NB: THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT: BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS- HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY. ........................................................................ PANORAMA "Life on TV" RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC-1 DATE: 12:11:00 ........................................................................ Television, the drug of a nation - breeding ignorance and feeding.... MELANIE [Big Brother] They could pretty much manipulate it as much as they wanted to. RON COPSEY [Castaway] You're provoking me. I'll throw this plate at you. RON It felt like being psychologically being beaten up. ELEANOR [Jerry Springer Show] I want you to leave us alone. JERRY SPRINGER Let's start to peel away these levels of reality. GEOFFREY FIEGER Television - might as well throw the Christians out there, let them get eaten by the lions. Same thing. MARIELLA FROSTRUP Tonight on Panorama we report from inside the reality television revolution. It's cruel, it's voyeuristic and often humiliating and it seems we can't get enough of it. As broadcasters wake up to the huge commercial benefits of putting the public centre stage, we ask just how far television is prepared to go to keep us tuned in and turned on. Across the globe from the tropical desert island of the Survivor programme to Big Brother's specially constructed house in East London, the spectacle of people laying themselves bare for the cameras, so called 'reality TV', has made for compelling viewing. But at the same time it has raised questions about the exploitation of those that take part, and the responsibilities of the industry. DR DAVID MILLER MEDIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING I think there's a very genuine problem with Big Brother as well as many of the other programmes genre, and not just in damaging the contestants but I think in damaging us as viewers. JERRY SPRINGER This is only television. My God, there are real issues in the world. MARIELLA Big Brother was the broadcasting event of the summer. It attracted record ratings for Channel 4, generated acres of news coverage and marked a radical departure from British television. Some say that it's set to revolutionise what we watch. The concept was this. Place ten people in a house, put them under 24 hour surveillance and ask them to compete against one another for a cash prize. NICK BATEMAN It was the most incredibly nervous day just thinking my god, you know.. will I like these people or will they like me was the most sort of primary fear that one had. MELANIE HILL A really restricted environment, a very claustrophobic, very strange... I mean the most intense environment I've ever been in in all my life. Very intense and most difficult eight weeks I've had all my life. This is Big Brother, could Melanie please come to the dining room. MARIELLA And there was a further twist. The contestants were deliberately set against one another. Each week they nominated a house member for eviction. [Big Brother Contestants] "Craig" "Craig" "Craig" "Melanie" "Craig" "This is horrible - you're so cruel" MARIELLA The audience shared in the ritual cruelty by finally deciding who would leave the house. MELANIE The people that were nominated found it very, very, very difficult and emotionally when someone is going through a really tough time in such a very claustrophobic, restricted, strange, weird environment.... MARIELLA The makers of the show were putting the contestants in a psychological pressure cooker, so what precautions were taken to protect them? Were you screened by a psychologists before you went into the house? NICK Yes, we were, all of us. MARIELLA How much time did you have to spend them? NICK About an hour. MELANIE I had a discussion with a psychotherapist for about 40 minutes. Now what's... I wouldn't describe it as adequate psychological profiling at all. MARIELLA But the company that makes the programme is adamant that they take the utmost care. How concerned are you for the safety of the people long-term who are involved in what is seen as a psychological experiment to some extent? GARY CARTER ENDEMOL ENTERTAINMENT INTERNATIONAL I think that we are extremely concerned about the safety of the people who participate in any television programme. We'd be foolish not to be. In commercial terms Big Brother is hugely important to this company, and therefore it is in our best interests to take care of the people. DR MILLER There really ought to have been much more psychological screening. Clearly the participants in the programme did feel that they weren't given adequate psychological screening and did feel that they were misled about what would happen to them in the house. MARIELLA Before they started, the participants were given a series of warnings and then it was up to them. MELANIE They emphasised the fact that you've got nowhere to hide. They emphasised the fact that there is going to be an enormous amount of media attention on