Am I living in a box?

Today I are been mostly reading "Living in the box" by Dean O'Loughlin, who with a trace of somewhat justifiable bitterness describes himself as "the boring one from Big Brother 2". It is a detailed, although largely superficial, account of his experience of appearing on Big Brother from the initial application, through the selection process, his time in the house and a brief coda of his fifteen minutes of fame after being evicted. He is currently running a company making teabag bins - make of that what you will.

The book is most interesting when he contrasts how he perceived events in the house to how they were portrayed by the producers when edited down to a half hour nightly show and subsequently reported in the tabloids. The best example of this is probably one housemates cocaine problem which was reduced to the headline "I'm forever snorting - Bubble".

The subtitle to the book is "An adventure in reality TV" and the most telling paragraph is this one:

Safe TV
And where reality TV really scores big time in the entertainment stakes is that we know we are watching a controlled environment, where nothing genuinely bad is going to happen. We can enjoy the carnage without feeling guilty. No matter how heated the argument or how impending the danger we know there is always a camera crew there, or a director, or someone in charge. We are generally not so entertained when watching the harsher versions of reality TV such as the news. We don't enjoy watching people being shot dead or jumping from burning towers for real. That's not nice at all. We want our reality controlled and tempered and served to us in handy twenty-four minute slots on concurrent nights at nine. We want to see page three girls in the jungle, bank managers on a desert island and the bloke next door moaning about pop music. And the public gets what the public wants. At the end of the day if we didn't want it then it wouldn't exist, and that tells you more about our society than it does about anything else.

The current series of Big Brother has been the most interesting one for me, mainly because most of the participants are very aware of what they are doing and are playing it as a game. You could sum the whole series up with the image of Michelle and Emma watching the other housemates from the bedsit, whilst we were watching them.