Down the Back of the Couch: The Problem with Big Brother

Poor George Orwell must be turning in his grave. Two concepts from his dystopian novel 1984, have been mauled and distorted beyond recognition to form two of the naffest TV programmes, namely Room 101 and the interminable Big Brother.

So what’s wrong with Big Brother? Well, for starters, doesn’t it now just stink of desperation as the producers  seek to wring every last bit of advertising revenue from a tired old format that never lived up to its promise? Each season the choice of contestants gets  more bizarre and tasks become more degrading in a attempt to boost the flagging ratings. Isn’t it just all a bit sad that this is what passes for entertainment today? Once billed as a ‘social experiment’, yeah right! It’s a delusion to suggest that this so-called ‘reality TV’ programme tells us anything about human social behaviour in real life, except how people behave in the Big Brother house. That’s it!

If you want to find out about social behaviour then get yourself a social psychology book. It’s all in there. You can real about the Obedience to Authority experiments of Stanley Milgram, the Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo and the inspirational work of Jane Elliot with her Blue Eyes / Brown Eyes experiment. And there’s so much more. A great deal of the material to be found in the humble social psychology book gives us real insight into why we behave in the way we do, how we behave in strange situations and why. Big Brother has added nothing apart from  maybe footnote here and there.  Reality TV has never had anything to do with reality.

So what exactly does Big Brother offer? Well, it tells us that people desperate for celebrity status will do almost anything to achieve it. It also tells us, that programme makers can broadcast people sleeping using night vision cameras some members of the audience will stay up into the early hours in the vain hope that someone will snore or better still ‘let one off’ and startle the other house mates! Oh how we’ll laugh! It’s also the modern day equivalent of Bedlam, where the programme makers create insane situations and people behave insanely.What a surprise.  In the past, a ‘gentleman’ would take a lady out for a nice fish supper then off to the lunatic asylum to laugh at the mad people. What foreplay! Nowadays, you can just order a pizza and stay at home and watch the mayhem from the comfort of your own couch. You can also vote on the fate of the inmates, which is a great way for the producers to get the audience involved and make a lot of money. It’s perhaps a sad indictment that many people are more likely to vote for ‘reality TV’ than they are at elections.

Much has been made of the ‘shrinks‘ who advise on the show stringent psychological screening process for contestants, but let’s have a reality check here. ‘Psychologists’ or ‘counsellors’ or ‘therapists’ (we are never clear which) band together to make sure that the contestants are psychological sound enough to undergo psychological distress. Surely that’s a conflict of interest for any psychologist. Maybe there’s a temptation to let a few borderline cases through to spice up the show a little. Watching the predictable meltdowns each and every year, it’s clear that some vulnerable people do ‘slip through the net’. Maybe, the best qualified shrink associated with Big Brother, is the shrink in ratings.

Now hands up, I confess,  I have been involved with a spin-off of the show, appearing on Big Brother’s Little Brother (many moons ago). It was my first live TV appearance and an amazing learning experience. I was treated very well by all involved on the show. They were all very nice people and a pleasure to work with. The mistake I made was believing that the show wanted any real psychological input. The sad fact is that ‘psychobabble and pseudoscience’ just sound a lot sexier, especially as there’s no issue with making up quirky theories to fit the events. And yes, I have to agree with colleague Petra Boynton that the producers have settled on a motley crew of analysts. I just wouldn’t want to be sitting on the same couch with many of them, much in the way that any reputable trades person would want to be seen to endorsing the kind of cowboys who appear on consumer programme Watchdog.

Occasionally a suitably qualified commentator does some manage to fly in below the  radar and offers some  insightful comments and may even, occasionally,  sneak in a bit of psychology. However, they are in the minority, as a number of regulars are have no qualifications whatsoever, although they claim to be psychologists and one even claims to be a psychiatrist. Now a psychiatrist has a medical degree but having checked the website of this particular BBLB regular all I can find that remote applies to anatomy is the ability to walk in high heels!  I suppose the equivalent is saying you are a surgeon, just because you own a craft knife. The sad thing is that instead of any real psychology getting out there, we get to hear utter drivel. It’s dressed up to sound significant but is more often than not just stating the bleedin’ obvious.

If we think about it, there have been ten seasons of Big Brother with what, 12 people per show (120 in all)? Now this tiny sample is in no way selected to represent the general population, just in the likelihood that the people will ‘kick off’ or ‘crack up’. So, in terms of the psychology of social behaviour in general, it tells us virtually nothing. It doesn’t even tell us very much at all about the people on the inside, except how they cope in a particular season in the Big Brother house. Again, not an every day occurrence and in no way generalizable to the real world.

