Banana writes "
'Big Brother' TV Show and Death
by Banana
In discussing [1] the report of the 'Slaughter the Pig' demonstration against one of the participants in the 'Big Brother' TV 'reality' show (Sunday Times, 21 July 2002), I asked whether the demonstrators had been paid. I also asked what lies next in the development of this horrendous shit. In particular, I mentioned that one victim of a version of the show shown elsewhere in Europe "killed themselves shortly after being 'ejected'."
The fact that this man killed himself was mentioned in a cover article in the second section of today's 'Guardian' newspaper [2]. It will now become more widely known.
You can imagine the sort of thing the Guardian hack writes. It's the same with the related question of whether exposure to a huge amount of simulated violence and cruelty on TV has any detrimental effect on children. The 'issue' is admitted to exist, but of course, the fact that credibility is given to the point of view of the TV companies - and, as will doubtless shortly also be the case with 'reality TV', to running-dog academics - ensures that the question is answered as follows:
- no, there is 'not proven' to be any necessary ill effect;
- these victims had something wrong with them before they signed up (i.e. the 'losers' 'had it coming to them', e.g. Sinisa Savija, who died in Sweden - 'he was a refugee from Bosnia, you know')
- what is needed is for everything to become more and more efficient and for everything to be stamped and handled by accredited professionals.
'Researchers' wanting to draw conclusions in favour of this filth - i.e. to desist from identifying its real nature, purpose, and lines of development - will have little difficulty in getting money to 'fund' their 'work'. Similarly, living under high-voltage electricity cables or next door to a nuclear power station doesn't officially cause any damage to your health. Mr Scientist says more 'research' is needed, but the above is his bottom line. Don't get neurotic, Mr Punter!
It was the same story around 30 years ago with a show on UK TV called 'The Family', where the fact that some of the main participants went through a lot of unhappiness afterwards was blamed on their 'problems' prior to the show.
What is boxing about? The point of it is to knock the opponent out with a blow to the head, which, although many idiot spectators won't have realised it, can only be done by giving the opponent brain damage. Gladiatorialism is not just in the past.
'Reality TV' is a step forward. A big step forward. It is, to an extremely high degree, 'of its time'. The point is for the audience to identify with the pack in putting the boot in to the victim.
Of course, in the conditions of modern atomisation, the spectator is always a bit uneasy about whether he acts the same way as everyone else does once he's shut his front door. Yes there is the superficial immaturity of watching Big Brother to see whether two strangers have sex with each other - all justified in terms of bourgeois individual rights, of course, since the participants have 'chosen' to be watched, and presumably most spectators wouldn't climb up a ladder placed against their neighbour's bedroom window so as to watch *them* have a good fuck. But whilst grown-up spectators can have a bit of a laugh about this, sublimating their insecurity in an officially acceptable way, it's the victimisation that remains the main defining characteristic of the content of these shows.
This is not to forget to mention that the show desensitises spectators to the huge amount of surveillance to which almost everyone is now subject without having been asked to be subject to it.
The Guardian hack Esther Addley spews out a whole lot of shit she has received from the TV companies. Think about it. She tells them she's doing the article - do you think they send her some nattily-phrased PR lines about it, or not? She may not even have read the stuff before cutting and pasting it. To take an example: she writes that "most broadcasters argue that [participants'] psychological screening is much more rigorous than in the past".
Like yeah, right. There is already talk of a show in which people will have been chosen for their 'deepset psychological problems', and will be 'rewarded' with 'treatment' if they admit in front of the bloodthirsty idiot spectators that their 'problems' exist. She doesn't even mention this, the lazy fool, despite its being mentioned in the press only a few days ago.
The idea is to pick 'outcasts' and watch them squirm, and there are bound to be more deaths. At some point, the deaths will even start to be broadcast, I should have thought.
The psycho-fuckologists are 'expert witnesses'. They are true professionals. I.e. they'll work for whoever pays them the most. No prizes for guessing who that is.
It was ridiculous to read that Stephen Reicher, 'crowd psychologist' who's worked with the police, set up some sort of re-run of the 'infamous' Stanford Prison Experiment. The ludicrousness of this moron's protocols was evident when the 'prisoners' got together with the 'guards' and organised a 'breakout'. No Stephen you cretin that's not what it's supposed to be about. His experiment was a bit of piss, a bit of drinks money for him, compared to the much more psychologically and culturally sophisticated 'Big Brother' stuff. (I'd also note that practically no-one qualified to speak in the spectacle has noted one of the features of the Stanford Prison Experiment most evident to anyone without shit for brains, namely the extent to which 'good citizens' will inflict oppression and cruelty on others, if that's what they've been told to do by those in positions of authority, be it 'official' or 'professional').