this and they're there to frighten you and to say think about this now, think about it really seriously. MARIELLA Once in the house the participants were oblivious to how the editing and selection process was portraying them to a burgeoning audience. NICK It was presented in a way that the editors made the show, they had the capacity to make anyone look very good or very bad at the flick of a switch. MARIELLA Viewing figures soared and reached a peak when Nick Bateman - thereafter known as 'Nasty Nick' - was caught trying to influence the voting system, much to the disgust of the house and the fascination of the rest of the nation. CONTESTANT 1 They were totally all respecting you, you know, what I mean. CONTESTANT 2 Most people in this house had a lot of respect for you Nick and Carol and I used to sing your praises at night time, and at the end of the day I'm gutted. CONTESTANT 3 I think once you leave and you're able to step back from a situation and look.. you know.. how it's been conducted, therefore you become cynical because at the end of the day we were just pawns in a game. MARIELLA Suddenly a TV show had the power to transform one of its participants into the most evil man in Britain. NICK I think one of the problems with the whole show is the public thought it was real. They lost sight of it was a game show, and it became very personal to every member of the public watching it. They just reacted very badly to something they'll probably do if they'd have been in the same situation. MARIELLA Following Nick's eviction tabloid interest turned toward Melanie Hill, the so called 'preying mantis' of the house. For Mel the alarm bells rang at an early stage when the producers filmed an introductory video. MELANIE When they made my two minute video, they have a script written for you, which I found slightly strange anyway, and looked at the scripts and one of the lines on my script was.. "I'm Mel and I'm a sexy little babe" and I just I'm not saying that because that's nothing I would ever, ever say. At that point I just kind of started to feel very uncomfortable with it. But I rang up the producers, had a lot of conversation with them and they reassured me. How naïve of me. MARIELLA When she saw her on screen persona she was not happy with the way she had been portrayed. MELANIE I just thought my god what is going on? The fact that the cameras could get so close to what was actually going on in the house. I feel angry with the programme makers about that more than anything because we had no idea how.. what they were going to do with all the footage, and what they actually did was they manipulated it into our little stereotypes - and unfortunately those stereotypes aren't real, they're just caricatures - which is a shame. CARTER The way you behave in the house is all 'you', and even if things are selected from it, it's still 'you'. Now I admit that what you see is a refracted image of those people, but then that's why it's a television show and not real life, and that's why it's a television show and not a pure experiment in psychology. MARIELLA But when Mel came out it was the hostile reception from some sections of the crowd inspired by her Big Brother persona that caused her the most distress. MELANIE I certainly know that when I came out of the house there was booing and I know that a lot of people really disliked me. I just wanted to disappear from everyone's view. I really didn't want anything to do with anyone. I just thought if that's what they think of me, then that's fine. But I don't want to be here to experience any of this anymore. CARTER The people who go into the house know what is going to happen. Even I accept if they're not fully aware at the time of going in of the repercussions on their lives. But even that position I think is a little disingenuous. By the time you're eight in the United Kingdom and you're reading Hello and you know what Posh Spice says about the plight that she finds herself in, you know what the media will do. LIZ WARNER COMMISSIONING EDITOR, CHANNEL 4 We chose people who were pretty resilient and the psychological testing as well as the interrogation by the production team who were pretty used to doing this, they're pretty experienced, meant I think that we ended up with a group of people who were more able to deal with this situation than average, and I think that now they're pretty well equipped to deal with what most of life could throw at them. JONATHAN ROSS You knew it was coming, Big Brother's Caroline, Nicola and Sada! [Applause and cheers] MARIELLA And there's no doubt that for some contestants, now basking in the limelight of their newfound celebrity, the whole experience has been worthwhile. NICK BATEMAN Presenting awards is great, walking the catwalk also is a great thrill and it's perhaps.. you know.. when you're 12 or 11 you always want to do this kind of so it's almost like a dream come true literally overnight. MARIELLA But for Melanie Hill who, by and large avoided the limelight in the