The Father Of Reality Tv Rails Against The Monster His Child Has Become; Has Not Read ‘Frankenstein’ Recently

Interesting little bit of “industry” drama happening in the UK at the moment: Paul Watson, who is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer who, it’s generally accepted, invented the reality television format with his documentaries The Family – and one we’ll all remember – Sylvania Waters, won a special BAFTA on the weekend for Outstanding Contribution to Television.

In his acceptance speech, he took a moment to open up a pretty amazing spray on the topic of reality TV (particularly gutsy considering he has made reality television, more or less, even if his efforts were a little higher up the viewing food-chain than Laddette To Lady or Wife Swap), calling it “sneering” and branding Simon Cowell a “bully”.

Here are some highlights from his op-ed piece in the Mail explaining his harsh words:

With fly-on-the-wall series like The Family (about the working class Wilkins who lived in Reading) and Sylvania Waters (about a raucous family who lived in a suburb of Sydney), I tried to show life as it was lived, warts and all.

My accounts were socio-political, unlike today’s shows, which are just circuses.

With my shows, I can even make some claim to have invented the idea of “reality TV”, but I no longer recognise what goes under that name.

Where I hoped then to inform, today, trashy, modern reality TV seeks merely to titillate, shock and gain notoriety by brutalising and denigrating its subjects. That is the extent of its intellectual vigour.

What now passes as reality TV is, of course, far from real. Such shows are as scripted and choreographed as any drama.

Their participants are scarcely real either. They are there because they want to be on the screen, have their 15 minutes of fame – and a lifetime of hell and regret afterwards.

People signing up for reality TV think they can handle themselves on camera. The production assistants who convince these so-called volunteers to appear know better. They only have to wind them up, and savour their angry outbursts.

Take shows such as Britain’s Got Talent. A deluded performer stands up and sings a few notes, until the judges hit the buzzers and pour scorn on this pathetic teenager or vulnerable old man.

He should never have got past the first audition. But the selectors know he will make everyone cringe, and the judges laugh and we laugh along with them.

Simon Cowell has made a fortune abusing and ridiculing people. Yes, it’s slick and clever, and for a short while mildly entertaining.

The nation laughs along with the hanging judges. But, in effect, they and we do scant more than belittle people unable to defend themselves.

Such shows parade people who can’t sing and are too often unprepossessing, in a business where there are no such things as unprepossessing pop stars.

I find that deeply offensive. The behaviour of the judges is little better than that of fashionable ladies touring Bedlam to titter at the mentally ill inmates.

And so on and so forth, for quite some time. Pretty damning, non?

However, we’re inclined to side with Watson – as car-crash viewing as Sylvania Waters was, it was closer to documentary than “reality” television as we now know it. Naturally the rubbernecking factor that makes reality TV work has always been a part of documentary filmmaking – particularly, as Watson puts it, the “socio-political” variety – but it’s the shaming/embarrassing slant of the current model that we find particularly unsavoury.

But what are your thoughts, gentle Defamer Australia family members? Is reality TV heading for its grave, or does your hate just make its dick harder? Or, you know, something like that.