The level of understanding among idiot spectators of what the Big Brother shows are all about is so low it makes me want to vomit. For instance, the phrase 'it's only a gameshow' is repeated wall-to-wall, in a sort of fashionably pseudo-ironic way which really means 'I'm too stupid to think about it, or even to get the phrases I use about it from my own cogitation rather than from my social superiors; and moreover, I repeat single phrases my social superiors have told me as if they were deep and meaningful and as if I were an amusingly semi-sceptical free individual for doing so'.
Of course it's a competitive 'game'. Of course it's a 'show'. Therefore yes it's a 'gameshow'. (Yeah and rain is bits of water that fall out of the sky, an observation which isn't much help when you're caught in a flood). Meanwhile, equally obviously, it is not in any way whatsoever 'only' a gameshow. Of course it isn't. Firstly, nothing is 'only' what it is. It is what it is only in relation to other things and ideas. Many retired people and others spend hours watching numbing TV gameshows such as 'Countdown'. How heartless is someone who says that they're 'only' watching a game-show and leaves it at that? Secondly, it is patently obvious that 'Big Brother' is a major cultural phenomenon. Media commentaries may refer to 'water-coolers'. This is an instance of the encouraged growth of American terminology in the UK, given a patina of 'hipness', although in fact very few workplaces in the UK actually have water-coolers. But it is accurate, to the extent that it means it is very widely discussed in those parts of people's days when they aren't working, sleeping, travelling to or from work, or engaged in sanctioned leisure activities.
Addley writes that UK State TV's 'director of editorial policy and most senior arbiter on ethical standards', fuckhead Philip Harding, "warned that the very high levels of stress experienced by participants in reality contests might one day lead to a death", and that "he was almost certainly unaware that he was three years too late". Fucking curious that, huh? Did his underlings who briefed him not even get hold of a clippings file? Duh!
Death is the point of these shows. Social death, actual death. There is a ratcheting-up of the desensitisation of the idiot spectators, as they watch 'people' who are supposedly 'representatives of the normal' put the boot in against victims. It's not the done thing to admit to their fellow discussants that they would even think of identifying with the victim, is it?, even if they did so the day before when the person in question wasn't yet the victim. And 'it could be you' next, Mr Spectator, and don't think people will identify with you once you've become the victim, either.
All the time, this horrendous identification with the bully occurs in the officially sanctioned form of a TV programme, and it's discussed or referred to by 'opinion formers' in almost parts of the celebrity spectacle - political, cultural, even legal (e.g. in the van Hoogstraten case) - as a pretty bit of cultural wallpaper, a 'now' thing. They call it 'reality TV' but in an example of a very 'contemporary' mindfuck, what they really encourage people to think is that whilst it's real, it's not 'really' real, or in any case, it doesn't 'really' matter, 'entertainment' just happens.
It's not just the 'Slaughter the Pig' demonstrators who are 'sicko'. It's not just the media people who almost certainly paid their fares and gave them a bit of drinks money on top who are sicko. It's not just the 'experts' the TV topdogs, the pschologists.
Major cultural trends are chosen, enforced, tweaked, nurtured. They do not happen by accident. Consumerism. The variety of different role models in the very long- running propaganda channel known as the Archers programme, broadcast on UK State radio. Want a view on something? Hey, your social superiors will oblige. They'll be there before you, cretin, they'll even give you a little bit of a range you can choose from as you fail to notice the assumptions shared by all the 'opinion' you're allowed to choose.
Big Brother is Nazi TV. There will be more deaths. This is not the bottom of the barrel.
And it's not just about death. Millions are kept alive to work and to breed. Bit by bit their minds are being killed off. Ring a bell? Ding-a-ling! Coo-ey!
Basic question: who does what to whom?; in Russian, 'kto kogo?'
banana
NOTES
1) My article is at: http://groups.google.com/groups?threadm=%24A7lGPAw A%24O9EwKB%40borve.demon.co.uk and also at: http://tinyurl.com/v8v>.
2) Esther Addley's Guardian article is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 468918,00.html>. Don't get the idea that the Guardian is 'liberal' - they are currently running a 'poll' where morons can vote for 'who they want to win Big Brother':
http://media.guardian.co.uk/bigbrother/table/0,768 8,762401,00.html>