immediate period after she came out of the house, refusing lucrative offers from tabloid papers, there is a clear understanding of the programme that changed her life. MELANIE HILL I'm certainly not a fan of it. I don't.. I think the term reality TV is totally misleading. It's not real. It is TV, it is a production, it is highly edited, it is.. the power of the production is incredible and I think people should realise that. It's not real. NICK Well it's only a game show. MARIELLA FROSTRUP Real or not, it's the TV that viewers want, and that's not lost on the industry gathered here in Cannes for their annual get together. For Endemol,, the company that makes and markets Big Brother, it means big business. Reality TV, having tapped into that advertisers favourite, the youth market, has proved a highly lucrative business. In some countries stations that carry Big Brother have actually managed to double their audience share. No wonder then that at this year's Cannes, the Endemol catalogue is absolutely crammed full of spin-offs. GARY CARTER ENDEMOL ENTERTAINMENT INTERNATIONAL We knew pretty early on, or at least certain people in the company were convinced very early on, that it was going to be huge. We didn't expect it to be quite this big. MARIELLA Foreign versions of the show already contain racier material, explicit sex in Holland and Germany, and violence in, of all places, progressive Scandinavia. There are concerns that as the reality format expands globally there will be a need to up the anti to keep audiences watching. PROFESSOR STUART FISCHOFF CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY Now we get in to the interesting question of how long will people sit still to watch what we're seeing on these kinds of Big Brother type shows, essentially to watch grass grow. How long will they sit still for this? Not for long. What's going to have to happen is they're going to have to escalate the anti and they escalate it through two basic forces - sex and violence. MARIELLA The warning comes from America where television has a long tradition of on screen humiliation dressed up as entertainment in the form of daytime talk shows. They started out innocently enough but have now become increasingly extreme. [Jerry Springer Show] Ladies and gentlemen, would you please welcome the eighth wonder of the world - Gerry Springer. Cheers and applause MARIELLA Jerry, you're credited as the king of reality TV. Is it a title that you enjoy and that you feel is justified? JERRY SPRINGER It moistens my eyes when I think about that. It's just - wow! No, you know.. we just do a silly show. I don't know, I think there's been reality TV before. I think what's different about our show is people are on it that normally would never have been on television before. MARIELLA FROSTRUP American talk shows have always relied on the experiences of real people to provide ratings in an attempt to provide a veneer or respectability psychologists are frequently invited to participate. FISCHOFF They essentially used people like me to give this show a sense of legitimacy. Nobody really cared what we have to say, they just want us to be there. MARIELLA And as the ratings war between the talk shows escalates so too has the need to keep raising the stakes, in more than one case this has proved fatal. AL SCHMITZ Only two minutes before the top of the hour, crazy Al's radio party All Days you just don't hear any place else. All Days fourteen sixteen on your radio dial from the motor city. MARIELLA Radio D.J. Al Schmitz is no fan of reality T.V. It triggered off a family tragedy which resulted in a life sentence for his son Jonathan who believed he was going on television to be introduced to the woman of his dreams. AL SCHMITZ He's going to meet Cinderella, and all of that went down in shame and despair in a descent into madness that resulted in somebody's death and his incarceration for most of his life, all because of a television show. Senseless. MARIELLA Things began to go wrong for Jonathan Schmitz when a friend recommended him to the Jenny Jones show after this appeal. JENNY JONES Are you romantically attracted to a friend of the same sex, do you have a secret crush you'd like to reveal to a same sex friend? MARIELLA Told only that he had a secret admirer, Schmitz agreed to appear, to his surprise he was confronted with gay acquaintance Scott Amadure. Known as ambush television, it was to prove fatal. GEOFFREY FIEGER Attorney You took two relatively uninitiated, relatively naïve, people who were not aware of the dangers associated with what they were doing. Scott Amadure had no idea of the dangers that he was putting himself into and Jonathan Schmitz was an extremely disturbed man who, if you put him in the situation that the Jenny Jones show put him into and subjected him to the type of humiliation that maybe another person might have let go, but Jonathan Schmitz was not that type of person. MARIELLA Outwardly calm during the show, the ordeal had taken a terrible toll on Schmitz. SCHMITZ The telephone rang, I jumped out of bed and picked up the phone and he said "Dad". I said, "John, who was the secret admirer, why didn't you call me?" And he started to weep and said "that thing in Chicago didn't work out so well for me Dad." And I said "well who was your admirer?" And he said it was a guy and he started to cry. MARIELLA Three days later Jonathan exacted his revenge on Scott Amadure. JONATHAN I just shot this guy. Okay. Why did you do that? JONATHAN Because he (expletive) picked me up on national TV and he's a homosexual. MARIELLA Jonathan was sentenced to life for second degree murder, at his trial the prosecutor argued that he was fully responsible for his actions, but never the less she acknowledges that T.V.. producers do have a responsibility to their guests. DONNA PENDERGAST STATE PROSECUTOR Jonathan was put under a very embarrassing set of circumstances and he was mad about that and he reacted as he did. I think these types of shows better look very carefully at what they are doing. I mean they definitely provide a forum that escalates pre existing tensions. COUNSEL They lit the fuse that resulted in Jonathan Schmitz committing this God awful and unspeakable act. MARIELLA In a separate civil case the lawyer representing the family of the deceased successfully argued that the show had been culpable and won twenty five million dollars from the show's producers, Warner Brothers. FIEGER Nobody is trying to prevent them, they can do all these shows they want, however you assume the risk. The Jenny Jones show is a business that sells that show in world wide markets and in order to create a viewership they have produced scenarios that involve embarrassing and humiliating people, some of whom are mentally ill, highly combustible, and if you set the fuse it will explode. MARIELLA This is the man who claims to have solutions not only to the charges of exploitation being levelled against the talk shows, but also for the problems of the guests. T.V. psychologist Jamie Huysman provides a comprehensive package. It's called "Aftercare". [Advertisement] Is your talk show or news programme looking for a provocative, responsible new way to tell dramatic tales? Aftercare is your answer. MARIELLA In a promotional video aimed at the T.V. industry, Aftercare outlines its philosophy. [Advertisement] Aftercare is win, win, win for everyone. First, the viewers follow a real life soap, second guests get help from a treatment centre thanks to your show or station and third, programmers and producers worried about quick fix therapists will sleep a lot easier at night. MARIELLA The deal is clear for guests like Scott and Jenny. Take your problems, discuss them on television and only then Aftercare will get you treatment. JAMIE HUYSMAN Director, 'Aftercare' Scott and Jenny, I was terribly conflicted about. I mean obviously a severely obese gentleman and an anorexic woman, which is seemingly what television likes, it's the visual phenomenon... MARIELLA Like a freak show? HUYSMAN In that sense too, but as unethical as it might sound, I wanted to get them both the best treatment they could to give them the best shot in life, and the reality was I could do that by doing a show with Lisa. HUYSMAN Scott, there was a time when you got to be about six hundred pounds.... MARIELLA At its best, Aftercare offers help to the desperate who have nowhere else to turn. In the dog fight world of talk show ratings Jamie believes the service he offers is the lesser of two evils. What does it say about a society though, where for a lot of people in their desperation, the last port of call is television? HUYSMAN Tragic, tragic. I totally agree with you, should we let the industry run rampant, should we let them take everything they want, put it on stage and just exploit and dissect and put people under microscopes and at the end of the day not offer them anything? I daresay I don't think we can, I think that this is the reality of television. MARIELLA And that reality just gets grimmer as illustrated by the fate of talk show guest Nancy Panitz. DET SGT KEITH MUNCY SARASOTA POLICE DEPARTMENT Once we got to the house, the deputies actually went in through an open window and found that the house was barricaded, furniture was pushed in front of the doors and there was no way to get in except this one window, which appeared that Nancy was in fear and was trying to block the entrances so she could keep herself safe. But there was one window that was not locked and appeared to be the entrance. Her body was found in the kitchen, and it appeared that she had been brutally beaten and kicked to death. MARIELLA The most recent murder to be connected to the excesses of reality T.V. took place here in Sarasota, the not insubstantial irony is that this sleepy Florida town is home not only to the murder victim and the accused, but also the king of tabloid T.V., Jerry Springer, on whose show they both appeared. "SECRET MISTRESSES CONFRONTED" SPRINGER Thank you, welcome back. So if you