Bye Bye Big Bore
by Graham Davies

Here is something that you won't have heard people saying over the last 3 days:

"Oh no! Surely they can't be stopping Big Brother? 10 series wasn't nearly enough. And all the hype and fuss that they managed to generate was always a fair reflection of high quality."

Presenting yourself on television is a deeply unnatural activity. Professional TV presenters learn how to focus their words and their personae to make sure that the viewing audience's watching experience is as good as possible.

But "reality" TV participants are told to be "natural". This instruction nicely ignores the fact that living your life for with several hundred thousand people watching you is perhaps the most un-natural activity that civilised society has yet invented.

Some advice: if you ever have to appear on TV, make sure that you prepare and focus on precisely why you are doing it. Make yourself a brief flash of light that momentarily brightens the viewer's day. Being "natural" is not the best way of leveraging 4 minutes of national exposure.

The problem with Big Brother was not that it was cheap TV that celebrated the worst behaviour of unpleasantly dysfunctional people. The real problem was that 24 hour exposure of "natural" human interaction is just plain boring.