One spin off show, Big Brother on the Couch, offers the kind of detritus usually found stuck down the back of the couch! We are served mainly crumbs of psychobabble largely from a bunch of phonies and quacks who engage in meaningless discussions about manipulated clashes and disputes in a make-believe house full of self-absorbed people, duped in to believing that this could be their big break, and placed under psychological stress for the amusement of others. What does this say about us? Even George Orwell didn’t dream it would get this bad! Karl Marx once described religion as ‘the opium of the masses’ but perhaps today it’s the cult of reality TV.

Links:

• Dr Petra Boynton on Big Brother Ten (BB10)
• Britain’s Got Some Thinking To Do
• Has Britain Got a Talent for Spite
• Big Brother’s Job Centre Easter Egg Hunt

The Apprentice: Getting Fired Up About ‘Traditional’ Homophobia

The producers of The Apprentice are apparently considering how much of a discussion of homosexuality and homophobia to include in forthcoming episodes for fear of offending people. Maybe that’s a step n the right direction but the kind of language used to discuss the whole issue is very telling.

In a task to rebrand the ‘traditional’ UK seaside town of Margate one gay male contestant suggested it should be rebranded a gay resort. This led to a rather uneducated reply from female contestant that she wouldn’t want her son to meet a homosexual man. Chances are her son has probably encountered more than one gay man in his six year life with no ill effects. The idea that gay man corrupt children is not as the show’s insider termed it, ‘traditional’. It’s just ignonance of the facts. Using ‘tradition’ for excusing homophobia is as relvant as referring to racism as ‘traditional’. According to the so-called traditional view ‘Gypsies supposedly abduct the children, Homosexuals supposedly molest them and Black people  supposedly eat them!’.  It’s not traditional, it’s ignorance. (I’ve added lots of ‘supposedlies’ just to make sure that no one ‘traditionally’ quotes out of context!)

On the subject of tradition, the term ‘homosexual’ is used as a neutral term, whereas infact t was first coined (in the late 1800s)  as a term for a particular kind of sexual impotence, referring to the passive partner in a sexual encounter. It was only in the early 20th Century tha he term was extended to the active partner. Science inevitably goes through stages of relevant ignorance too.

Whenever, faced with these kind of debates, it’s useful to exchange contexts for the comments. So what if the offending comment had referred to someone of another skin colour or another religion? What if a contestant in The Apprentice had implied fear of cannibalism as justificationb for racial segregation? And before we get ino the old discussion of whether gayness is learned, inherited or chosen, couldn’t we ask the same questions about religion? It’s not relevant here. The issue is whether it’s`acceptable to justify prejudice with ignorance or educate ourselves about subjects where our only knowledge base is folk tales and ‘fairy’ stories? The psychological evidence tells us that, ‘tradionally’, there is a connection between racism, sexism and homophobia.

So should the producers air the offending discussion and be damned? Perhaps we need to make up our minds, and have reasoned discussions about homophobia fits into the whole mechanism of prejudice. We’ll have made some progress when we say ‘informed discussion you’re hired’ and ‘ignorance, you’re fired’!

Links:

Homophobia in The Apprentice

His Dark Homophobia

The Great ‘Typical Alpha Male’ Delusion

Commenting on Barack Obama‘s trip to the UK, it was interesting to hear a journalist refer to the President Obama as ‘the typical alpha male, laid back and relaxed’ which is exactly not what an alpha male is supposed to be!

The alpha male (in animal groupings) usually has to fight off aggressively his ‘young-buck’ challengers so that he can continue to shag anything that moves. Er. . . I’m not sure that this President would be too pleased with that assessment.  Also, imagine the alpha male in an animal grouping saying to the young aggressive contenders ‘Chill out! Relax’ before getting his head or antlers torn off.

Mr Obama may well be the most powerful man on the planet, politically, but thankfully he possess none of the typical alpha male qualities. When we use the term ‘alpha male’ to refer to ‘powerful men’ we are more or less saying they are ‘bastards’ in the symbolic sense of the word. When men refer to themselves as ‘the alpha male’ they are usually dickheads or bullies or both! Being the ‘alpha male’ is never a compliment! It usually refers to a thoroughly unpleasant bloke who doesn’t have enough friends to tell him that his people skills stink!

So please, just let go of this same-old  tired  ‘alpha male gender stereotype BS’ that we heard too many times before. Instead, let’s focus on the best of our human qualities of compassion, understanding, leadership and the ability to listen to other viewpoints without seeking to crush them. . . just as Mr Obama seems to be doing in the early stages of his presidency. We need models of exemplary human behaviour to aspire to, not lazy-ass ‘stock phrases’ from journalists who don’t appear to know their ‘alpha males’ from their elbows!

Deja Moo: Heard that bull before!

I like the term ‘deja moo’ (from the Urban Dictionary) and have adopted it as one of the categories for my blog.

It’s used whenever you get a sense that you’ve heard that BS before – and most likely, here, will be linked to gender stereotypes and any other baseless pop-psychology, ‘old chestnuts’ that keep ‘doing the rounds’ largely unchallenged.