have just joined us here, a woman comes on this show and says she wants her boyfriend's ex, Nance, to butt out of the picture... MARIELLA It was a classic case of ambush television. Nancy Panitz was persuaded to appear on the Springer show. The cover story, her ex husband Ralph, wanted to get back with her. Instead, tricked into taking part on the show, she was subjected to ritual humiliation. ELEANOR I want you to leave us alone, I want a normal life. NANCY No you don't, neither does Ralph, he loves the excitement. ELEANORE No, he doesn't want you Nancy. NANCY He loves the excitement. ELEANORE You're old, you're fat... SPRINGER He's telling you he doesn't want to be with you. NANCY That's fine, bye. MUNCY She was brought on to the Jerry Springer show I guess as a ruse to... She thought she was going to get back together with Ralph. Actually Ralph and Eleanor brought her in to embarrass her on national T.V. to say that they no longer wanted her in their lives. REPORTER Why did you do it Ralph, why did you do it? Did you kill her Ralph? MARIELLA When the show was aired, three months after the recording, Ralph Panitz was watching in a bar. Even though it was his ex wife being humiliated, and he the one taking delight in it, something appears to have snapped. Later that day it is alleged that Ralph bludgeoned Nancy to death. GEOFFREY FIEGER ATTORNEY The facts that I know about the show itself are entirely consistent, almost parallel with the Jenny Jones show. That show took a known already volatile relationship and exploited it and re-enacted it and re- created it and created more hurt and more fear and more embarrassment to what end? So that an audience could hoot and holler, so that somebody could watch it on television and be some kind of.. sadistically amused by it, to what end? What? You might as well throw the Christians out there and let them get eaten by the lions. Same thing. [News Report] Nancy Panitz was murdered .... MARILELLA So what are the programme makers responsibilities? [News Report] REPORTER Do you feel like your show is in any way responsible? JERRY SPRINGER I can't comment, you know this is no time to be talking about television, someone has been killed, these people happen to have been on our show. We've had over the years twenty thousand people on our show, so Lord knows what all of them have done. We were told it had nothing to do with the show so we shouldn't even raise that issue, it had nothing to do with the show so I won't comment on that. MARIELLA But what I was going to ask was the actual screening of people, a bit like those people for example, had a history of disturbance and violence... SPRINGER No, it's not our job..... it's not our job... and television cannot get into the area of censorship. You would never, in doing your story, for example when you just are doing this interview, you never gave me the questions ahead of time, you never figured out whether or not this story is going to hurt my feelings. MARIELLA I would hate that Jerry. JERRY SPRINGER Yeah, I know, but what if you did a story that embarrassed me or what if you were working in newspaper and I went nuts because you just... you know... And you can't have news do that can you? In other words so.... MARIELLA But I think that you would probably be better able to cope with it and have the infrastructure and obviously... SPRINGER I will live by that rule, if the rule is from now on newspapers and television can never report on a person, or have a person on the air, or in your paper, or on the BBC, without first testing them to make sure that the story they are going to do will not have a negative effect on their emotions, then let that be the rule. I can't imagine in a free society that the media would accept that. You know at some point we have to stop always passing the blame, people have to be responsible for their own behaviours and if someone chooses to go on television, chooses to go on television, that's their responsibility. FIEGER You want to make a bunch of money embarrassing and humiliating people and you get somebody killed? You are going to have to pay. I am not trying to stop you, I am not trying to censor you, if that is what you want to do go ahead and do it. But if you don't disclose to the people who you are doing it to, for your own profit, remember this is a for profit business, this is not being done as some charitable act and clearly there are people getting rich, including Jerry Springer. MARIELLA The more extreme forms of day time tabloid television are already filtering through to Britain. In the past week alone on commercial television you could have watched "I'm proud to be a prostitute". "I've slept with thirty men and twenty women in the past six months". And "Sex change girl shocks lover". All unthinkable even five years ago. It graphically illustrates how one popular form of television can re-define the boundaries of what is acceptable. Is it only a matter of time before public service broadcasters follow suit? GARY CARTER