Real New Formats of Television: Looking at Big Brother

Abstract

Recent ‘reality TV’ formats, such as Channel Ten's Big Brother, exhibit many features of ethnography, and attend to ‘real’ aspects of human behaviour in ways reminiscent of experimental psychological simulations of institutional roles conducted in the 1960s. Reality TV integrates and re-mixes genres of observational cinema and of game shows and situation comedy, purporting to reveal the very nature of people stripped of their conventional social support and competing for biological or social rewards. Yet these formats construct tight, artificial recontextualisations of existing social practices (around sex, courtship, work). Controlled, scripted games are therefore played out which beg the question of how ‘naturally’ people do (or should) behave, both in ‘reality’ and on television.