Armchair Nation (57 page)

Big Brother
was not, perhaps, such a radical departure as it at first seemed. In a sense, it was simply transferring to the naked ape and the human zoo that interest in looking at other species that had defined television from the beginning. Some of the earliest television stars were zoo animals, and the career of the most admired personality of the television age, David Attenborough, had been fashioned around such zoological scopophilia. In the mid 1980s, Laurie Taylor and Bob Mullan interviewed hundreds of viewers and found that Attenborough was the only TV personality not to attract any criticism. ‘If there was one aspect of his appeal which stood out,' they wrote, ‘it was the feeling that we – the viewers – had been privileged witnesses to the development of his interest: we had been drawn into this world by his genuine curiosity and then watched as he went about satisfying it.'
¹⁶

The most memorable scene from Attenborough's series,
Life on Earth
, came in the penultimate episode, when he explained the closeness of homo sapiens to other apes by lying on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes in Rwanda while a pack of the human race's non-TV-watching cousins, mountain gorillas, checked his scalp for fleas. Attenborough's hushed voice, much imitated by TV impressionists, exemplified the
care he took not to alarm the animals, the assumption being that their privacy could be disturbed as long as they were not distressed. Soon cameras the size of a lipstick could be put inside a badger's warren, strapped on a bird's back or hidden in artificial stones named ‘bouldercams'; low light cameras illuminated nocturnal animals; fibre-optic endoscopes filmed insects underground; and helicopter cameras steadied by gyroscopes could film an animal from half a mile away. Animals were seen mating, killing and being killed – things that viewers rarely saw other humans do on television, even on
Big Brother
.

‘The whole proceeding seems to contain an unpleasant voyeuristic streak, verging on the pornographic,' wrote Ferdinand Mount about Attenborough's programmes. ‘Isn't there something faintly repellent about a posse of cameramen training their sights on a python slowly swallowing an antelope or on a coot killing her surplus young – and then countless millions of us crowding round to watch the footage?'
¹⁷
But such dissenting voices were not only rare; they were the opposite of what most people felt. These nature spectaculars, particularly when fronted by Attenborough, were some of the most admired programmes on television. Homo sapiens is the only species curious about other species, and such curiosity is, mostly, a benign and touching quality – even if, as when it is aimed at the contestants on reality TV programmes, it merges with
schadenfreude
.

Attenborough might at one point have taken a different route, into the televised ethnography of which
Big Brother
was a coarsened version. In the early 1960s the BBC seconded him to study at the LSE under the ethnologist Raymond Firth and, as part of this arrangement, he came up with a number of programme ideas to examine human territoriality. He planned to take a wrecked car, park it in Mayfair and secretly film the reactions of residents; or to hide a camera in a hotel room to see how a guest marked his territory, by putting his pyjamas on the bed and so on. But Attenborough soon realised that for the experiment to be valid, people would need to be filmed unawares. ‘Programmes could not be made in such a way,' he concluded. ‘Human beings are not, after all, the same as other animals and television should not treat them as though they were.'
Life on Earth
did not
end with the then voguish sermon about what a human-created mess the world was in, for Attenborough maintained that to pretend we were no different from other species was ‘to carry modesty too far'.
¹⁸

Attenborough's friend, Desmond Morris, did make the move from wildlife expert to anthropologist. A curator at London Zoo, he had begun hosting Granada's
Zoo Time
in 1958, but as his and the public's views about zoos changed, he resigned both posts and moved on to the zoological study of humans, notably in his bestselling 1967 book
The Naked Ape
. One of Morris's key theories was that modern urban life resembled being an inmate in a zoo; like caged animals, humans were protected from the dangers and discomforts of the natural world and were thus more likely to become neurotic and inward-looking. His 1977 TV programme,
Manwatching
, helped to popularise the study of body language and the tiny, involuntary displays of self he called ‘social leakage'. One of
Manwatching
's fans was a Dutch television producer, John de Mol, who in 1993, invited Morris to cooperate on the idea that became
Big Brother
.
¹⁹

Morris declined, but the
Big Brother
house, particularly as reinvented for British audiences by Peter Bazalgette, certainly seemed Morris-inspired. While at London Zoo, Morris had inaugurated a special house for small nocturnal mammals. By using bright lighting at night and dimmer lighting during the day, he convinced the animals that day was night, so they were awake during the zoo's opening hours and visitors could see them at their most active. The
Big Brother
house was a similarly simulated environment with bright lighting on constantly in order to blur the division between night and day.

Morris had also devised tests for chimpanzees to stop them from becoming bored, and to provide entertainment for viewers of
Zoo Time
. If they passed, the chimps would receive tokens which they could use to buy raisins at a ‘chimpomat' slot machine. To test whether apes had the precise aim of early hunting humans, Morris enlisted the help of Bruce Lacey (a performance artist responsible for inventing the weird props used for the comedian Michael Bentine's surreal television shows) to make a chimp coconut-shy with grapes. When the ball hit the grape, it rolled down a sloping panel, the chimp being able to
collect it if he learned to push a rod through various holes.
²⁰
Like Morris's chimps, the
Big Brother
housemates were set tasks, such as learning semaphore or how to ride a unicycle which, if completed, could win them a luxury shopping budget and other ‘rewards'. Academic psychologists were on hand to interpret the housemates' body language, from flirting to passive aggression. With public opinion shifting against zoos, the pleasure of observing animals in captivity could now only be satisfied by watching consenting adults.

