So-Called Reality

It's no secret that I love reality tv, and I've been getting my full lately. It's an excellent incentive to get through a day of reading parliamentary papers. I thought I'd share some of my favourites with you.

Celebrity Big Brother

This is the last year that Big Brother will be running here, and I think that's very sad. But I also recognise that I'll have a lot more free time when it's over. Big Brother here is not like it is in the US. I was used to three one-hour episodes a week, centered around specific events: Head of Household competition, nominations, power of veto, eviction, and repeat. Here, Big Brother is on every night with a one-hour episode condensing the entire previous day, edited chronologically with times, and shows day-to-day happenings and conversations as well as tasks and nominations. There are also talk shows devoted to discussing Big Brother, like Big Brother's Big Mouth, where the latest evictees, past housemates, and the family and friends of current housemates come on to discuss the latest events and defend the housemates' actions.

If that isn't enough for you, some days have live feeds running for a couple hours in the afternoon, where you watch the housemates sitting around chatting. Most often you're stuck listening to birds and other nature sounds when the microphone feeds are cut due to the nature of the conversations. There's also a live feed to the house overnight, so you can watch them sleeping. A little creepy. But it can be fascinating to watch the live feed of the celebrity household, and catch a glimpse of how Hollywood stars, musicians and other rich people live, when stuck in a small house that they have to share with 11 others, with limited groceries and everyone sharing a bedroom.

Celebrity Big Brother is only a month long, compared to the three months of Big Brother in the summer for celebrity-wannabes. Celebs from the current house include Sisqo of The Thong Song fame, born-again-Christian Stephen Baldwin, very cute Swedish DJ and singer Jonas (aka. Basshunter), cross-dressing cage fighter Alex Reid, and multi-millionaire Ivana Trump. It's been quite an interesting couple of weeks. We were sad to see Sisqo evicted, but were fine with all of the other evictions, and aren't quite sure who'll win it. Like everyone else probably did, we were thinking the winner would be Vinny Jones, footballer-turned-Hollywood movie star who's taken on the role of House Dad, but he's been acting pretty silly and huffy lately, so I think Dane, having completed a rediculous task of faking a nightmare, screaming like a girl and getting a consolatory hug, is now a good bet. We'll see this weekend! (although sadly I'll be away, so I'll have to avoid all news until I get a chance to watch the final!)

Weight-Loss Shows

I'll lump these together, because there's so many of them that follow the same general pattern:

• a host introduces you to fat people or fat families,
• follows them around to find out how they got fat,
• shocks them,
• puts them on a diet and gets them exercising,
• and finally sees what happens a couple months later.

Each one varies the pattern, shock tactics and subjects a tiny bit. For example, Generation XXL followed young kids who were morbidly obese, interviewing them and their parents, and has them taking part in a university study on weight loss and self-esteem. It's shot in a documentary style, and says that they will film followups through the years, to see how the children do. It's amazing how some of the parents refuse to listen to the doctors and the specialists' advice about diet.

Fat Families has a 'former fatty' for a host, who helps adult families with 3 or 4 morbidly obese family members lose weight over 10-12 weeks by teaching them about portion size, shocking them with medical truths, using a small video camera to show them the extent of their body fat, and replacing at least one couch in their living room with a treadmill or exercise bikes. After the 10 or 12 week session each gets a makeover, and then gets weighed and examined. We've also been watching a lot of The Biggest Loser and The Biggest Loser Australia, both of which we're at least a year behind on.

Bad Kid Shows

Here's another category of reality tv that's popular (and rather fun to watch). There's the standard ones, like Supernanny and WifeSwap. But there's many others that I'm only just beginning to discover. They too generally follow a prescribed path:

• We're introduced to a family with spoiled, lazy, disrespectful children
• The parents decide that things are going to change
• They attempt to enforce rules and discipline their children for the first time in their lives
• After some hiccups and tantrums, the household ends up much more peaceful
• If there is a follow-up, it's either been a really good change, or everything's gone right back to normal.

There are so many of these that I can't remember all their names, and the purpose of the shows vary as well. There's shows like Supernanny, that are meant to teach parents how to be better parents and have happier families. Bank of Mum and Dad has parents completely taking over their child's finances for a week, after the child admits how many thousands (or tens of thousands) of pounds they are in debt, in order to get the child back on track financially and curb their spending. Never Did Me Any Harm turns a twenty-first century household into one from the era of the parents' childhood (for example, the 70s), where the children must live, work, and play how their parents did when growing up (minus the physical discipline and unsupervised hours outside), in order to be grateful for what they have and gain new respect for their parents and the household rules.

Electric Dreams

Electric Dreams was probably my favourite reality show of the past year. It was a three-part series that took a family of five through the 70s, 80s and 90s a year a day over 30 days. Each episode was the start of a new decade. The house was transformed by decorators, and the only appliances and electronics in the house were those that were consistent with the decade. Rooms in the house were blocked off to reflect the size of the average British home in that decade, the central heating wasn't allowed on for the first few days, and one night in the 70s the power was cut to reflect the rolling blackouts of the year.

Every day brought new deliveries to the door of new electronics and appliances according to when the average household got certain items, like a vcr, microwave, stereo, dishwasher, washer/dryer, computer, video game system etc. It was also fun to see the outfits and hair, the vehicles, and how the size of the house changed through the decades. But it was also amazing to see how quickly the items began to flow in and out by the late-80s, and how the pile of obsolete items in the garage kept growing. We got particularly excited to see the different game systems (we were hoping for an NES, but a Super Nintendo arrived instead). Some of the year-specific tasks were pretty crazy, like having to cook an entire meal and bake using only the microwave. I would not have eaten any of that whole chicken, which they had to rub paprika onto since it couldn't brown in the microwave!