remember particular moments and not others, replay them in our minds over and over, and sometimes we splice them in our thoughts with other events, both to give meaning to those new events, and to interpret and reinterpret the old ones.

We do this as individuals, and we do it as a culture. In what we call history, for instance; or in the social definition of "news".

So yes it’s manipulated, but rather than rejecting this kind of tv (on some kind of moral grounds - as if other tv isn’t manipulated) hopefully we can use it as a site for discussions about this..

(..And what a fantastic teaching tool it could be if we could get kids to stop talking about whether or not x is nice and look a bit more at how x is presented.)
 

Being There (or as Mr Gardiner says: "I like to watch")

I'm proud (although I'm not sure if that's the right word..) to say I was a 'Big Brother' watcher right from the start --and these days the start isn't the first episode, the start is the 'Making of..' special. And I watched every single episode, every single Uncut version, Saturday night review and of course, every single Sunday eviction. Needless to say, like the 'Simpsons', 'Big Brother'-- if you want to get the whole experience -- requires a video recorder..

Not just because this is an awful lot of television per week to catch, but because the only way to really get it is to be obsessive about it. And that's what the rewind and pause buttons are for.

I get annoyed by those who say nothing happens in it, that it's boring. This judgement -- like the one that says that reality tv is bad because it will push us to further and further extremes of voyeurism until we'll be watching murders on tv -- usually comes from those who don't watch it. They might glance at it now and then as they walk through the room while their children are watching it, or even sit through an occasional episode. But they don't watch it.

Bird watchers might understand what I mean.

So rather than a sign of a terrible demise in viewing standards, you could look at it as evidence that we are becoming more subtle, more refined in out tastes. Able to enjoy, for instance, the pure performance art of Sarah Marie counting and arranging a row of stones on a sidetable: the beauty of the ordinary; and of what is not-often considered beautiful.

There are no guns, no murders, no car chases, no doctors or patients with exotic diseases, no lawyers battling it out in expensive suits and immaculate hairstyles. And yet Channel ten is investing another five million dollars in it, and advertisers are lining up for their thirty second slots.
 

Participatory tv / tv as event (but is it art?)

One of the things I found so interesting about the 'Big Brother' concept was its creative and inventive use of television. Specifically, the way it operated as a media event with a whole host of other events surrounding and informing and altering it.

…The webpage with chat lines, forums, and 24hr surveillance (3); the one hour specials reviewing and commenting on it each week; the voting system; the external press coverage which was constantly fed back into the mix; the fashion shoots and night club appearances as the evictees came out and told their stories; and so on and on.

Within this festival of events were a range of ways to participate if you were so inclined.

The voting thing, for instance. Now I've heard people knock the significance of viewers being able to influence the direction of the show by casting votes each week to evict one of the nominated ones. And I agree that this doesn't make it "democratic" or "participatory" in any absolute (or even terribly deep) sense -- individuals' means of participating and being heard vary enormously and there are far too many other forces, including underlying financial pressures, that have greater influence in more complex and subtle ways… But if the ability to cast a vote for (effectively) one of two political parties every three years is worth fighting wars over, then I don't think this aspect of the series should be too readily dismissed.

After all, democratic and participatory are relative terms, and in expanding the ways that the technology of television can be used -- by providing a range of forums in which to become involved and effectively speak back to the producers while it is in production, and to speak to (and influence) other viewers outside your own friendship circle -- it is a notable development in that ever changing and increasingly complex system we call "the media".

As the British writer Jon Dovey has described it, the set-up provided a new kind of public-space: a "relationship laboratory" (4). Family viewing of a different kind, with each night the opportunity to discuss a whole range of questions about intimate social and household behaviour, gender issues, sexuality, values and so on. And through the widening out of these discussions into the datasphere, providing a fascinating (and often disturbing) barometer of community attitudes.

In the light of recent political debates (and concurrent ones) about asylum seekers, it was also interesting to see the impact and importance of leadership (good and bad) in these discussions: and the power of slogans (Lisa is a fencesitter, for instance, and thus should be evicted; or Johnny the backstabber.)
 

'BB' as a Media Virus

In the long haul, the success of 'Big Brother' depended on its ability to become an ongoing Media Event  -- but in doing so it also became what Douglas Rushkoff describes as a Media Virus (5).