ENDEMOL ENTERTAINMENT INTERNATIONAL Public Broadcasters are under enormous pressure to compete with the commercial stations and to compete within the landscape with which they operate. I think they are in a very, very unfortunate position because on the one hand there is this perceived public agreement that they have to meet some kind of public service remit and yet in fact they are hide bound into competition with commercial stations. MARIELLA With the second series of Big Brother on its way and a host of spin-off's already in production, the BBC has to decide whether to embrace the format. MARIELLA Would you be interested in commissioning a programme like Big Brother? LORRAINE HEGGESSEY No, no I wouldn't commission a programme like Big Brother. MARIELLA Why is that? LORRAINE HEGGESSEY CONTROLLER, BBC1 I just don't think that it would work on public service television. I mean interestingly the people who made Big Brother said they deliberately didn't bring it to the BBC because they felt that we would spoil it, and I think we probably would have tried to underpin it with some more informational content of some kind. Now that's not to say that we were wrong. I think that Big Brother worked extremely well as entertaining television, but I'm not sure that we would have done it on the BBC. MARIELLA But the BBC does have Castaway 2000, described as a serious sociological experiment. Take a cross- section of society, place them on an island and film them for a year, document their trials and tribulations and the pressures endured. Add a resident psychologist and the similarities to other reality formats would appear obvious, without of course the financial inducement. JEREMY MILLS EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, 'CASTAWAY 2000' Well I have to say the Americans, when you talk to them, it's showing in America at the moment, the Americans go, "What, there's no prize at the end of this? You mean they do this for nothing?" And we say no they don't do it for nothing, the point about Castaway is they all do it because they want to get something out of it. Now for some of the people taking part in Castaway this is some sort of inner journey, it's some sort of spiritual journey. MARIELLA Were you at all distressed by the advent of programmes like Big Brother and Survival, which to an extent were doing a sort of commercial television's version of the BBC's Castaway? You know, making it faster, punchier, shorter and putting, you know, a bit of prize money at the end? MILLS I personally always felt that Big Brother, because that's the only one really that's been in the UK so far, was so different to Castaway that it didn't matter. Inevitably journalists compare the two, but I hope that we have still got, as I say, the main bulk of Castaway programmes to come at the end of the year. Those to me are the really important shows, the shows that do give the participants the opportunity to reflect on what's happened over that year. [Castaway scenes] PARTICIPANT What's happened? RON COPSEY He's just had Gwen in tears. PETER I only went to the toilet. COPSEY He's a big bully.. when I stood up to you, you didn't like it did you? You didn't like it did you? MARIELLA But for one of the participants who has come off the island, the Castaway experience has turned out to be somewhat less than spiritual. At times he felt he was part of more basic television fayre. COPSEY: You want to bully somebody Peter, you come and bully me. You come and bully me. If there weren't women and children in this room I'd throw this tape at you... yes I would. RON COPSEY Soap operas are not subtle, Castaway 2000 is not subtle. It shows the worst of human nature. For me, from my point of view having taken part in it and watched all the episode, it's no better... I want to say it's no better than East Enders or Brookside, but I prefer to watch East Enders and Brookside because they are honest. It says this is fiction, this is drama, these people are being paid to entertain you. We weren't, we were guinea pigs and I really believe I was led down the garden path. [Television Summer on Taransay ] PARTICIPANT Feeling another man's bottom and having sex with another man is dirty, it says so in the Bible. MARIELLA Since Ron Copsey left the Castaway island he has had the opportunity to view the way he has been portrayed on television. His complaints echo the complaints of those who appeared on Channel 4's Big Brother. RON COPSEY They might as well have given me a script and said we are going to demonise you, you are the villain off the piece, you know you are Big Brother's "Nasty Nick" You know you are Rancid Ron and that's how we are going to portray you. MARIELLA Ron says that he might as well have been given a script at the beginning of the programme. Big Brother had Nasty Nick and he was Rancid Ron. MILLS He might call himself Rancid Ron, I wouldn't describe him as that, but there we go. MARIELLA Do you think that there is any justification to the claim that he may as well have been