Morris had declined to participate in
Big Brother
but was a keen viewer. ‘For a professional people-watcher like myself,
Big Brother
provides a feast of body language and social interaction,' he wrote. ‘There is a never-ending supply of courtship rituals, confrontation displays and appeasement gestures as the housemates struggle to adjust to one another and to their isolation.' After a few series, though, he became disillusioned by the exploitative gimmickry of the show and the public hostility to the participants. Attenborough was also intrigued by
Big Brother
and its clones. ‘Reality TV programmes are quite fascinating, a real social phenomenon,' he reflected. ‘These programmes might seem like a big shift, but really they are about human nature and about registering your identity.'
²¹
He did not, however, think them a proper experiment, because the participants, unlike the animals on nature programmes, were aware of what was going on. Everyone, from watchers to watched, knew it was television.

A new type of scabrous, surreal TV criticism, pioneered by Jim Shelley in the
Guardian
and Victor Lewis-Smith in the
Evening Standard
, had by now emerged to satirise the trashily attention-seeking programmes of the multichannel era. In 1999,
TVGoHome
, a website of mock TV schedules which parodied the television listings style of the
Radio Times
, acquired a cult audience. The site's founder, Charlie Brooker, also began a TV column for the
Guardian
in 2000, with a much imitated, scatological style in which he dwelled mainly on the
factory-produced television he called ‘untertainment'. For Brooker, malignantly trite shows such as
Elimidate, So You Think You Want Bigger Boobs?, Celebrity Wife Swap
and
My Breasts Are Too Big
were a simple by-product of market conditions. ‘Hundreds of channels, filling hundreds of hours,' he wrote. ‘No wonder the majority of programmes are churned out like sausage meat: unloved swathes of videotape whose sole purpose is to bung up the schedule … Most modern TV is uniformly nondescript, the equivalent of oxygen-flavoured gum.'
²²

In this new environment, good television carried on being made but seemed to be smarter, edgier and less needy in its search for the audience's approval. The first episode of the BBC sitcom,
The Office
, went out with no great fanfare on 9 July 2001, on a midsummer Monday evening after a rain-delayed Wimbledon final. Partly because it mimicked the then ubiquitous formula of the docusoap and had no laughter track, many viewers did not realise it was a comedy. The BBC chairman Gavyn Davies was an immediate fan, but his wife, Sue Nye, who ran the office of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, mistook it for a documentary. It got fewer than 1.5 million viewers; only one other new addition to BBC2's schedule that year scored lower in the BBC's audience appreciation index, and that was women's bowls. Not until the autumn of 2002, when the DVD came out and the second series was heavily promoted, did
The Office
come to be seen as a modern classic. Even then, while the first episode of the new run got 5.2 million viewers, 400,000 viewers had turned off by the end, and only 3.6 million came back for the next episode.
²³

Nowadays the understated performing style and atmosphere of
The Office
is the industry standard and the ‘fourth wall' sitcom, performed in front of a live audience like a play on a proscenium stage, seems old-fashioned. But in 2001,
The Office
, while not the first comedy to dispense with background laughter, took some getting used to because it seemed almost to forget that its viewers were there. Where a comedy producer might once have ticked the script for studio audience laughs,
The Office
instead had long shots of an office worker yawning or feeding paper into a shredder. It also broke the sitcom convention that viewers would laugh at characters
on the assumption that nothing too awful would happen to them. David Brent's decline and fall in the second series was a betrayal of this compact with viewers, who gradually realised they were laughing at something rather tragic. ‘We are living in a new golden age, but this time it is the golden age of a much colder, cynical and more cliqueish kind of entertainment,' wrote Graham McCann, the biographer of Morecambe and Wise. ‘For every viewer who savours each awkwardly tender exchange between Tim and Dawn, and laughs aloud at the sheer awfulness of David Brent, there are several more who shake their heads and protest: “I don't get it.”'
²⁴

Critics of the new digital era tended to focus on the threat to ‘quality television', a peculiarly British term which has its origins in our tradition of public service broadcasting and the idea that it needs protecting from an unfettered market. There was even a ‘Campaign for Quality Television', born in opposition to the selling off of ITV franchises to the highest bidder that was proposed in the late 1980s. Mobilising TV stars like Rowan Atkinson, Esther Rantzen and Michael Palin, it campaigned successfully for a ‘quality threshold' which every applicant for an ITV franchise had to pass. In 1999, the Campaign for Quality Television published a paper whose title summed up its fear about the fate of what it was campaigning for:
A Shrinking Iceberg Slowly Travelling South
.

But despite quite a lot of evidence of untertainment on the ever-expanding number of digital channels, shows like
The Office
proved that ‘quality television' was also thriving. Quality TV actually benefited from the multiplication of channels, for it could now have several lives, appearing on a main terrestrial channel, its sister digital channels and on a DVD box set with extras. In his book
Everything Bad is Good for You
, the American critic Steven Johnson argued that this kind of quality television had to be complex to stand up to such repetition. Following a pattern set by
Hill Street Blues
as early as 1981, American drama series, such as
The Sopranos
and
24
, now built up multi-stranded narratives and demanded more intellectual and emotional work from viewers. To gorge on a box set of
The West Wing
, watching several episodes in ‘a single glorious wodge' that stretched
deep into the night, was, wrote Clive James, ‘like Bayreuth with snappier music'.
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