10:36AM Clem Bastow | 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.
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