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Victims of reality tv

Matt Warren

For a few, brief weeks their names steal headlines and capture a nation’s imagination. But after tucking into bowls of maggots and canoodling with their housemates in exchange for a momentary glimpse of celebrity, the lives of many "reality TV" show contestants are left in tatters when they finally make the bleak journey back to their day jobs.

Channel 4 received 50,000 applications for Big Brother 2. Watched by millions, many of the contestants hope their appearance will put them on the path to stardom. But as prizes grow and participants are forced to think of more innovative ways of winning voter sympathies, reality TV is becoming a cut-throat business. For many, dreams of celebrity descend into the stuff of nightmares.

Dr Cynthia McVey of Glasgow’s Caledonian University recently discovered that many contestants in reality TV programmes also felt like victims when the film stopped rolling.

As an official adviser to the BBC’s Castaway series, McVey has had first-hand experience of the impact reality TV shows have on their contestants. She told the annual conference of the British Psychological Society : "Many of the contestants were unhappy with their exposure on reality television.

"People should first consider the effect it may have on them and their families."

Interviewing each of the 36 castaways, she discovered that most were upset by the way they had been represented, and two were "deeply distressed" by how their families had been treated.

Responses included: "Tabloids indulge in character assassination", and, "The TV company is in total control of the way you are portrayed."

They are sentiments shared by Uzma Sheik, the 30-year-old nursery owner recently voted off the Survivor island. "I had had enough," she says. "I was not prepared for the bitchiness and slagging of each other. Reality television shows the vicious side of people and they just become vultures for the money."

Series 7: The Contenders, which opened in cinemas last week, offers a bleak view of the future of reality TV. The film follows the fortunes of six contestants who are chosen by a government lottery to take part in a new breed of gameshow. Each issued with a gun and a cameraman, the participants are given only one goal: to kill the other five contenders.

"When I started writing the film in 1995, the idea of a TV show where people kill each other was a pretty wild concept," explains writer-director, Daniel Minahan, "but today it doesn’t seem so far-fetched."

While a The Contenders spin-off is unlikely to appear on BBC schedules for a few years yet, TV regulators are becoming more concerned that contestants will stop at nothing to win the sympathies of a fickle public. On-screen misdemeanours may be a quick-fix for falling viewing figures, but it is the contestants who are left carrying the can.

In a contest that is becoming increasingly political, Big Brother’s Penny Ellis, a 33-year-old English teacher, has made her manifesto absolutely clear. Reportedly claiming that she is prepared to have sex with another contestant, she was canoodling with fellow housemate Paul Clarke within a week and later inadvertently allowed her towel to slip off in the shower, granting the viewers their first glimpse of full-frontal nudity in the house.

But Penny is apparently becoming the victim of her own strategy. After being threatened with the sack by her school’s increasingly anxious headmistress, Ellis is now facing eviction, nominated for the boot along with weepy hairdresser, Helen Adams. As newspapers, politicians and viewers’ groups all express their disapproval, Ellis’s shot at stardom appears to be falling well short of the mark.

But even as Ellis packs her bags prior to her potential eviction this Friday, the revelations keep on coming. She has now also admitted to being abused as a child, suffering from childhood anorexia and, most recently, dating four over-sixties on the trot. With the tabloids quick to pick up on the revelations and her already shaken boss looking on in horror, her day job must be looking increasingly untenable as well.

And it hasn’t been much better for Welsh contestant, Helen. Her mother, Liz, may have come out of the woodwork to protect her daughter’s reputation, attributing her shortcomings to dyslexia, but the "angelic" 23-year-old found herself at the sharp end of the tabloids on Sunday, when the People exposed her teenage sex sessions with a "thug", who had been convicted of assault. When she later went to visit him in prison, they claimed, she wasn’t even wearing her knickers.

Even hat-wearing Big Brother joker, Paul Ferguson - aka Bubble - has been "exposed" by the tabloids. Playing the part of the fun-loving prankster on camera, Bubble also fell foul of the People, who branded him "a drug-snorting thug, who viciously bullied two childlike, handicapped men", before challenging the "heavily-pregnant pub landlady who tried to protect them".

And as contestants jostle for the upper hand and newspapers compete for their own slice of the pie, digging up past indiscretions and pursuing the participants’ families, few are pleased with the public image they are left with when the credits roll.

Popstars’ Darius became a national figure of fun, the original Big Brother’s Melanie Hill was forced to go into hiding and Chloe Price, who dates Hear’Say’s Danny Foster, spent April fending off hate-mail. Worse still, Mark Hobrough could only watch in horror as it emerged that his wife, Charlotte Hobrough had been indulging in steamy sex sessions with fellow Survivor, Adrian Bauckman.

Even Vanessa Feltz, who herself exploited the market for reality TV with her own talkshow, left the Celebrity Big Brother house in emotional tatters after millions of viewers witnessed her break down and scrawl graffiti over the kitchen table.

But the contestants and their families are not the only victims of the meteoric rise of reality TV. Angered by the growing number of programmes using "real people", instead of actors, Equity last month announced that it planned to take industrial action.

ITV is about to launch its new series, Soapstars, a Popstars-style fly-on-the-wall programme aimed at making a soap with everyday folk, and the actors’ union claims programme makers are gradually replacing professional performers with amateurs, hungry for their 15 minutes of fame.

But as the next batch of "real" people eagerly line up to take a very public fall and programme-makers promise bigger prizes for bigger scandals, things can only get worse.

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