Attempt not to Vomit

I’ve been trying to write something about reality TV for a while now, but somehow it’s never quite come together. I could almost believe that the issue is rooted in my inability to pay attention to reality TV, but the fact is that I’ve been exposed to a copious amount to it. I imagine the relationship as being analogous to not having benefited from a nuclear reactor, but still falling victim to the fallout once it explodes.

My first interaction with reality TV was during the first (UK) Big Brother, back before it was its own TV channel, when all there was to watch was a daily breakdown of events in the house. It wasn’t the reality-defining event it later became, but the glimmer of it was there. It didn’t quite take though, my fascination with reality TV hadn’t been kindled quite yet. Another five or six years of Big Brother would pass before they’d manage to produce a show so deranged that I couldn’t maintain my disinterest.

Shattered was a work of dark and twisted beauty. Looking back on it, there’s nothing at all reasonable about it, the whole thing should never have happened. In these cases, I often try to envision the boardrooms in which shaky business decisions are made, a desk surrounded by middle-aged men trying desperately to keep fingers to pulses and coordinate enough focus groups to build a media phenomenon (and hopefully not break any laws along the way).

I try to imagine the conversation that led to shattered:

“You know John, I keep trying to come up with a new reality TV show, but I’m just so damned tired.”

“I know where you’re coming from James; there just aren’t enough hours in the day. You know, I only slept three hours last night? It’s insane.”

“I think you could have something there… there’s something…”

“I see it! I see it!”

“Picture this, stay with me here. We make Big Brother, right? Only none of the contestants are allowed to sleep, ever!”

“How many seasons do you think we’ll get before they declare us war criminals?”

I don’t want to ruin the honest inhumanity of Shattered by rendering it in stilted terms, so instead I’ll just copy out the description as it appears in Wikipedia:

Ten contestants were challenged with going without sleep for seven days while their actions were constantly monitored. Over the seven days the ten housemates had to endure daily performance testing and a variety of challenges. They were competing for a potential prize fund of £100,000 though, at any point, if a contestant closed their eyes for over ten seconds, then £1,000 was deducted from the prize fund.

It’s worth noting that the fine folks curating that article also point out that there was a requirement in place that contestant be allowed to sleep for one hour out of every twenty-four, as “without this the show would probably have been deemed too dangerous and too damaging to the health of those involved.

Now, where Big Brother passed me by, my attention was drawn to Shattered. There’s something about the impression that, at any moment, a person might keel over into unconsciousness that really shakes up tired old TV formulas. Highlights included:

1. Asking contestants to complete a series of increasingly complicated dexterity-centred tasks while they were essentially no longer in control of their limbs

2. Watching two people who, for all intents and purposes, haven’t slept in five days try to have a meaningful conversation/argument

3. Measuring the ability of people under those conditions to correctly gauge time (somewhere between poor and hilarious)

4. Watching the “sleep-off” race that ended it all, with players all sent to pleasant and warm beds only to be told that the last person to fall asleep would win

5. Waking up at three in the morning and knowing, without doubt, that there would be people on TV awake and in a state of gradual mental disintegration

Sadly, there’s been no word of a second season, for reasons I can’t fathom. Still, Shattered manages to come number two the reality TV show so strange, so utterly captivating and bizarre that I couldn’t force myself to watch it.

MTV’s I Want a Famous Face is, perhaps, the most intriguing thing I’ve ever seen. Again, I think back to our hypothetical boardroom surrounded by businessmen trying their very hardest to come up with something that will blossom into a long-term project with localised versions in countries all over the globe (and again, without breaking any laws).

Somehow, the best idea anyone had was I Want a Famous Face. I’m not even sure how that would occur, but I can only assume it came in roughly the same format as the idea above,

“You know John, I keep trying to come up with a new reality TV show, but I’m just so damned tired.”

“You do look tired James. Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Oh, I’ll be fine. I wish I looked like Brad Pitt, or one of those other celebrities.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I can see it now, we take you, make you into a body-double for Brad Pitt, work pays for the surgery and we televise the whole thing.”

“Well, I’m not crazy, James. You’d need to have a genuinely serious mental condition, desperately in need of treatment to want to entirely replace your own face with the face of a famous movie actor or pop star.”

“Or maybe… just maybe you could be young and lonely, a bit of an outsider, perhaps?”

“I like where you’re going with this, call the shareholders, tell them we’ve struck gold.”

I’d love to describe I Want a Famous Face from memory, but what remains of it in my memory is a twisted mixture of Face Off and MTV’s MADE, so the description I’d paint of it is likely something entirely incorrect. Again, we’ll defer to the Wikipedia description, because I’m not sure I can do it justice:

The show features young adults who undergo plastic surgery with the goal of looking more like a famous person. Celebrities that participants have chosen to look more like include Pamela Anderson, Jennifer Lopez, Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Ricky Martin and Victoria Beckham.

The show also features short spots on how plastic surgery can go wrong from people that have experienced poor health resulting from their attempts at plastic surgery.

Well, that’s about the size of it. At least with Shattered there was something to watch; it was a guilty pleasure, but I felt enraptured. Famous Face still feels like someone walked through a horror movie about a future meant to teach us a lesson, brought back their ideas… and somehow nobody thought, “Wow, we can’t let this happen, it’s grotesque.”

I suppose there’s some really interesting analysis to be made about the fact that I Want a Famous Face emerges in the context of the rise of reality television (during 2004-2005) and the fact that it features people who would otherwise, have been part of the show’s viewership (given their age and MTV’s target audience) ‘becoming’ the sort of celebrities who reality television was, in some ways, supplanting.

Sadly, I’m not the man to offer that sort of breakdown; all I can really say with any surety is that it still staggers me that either of these shows existed. For a very long time, I was convinced I had made Famous Face up. Other people seem not to remember it, and asking people tends not to yield too many results,

Hey, remember that time MTV thought it’d be a good idea to encourage kids to get plastic surgery so that they could look exactly like famous actors and singers? No? Did I read it in a novel about some sort of hideous, dystopian future?

For those of you who thought this was going anywhere, I’m sorry… it’s just that I needed to write this down.