A virus we know as something which is able to pass through the protective barriers of a host body by mimicking the latter's own characteristics -- by appearing to be safe, or more of the same. But once inside, if there are weakened cells, the virus can attach itself to these, replicating itself and substituting its own code, causing further weakness of the whole body and often serious damage.

Rushkoff uses this as a metaphor to describe how subversive ideas, or values that threaten the pervasiveness of the dominant culture, can sometimes get under the skin, so to speak; or get inside like a Trojan Horse, and break loose.

So 'Big Brother' is allowed entry (into our living rooms, into significant amounts of mass media space) because it looks like a charming and fascinating gift; and basically because the media can never resist talking about itself.

The weakened cells that allow it to take root -- and that make control from the top, or from any presumed centre, so difficult -- are our very concerns about the interface between public and private, about surveillance and censorship, about the consistency of public lives and private ones, the power of the media, the nature of identity, and of "reality".

For 'Big Brother' is not just about the surveillance of private individuals by a public “eye”, it is also about the surveillance of public institutions by private individuals and by communities of viewers.

I don't wish to downplay the enormous amount of control and influence of the people who set up the parameters of the game, selected the contestants, and edited the daily twenty minutes that went to air. But the difference with 'Big Brother' is that what would normally end up on the cutting room floor (so to speak) is now out there in the public arena (on the 24 hour web-cam) able to be scrutinised by the dedicated, and commented on in a public forum. It is as if there were an unknown number of viewers with them in the editing room, watching their decisions.

Furthermore due to the program's own needs -- to be entertaining, to create a spectacle, to garner publicity, and thus to tap into and make use of a range of media -- the results of the experiment when unleashed (once it became a 'complex system' in the mathematical sense) were to a significant extent always going to be unpredictable (6).
 

Chaos theory in action

When Sarah-Marie says, "I woke up this morning in love with my tummy again. I love my tummy sometimes, it’s so big and soft…" (and fashion designer Wayne Cooper says he would like to dress her - he who usually only dresses sizes eight and ten), something very unusual for prime time commercial television is happening (7).

This is a single individual, the kind of person who doesn’t usually participate in media and opinion making, having a huge effect on body image attitudes -- challenging in quite a powerful and effective way conventional views not only of what is acceptable and unacceptable in terms of female body size, but what is lovable and unlovable, even by the self.

Of course 'Big Brother' could have edited this out (or simply "left it out"), could have made Sarah Marie look unlovable or less lovable (8) (as seemed to be happening in the first week or two); but 'Big Brother' needs good talent, good entertainment, and Sarah Marie saying this gives it -- so it’s the form's need for novelty and surprise that enables Sarah Marie to enter the gates and have her say… in a very subversive way.

Likewise with Johnny. A gay man to spice up the mix --  not a political decision, simply in this case an entertainment one, as 'Big Brother' is dependant for its success on its ability to create sparks, to make news. So Johnny gets to be part of the house… and to talk about his life, his ethics, his friends, his sexuality, day after day. And we get to watch - whether we like it or not. And the very high vote against Johnny as soon as he was nominated indicates that a lot of people out there did not like it. Did not, for instance, like watching a young man like Blair enter the house as your usual mildly homophobic heterosexual footy player from the suburbs (the non-obsessives may have missed his early sotto voce comment about 'poofs'), and then gradually over many weeks, surprise himself by forming a deep friendship with an openly gay man. Culminating in the extraordinary scene of Blair crying in the emotional episode when Johnny is evicted; saying afterwards in the diary room how much he admired Johnny, what a truly great role model he was (9).

Forget the Gulf war. This is the kind of history I'd like to watch. And not just watch, this is the kind of history I want to participate in.
 

Series two..

Will I watch it again?

You might as well ask the Gulf War obsessives if they'd watch another Middle East war if it was televised.

I'd like to think that one is enough, that I've done my time in reality tvland, and can leave this next series up to those who scoffed and ridiculed and turned up their snobby noses at it last time (and then began to tune in more and more towards the end as they realised that this was a total event happening here that they were missing out on)…

If you'd asked me a month ago, I'd have said definitely not. But having watched my third series of 'Temptation Island' (and at least they speak English in this one (10) )... and as the date for the launch of the new 'Big Brother' looms closer.. well, maybe I'll just have a little peek.. now and then… Just a taste…

I am curious to see how well immunised we've become as a nation to some of the more radical content; and how the new secondseries inmates manage to make up for the lack of innocence. The fact that in the first series the gang really had no idea of how large an audience they had each night and how much press their every move was generating, and hence their shock when they emerged, was of course all part of the charm, and it's hard to think of what might replace it. But chances are, something will…

And being a witness for that something -- if it does emerge  -- is what it's all about..

