As the MP George Galloway has discovered, reality TV can be most unforgiving. Galloway’s schoolboy error, as his fellow MP Ann Widdecombe pointed out on the Today programme, was failing to set clear boundaries. In the context of Widdecombe’s own reality TV career, this meant refusing to swim on Celebrity Fit Club. “I love swimming,” she said. “But I’m certainly not going to let six million people see me in my bathing costume.”
For Galloway to have established such protective boundaries would have required a degree of self-knowledge; and self-knowledge, along with humility and consideration (as Chantelle said: “What’s his party called — Respect? They should put three little letters in front of that: d, i, s.”), is not something the formerly gorgeous George is familiar with.
Galloway’s predicament may delight the Westminster village and the wider public, but it also usefully illustrates the dangers of messing with reality TV. It was his arrogance that did for him, the arrogance of thinking that anyone but Endemol, the makers of Big Brother, would profit from the relationship.
Looking back on the trajectory of reality TV, those Nineties tabloid tales of Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and his Changing Rooms horrors seem as innocuous as Andy Pandy. At least all that Llewelyn-Bowen’s disgruntled contestants had to deal with were a few bits of badly glued MDF. As reality TV has broken new frontiers (or plumbed new depths), so the stakes have risen.
The women who subject themselves to gruelling plastic surgery for programmes such as Ten Years Younger and Extreme Makeover would argue that it is they who are benefiting by receiving thousands of pounds’ worth of top treatments free. But they don’t see themselves as we do, out cold on the surgeon’s table, carved up like so much mutton to feed the ratings, the advertisers and, of course, the viewers, whose appetite for visceral suffering seems insatiable.
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In truth, if you have any self-esteem, it is probably best to avoid reality TV altogether. In a reality TV show the contestants form the core of the entertainment, and the format will always be designed to push them to the limit: to build them up and knock them down, to induce heightened emotions and, if possible, to secure the perfect shot for syndication (in Galloway’s case, the imaginary saucer of milk).
If the stakes for the individual are high, where reality TV meets art they can be even higher. For art to succeed as more than just entertainment it must safeguard both its authenticity and its credibility. The needs of the television format must yield, at least partially, to the integrity of the work. And that is a difficult balance.
In America, of all places, such a feat is being attempted. With the help of Jeffrey Deitch, a colourful New York art dealer and founder of Deitch Projects, eight would-be artists, chosen from more than 400 hopefuls, have each received the funding and the space to create new work. The resulting show, Artstar, will be shown in June on Gallery HD. But don’t get too excited: Gallery HD is an arts channel with a frankly tiny subscription of 30,000.
Nevertheless, the show is by all accounts a first: a reality TV format that doesn’t deliberately compromise the participants — or their subject. There is no clear “winner” (although the artist judged to have produced the best work will get a solo show at one of Deitch’s New York galleries); and the eight artists have not been living together, hothoused in an environment designed to create personal conflict. No, any hilarity, intentional or otherwise, will be entirely of their own making.
If it works, it has great potential to bring real art to a wider audience. Provided, of course, that the show can make the leap to a more accessible channel.
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Here in Britain we will just have to continue to make do with Rolf Harris painting the Queen and Carol Smillie persuading Coronation Street stars to pose in the nuddie for ITV’s A Brush with Fame. Some hope rests with Channel 4, whose Operatunity did at least show respect for the work in question and whose current You Make Me project appears to be a genuine attempt to create six works of serious public art. But the results of that experiment won’t be revealed until the autumn of 2007. Perhaps in the meantime they might consider an American buy-in?