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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

The Great Reality TV Swindle- More real than reality?

22:31 / 03.12.02

Did anyone watch this show on Channel 4?
Absolutely fascinating. 30 people abandoned their lives to appear in what they believed was a high profile Channel 4 Reality Gameshow, expecting accomodation, pampering and instant fame. What they got was stark reality.
I think the contestants themselves came off very badly. They whined about him 'ruining their lives' but they were the ones willing to give up their lives for a year to chase the chance of being 'famous'. I think the TV programme he came up with was more real than most reality TV, actually happening in the real world. What he did was pretty destructive, and I don't condone it, but I do, in a way, admire it. He showed them that the lives they had before were pretty good in comparison.
I laughed when the contestants were thrilled when they had 'local fame', as they didn't seem to twig that they were being laughed at.
What do you think? Do you think Nik Russian's an arch prankster or a pathetic manipulator? Do you think the contestants were meant to come off well, or did the documentary deliberately make them look like fools? Is the whole exercise a damning indicment of reality TV, or just a story of what you can get away with when you have a few cameras and a winning personality?
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09:07 / 04.12.02

I found it a bit boring. I was hoping to see some really eccentric characters on the team to mock but most of them just came across as normal, really sad, but normal. It was very amusing when they were suddenly all really happy because they had been on TV! And then they thought they were famous because people in the street recognised them! It was quite pathetic. One of the contestants called Nik Russian satanic for messing with their dreams of stardom. That made me laugh! I don't think tricking people with a fake reality TV show puts you in league with the Devil.

The programme got more interesting when Channel 4 took over and they started their search for Nik Russian. Niks best mate, Mike, was hilarious! "When Nik told me what he had done my first thought was 'What about me!' You've used my address as a place of business, I could end up with 30 angry people banging on my door!" Shows how selfish Nik and Mike both were!

I think that Nik Russian fully beleived that he could pull it off and get a TV show out of it. He was a great manipulator but at the end of the day he did believe in himself. When Channel 4 caught up with him he didn't cackle madly and say "Aha! You are all pawns in my social experiment to reveal the shallowness of reality TV and how its caused an obsessive fame chasing society!", or some other pretencious bollocks. He just stood there looking sheepish and skulked away.

All the contestants must be jumping for joy right now because they have been on TV again. Their moment of fame has finally come, and that seemed more important to them than the £100,000 they were cheated out of. At the end of the day Nik Russian was the real loser since the contestants got what they wanted. Fame.

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10:59 / 04.12.02

Does anyone-else think that the whole programme was a hoax?

11:15 / 04.12.02

I'd like to think it was all a hoax simply because it would be sad to think we're sharing the world with such shallow, fame-obsessed people who think that appearing on TV somehow validates their lives. But you only have to watch Big Brother to realise that there's a lot of them out there.

17:04 / 04.12.02

caught the last minutes of it, from where they discovered there was no programme.

Russian didn't come across as the great hoaxer but almost as "sad" as the people who were the contestants. From what I gathered he came up with the idea with the hope that someone like Channel 4 would pick up and foot the bill. So he was chasing the short cut to wealth and fame as much as the 30 people were.

It wasn't a hoax iivix23, as remember an article in the media Guardian a month or so ago about the exploits of Mr Russian.

But it's true all these people out there chasing Warhols 15 minutes and the easy life. Looking for short cuts, no matter how soul destroying (having to take abuse from Pete Waterman or Geri) or embrassing (your every move tracked by cameras) rather than working hard and enjoying the benefits.

The two "contestants" who carried on trying to track down Nik were the worst of the bunch. How much was their search about closure and how much about extending the 15 minutes because the documentary crew would still follow them and film them?

10:29 / 05.12.02

What I thought was fascinating about it was the way that "reality" seems to be completely suffused by TV: as if the only way experience has meaning for us postmodern Western fuckups these days is if it is viewed from the outside. That the first thing these people did when they realized there wasn't going to be a TV show was get themselves on the TV news and set up a video diary room, because that was the only way they could get at their own experience of the events. That everyone's behaviour was completely conditioned by the knowledge that they were on TV - but at the same time, they weren't going to be on TV, as if our behaviour is always conditioned by the demands of the medium of "reality TV", even if we're not actually on TV. Or something. Reality TV is the new reality.

It makes my brain hurt.

The Natural Way

11:56 / 05.12.02

Bizunth, sorry, but I hate this sort of statement:

"They whined about him 'ruining their lives' but they were the ones willing to give up their lives for a year to chase the chance of being 'famous'."

What? So they somehow deserved it? Come on, be a bit human, for davealan's sake.

11:58 / 05.12.02

adamswish:

"But it's true all these people out there chasing Warhols 15 minutes and the easy life. Looking for short cuts, no matter how soul destroying (having to take abuse from Pete Waterman or Geri) or embrassing (your every move tracked by cameras) rather than working hard and enjoying the benefits."

I wouldn't knock anyone for looking for 'the easy life'. "Working hard" doesn't always pay off and can be just as soul destroying and humiliating as dicking about in front of a camera, but lasts much, much longer (ie your entire working life) and is - well, hard. If you see a short cut, or an escape route to something better, and the worst thing that can happen is that you look like an idiot for a brief period of time, why not take it? If it all goes tits-up you can always go back to the soul-destroying day job.

12:02 / 05.12.02

Runce:Yeah, I fucked up. Seriously, I do feel remorse for the people involved, Russian screwed them over for his own self interests. I got carried away.
The whole Reality TV thing fascinates me, the willingness to get involved in other people's lives, the mix of soap and real life to simulate the 'over the garden fence' social community gossip that has diminished with time. Of course, now celebrities are the new normal people, with shows like CBB and The Entertainers allowing people to revel in their little failings and mannerisms.

12:14 / 05.12.02

So they somehow deserved it?

No, but it was hard to take their pain seriously when their expressions of it were so clearly tailored for the cameras - their unhappiness depended on the difference between on-TV/not-on-TV, but their expression of it collapsed that difference entirely.

What difference would it have made if the show had worked?

13:36 / 05.12.02

I don't have much sympathy for these characters at all. Perhaps if they had done some research prior to giving up their jobs, lives etc. they might have been better off. But celebrity status of any kind is a very addictive meme for some people.

They see a bright shiny shiny object dangled in front of them and they just follow along convinced their lives will be complete once they've achived fame and appeared on the telly. They're just as bad as the characters who go through life measuring themselves against others by obtaining status symbols.

But, as some character in a comic once remarked: "It'll offer you everything you ever wanted, but it's just pictures on billboards; dream cars, dream women, dream houses"