After all, Big Brother is watching, but we’re watching too (11).
 
 

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1. See http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm for an interview with Butler by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, London, 1993. Full version originally published in Radical Philosophy 67 (summer 1994).

2.  For instance, Slavoj Zizek in Looking awry: an introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1992, c1991) illustrates this beautifully in his reading of a Hollywood movie in one of the early chapters.

3.  A major change with the second series of ''Big Brother'' is that this 24 hour webcam will no longer be free, but available only to those who pay a fee.

4.  Jon Dovey, "Towards emotional literacy: Reality TV as relationship laboratories." Panel session (with Derek Paget and Jane Roscoe) at the Visible Evidence IX Conference, Brisbane, 2001.

5.  Douglas Rushkoff, Media Virus. NY: Ballantine Books, 1994/6. Especially pp 28 ff.

6.  For an excellent interview with Rushkoff about this concept see Roundtable Interview, December 21, 1994.
'BB' is the only successful Media Virus in Rushkoff's terms that I can actually think of in Australia. There have been many media circuses or events (eg the brouhaha over the two Helens a few years ago - Demidenko/Darville's Hand That Signed the Paper, and Helen Garner's The First Stone) but none of these seem to have had the subversive impact of a true virus. If anything, the Helen debates seemed in the end to merely reinforce the host body attitudes to multiculturalism and sexual harassment claims. It could be that our population simply isn't large enough to enable minority views to get the kind of momentum up that can generate a home-grown version of, for instance, 'The Simpsons', or of the Rodney King episode. And this is what, to me, makes BB so fascinating and worthy of study: by piggy-backing onto the attention generated by the overseas versions, our own BB was able to build into a virus fast enough to take hold and develop its own identifiably local effects.
If readers can think of other successful Australian viruses, I'd love to hear from them.

7.  It would be hard to imagine anyone scripting these lines for a soapie or drama serial character for instance. Another favourite Sarah-Marie-ism was her response when Grettel said, "We all loved you because you would lie next to Gemma beside the pool wearing your bikini." Sarah Marie replied: "Well we've both got the same bits, mine are just bigger."

8.  In a question and answer session at the Visible Evidence conference (op cit) late last year (2002), Peter Abbot, the Australian Big Brother (executive producer) was insistent that the role of the BB editors was insignificant in terms of how people came across to viewers. His argument was that they could only work with what each person gave them to work with, and thus they couldn't make a person appear to be bad who wasn't and so on.  Interestingly, on the same panel Steve Thomas in a paper titled "Private lives, public exposure: Ethical dilemmas in the personal documentary" discussed how viewers of his film, exploring a particular episode of his family history, would probably come away thinking of his mother as grim, humourless and unkind; whereas a different narrative would literally tell a different story.

9.  And Blair wasn't the only one crying, both on and off screen. Watching this footage a friend (Daryl Dellora) commented that it was like watching the Gestapo taking him away; and this to me was the point: we cried not just because we'd miss him, but because we knew that this was prejudice being enacted in front of us, and we were unable to do anything about it. Johnny was voted off not because he was "Johnny Rotten" (by this time the JR campaign had been pretty much exposed as at best a silly misunderstanding of his form of niceness, at worst a malicious one), but because he was homosexual, and a lot of people out there did not want to watch (and have the nation watching) a good homosexual on tv every night, and especially watch his influence on a young heterosexual man.
    Also note that under normal circumstances the Johnny not-Rotten but thoroughly nice person stories of his friends would have had little chance of getting mass-media exposure…  but in this instance, their stories were scoops, just the kind of news that the organism needed for fodder. So Johnny's friends were invited on to the Saturday night program to give their views even though these were deeply contradictory of what the program itself seemed to be saying and doing to Johnny's image. That is, BB couldn't help itself, it couldn't resist having the opposite view put.

10.  Authentic accents are one of the joys of Reality TV, but I needed a translator for the British series.. (or subtitles perhaps).

11.  And the Big Brother website, for those interested in joining in, is at http://www.bigbrother.iprimus.com.au. 'Big Brother' begins on Channel 10 on April 7th.     

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This essay is copyright Beth Spencer, March 2002.

An extract first broadcast on Radio National's Life Matters on April 4th 2002.
www.bethspencer.com/BigBrother.html