I think I’ve cracked the formula for creating reality television shows and I intend to give up my current day job and make my fortune churning out low-budget, high-audience figure programming for the format-hungry, if braindead, masses.
First ingredient – a desperate or vulnerable subset of humanity from which to pick your potential contestants. This could be fame-hungry talentless wannabees (Big Brother), fame-nostalgic talent-faded has-beens (I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here), the mentally unstable (er, Big Brother again) or the socially repugnant (Wife Swap).
Then throw in a generous helping of manipulation and exploitation – cynically-engineered challenges, deliberate character clashes, heavy-handed carrot and stick dilemmas – because obviously these people aren’t going to be entertaining without a bit of prodding.
Then garnish with a theme plucked from the zeitgest or just stolen wholesale from an existing successful show – e.g. home improvement, talent search, “natural” beauty, embarrassing personal problems.
Mix together and place at the bottom half of the TV schedule and you might just have baked yourself a successful entertainment format.
The latest programme to be added to this dubious televisual cookbook is Debt Monkey, an internet-only reality show which picks some debt-ridden individual, settles all their debts then imprisons them in a highly-restrictive TV contract for six months.
In case it’s not obvious, here’s the recipe breakdown: vulnerable group equals those in debt; the exploitation equals weekly challenges dreamed up by a misery-loving audience; and arbitrary theme equals debt, the credit crunch, the recession – what could be more topical?
This is reality TV on a micro scale. One contestant, filmed in their own home, with a single camera operator and a skeleton production crew.
It’s obviously a gamble on the part of MeFisto Media – the small independent production company behind it all, but a risk worth taking as, if successful, the format rights alone could be worth a fortune.
But they are pinning all of their hopes on a single person to sustain half a year’s worth of programming so I hope they’re spending a lot of time choosing the right person. They claim to have had over ten thousand entries for show – and in the current economic climate who would disbelieve them – but if a week is a long time in politics, then six months is certainly a long time in television (or on YouTube).
Let’s just hope, for the sake of the poor Debt Monkey his or herself, that when the six months is finally up, and the production company has taken numerous pounds of flesh, that there’s enough monkey left to actually enjoy the benefits of being (at least temporarily) debt free.