handed a script in the beginning, that the was to play the drama queen, which he felt also was rather homophobic apart from anything else? MILLS No, I mean Ron was what Ron is. Ron is portrayed exactly as he did on the island. We didn't ask him to do anything, we didn't force him to take a particular role or particular attitudes or particular things in the programme. What we've shown, what we've portrayed is Ron, in all his different facets. It's often very difficult when people see themselves for the first time on screen, to recognise maybe some aspects of their character that they've never seen before. But I think anybody who knows Ron will know that that's a true portrait of him. RON I found it really difficult to watch it, it was painful, it was humiliating, it was sad. I felt as if I had exposed myself, shown you my soul, shown you who I really am, and then you've chucked up against the wall and kicked it around and... It felt like being psychologically beaten up. DR DAVID MILLER MEDIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING It's a pattern of increased explicitness and increased voyeurism right across television. I think Castaway is different in degree, but not in type. It was set up in order that the BBC could get viewers from ratings, and in a way it is about the BBC following independent broadcasters downmarket. FEMALE [Castaway] Feeling another man's bottom and having sex with another man is dirty, it says so in the Bible. MARIELLA If, as the critics suggest, the BBC has taken that path, it's hardly surprising. We live in a multi-channel internet linked world, and the pressure to chase ratings has never been greater. How easy is it to balance the demands of the audience with responsible programming? LORRAINE HEGGESSEY Well I think audiences clamour for many things. They never only want one thing. Of course I have to be in tune with what the audience wants. That's what I'm there for. But I have to make sure that it's going to pass the quality thresholds that people expect of the BBC, and there are a lot of programmes they might watch in millions on other channels that they'd feel very disappointed if we did, and I have to somehow judge that. It's not easy. MARIELLA In the commercial sector the pressures are increased by the goals are more easy to define. CARTER Television is a mass entertainment medium, and it's a means of getting people to watch commercials boldly put, and therefore there is a huge incentive on the part of the broadcasters and the producers to meet whatever appetite comes from the audience. MARIELLA Like in America they're already thinking up more and more ingenious ways to satisfy a hungry audience. SPRINGER We always have a new twist FEMALE [Jerry Springer] Oh my God, I don't know what to do. His car is here. I knew I'd find him here. Why is he here? What is he doing here? Get out here, now. Where are you at..! MARIELLA Jerry Springer's response to the success of reality shows like Big Brother is to take his cameras into the trailer parks of America and feed back raw, unedited misery. RICHARD DOMINICK EXEC PRODUCER, 'THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW' Whatever the problem is and we just put a camera on it and do it, and we don't add to it and we don't take anything away from it. FEMALE [Jerry Springer] Why are you doing this to me? Do you not see this hurts? This hurts really bad. MARIELLA It's the new extreme in cruel voyeurism. Yet again the producers say that there's a public appetite for it. FEMALE [Jerry Springer] ...spending our money on a hotel with some slut? She's a slut! And you're probably not even using condoms. You could give me a disease that hurts the baby. MARIELLA You talk about giving people what they want but where would you personally draw the line? DOMINICK Oh there's no line to draw. If I could kill someone on television, if I can execute them on television, I would execute them on television. MARIELLA This may not be as farfetched as it sounds. With the internet further eroding the boundaries of acceptability, some people fear that we may end up with the TV that our baser appetites deserve. We'll only have ourselves to blame. PROFESSOR STUART FISCHOFF CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY There's no question but that public execution will be part of the TV fayre of the future, and when you have the situation with the internet where somebody could in fact broadcast shows off the coast of any sovereign nation and picked up by satellite, anybody in the world can put on whatever they want. Some substantial number are going to tune in and watch paedophilia, bestiality, blood sports, anything which is going to adrenalise them, and I think that's what the future looks like for the world in terms of entertainment. It's going to be our worst nightmare. ________________________ www.bbc.co.uk/panorama 2 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________ Transcribed by 1-Stop Express Services, London W2 1JG Tel: 0207 724 7953 E-mail 1-stop@msn.com