Roxanne Pallett is public enemy number one for giving us what we want.
A summer spent knee-deep in the messy tangles of Love Island’s Casa Amor taught us all a lesson. That our hunger for reality television is as ravenous as when Big Brother first took the world by storm back in the late ’90s.
Also, that we’ve refined it somewhat. It’s no longer enough to put people in a house and just hope for drama. We can’t afford to take that risk anymore.
Now the drama is an in-built part of the show. You have to fall in love. You have to betray a friend. You have to break a heart. You have to bring the sauce somehow, or you’re going home.
Though I can’t prove it empirically, I’ve been around long enough now to know that people aren’t watching reality television in the hopes that everyone on screen has a good time and makes friends.
Don’t get me wrong — the audience will pick their favourites, for reasons either noble or ignoble, and they’ll support them to the hilt. But they’ll also identify their enemies. God knows why. It could be a snippet of something they said. It could be something they know about the contestant’s past. It could really be anything.
But either way, just like in competitive sports, the fans decide for themselves who they’ll cheer and who they’ll boo.
This year’s Celebrity Big Brother, the 22nd UK edition, viewers are choosing from characters like Natalie Nunn, whose claim to fame was getting thrown off an American reality TV show called Bad Girls Club after physically fighting another housemate.
Also on the roster is a man called Nick Leeson, who spent six years in a Singapore prison for bank fraud. He was even Chief Executive of Galway United FC for a while too.
There’s a “human Ken doll”, who was repeatedly warned about using racist language on the first two nights before being kicked off the show after a “further incident”.
So what exactly were viewers expecting? What exactly were the show-runners encouraging? When a show goes out of its way to fill a house with outrageous and unpredictable Z-listers who are only there to squeeze as much shine as they can from a dimming spotlight, what is the outcome going to be?
And more importantly, why are we watching it?
Were we hoping for shy wallflowers who sat around reading The Financial Times and sharing carrot cake recipes with one another? Were we hoping they’d all help each other on a voyage of self-discovery before wandering off into paradise like the ending of LOST?
No. We were hoping for exactly what we got. We were hoping to get riled up. Hoping for something, anything, to talk about. Entertainment at any expense. The next Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty.
And Roxanne Pallett provided the scandal.
And once the original accusation was made, Roxanne just kept digging, fair play to her. She held the opposite side of her body that she claimed had been hurt. She cried in the diary room. Of course, that’s made us judge her all the more harshly in the end. Everybody acting like they were disgusted to see that kind of carry-on.
And Ofcom got 11,000 complaints. Excuse me? 11,000 complaints? Apparently, all these people were tuning in to see the extremely important and famous Roxanne Pallett and Ryan Thomas just be nice to each other on the show with a cast boasting several ex-convicts, a human mannequin who says the N-word and a psychic.
For Ryan Thomas’ sake, I’m glad that people were outraged on his behalf, but this is exactly what the audience is in for. If there wasn’t such a demand for programming where real people target, threaten and humiliate one another then the supply wouldn’t rise to meet it.
Ryan Thomas’ reputation wouldn’t need protecting if we didn’t have a TV show where the real winner is whomever boosts their profile the most (and, I promise you, Roxanne Pallett has already succeeded in doing that).
Even the title Celebrity Big Brother is part of the sick game. Look at the list above. You wouldn’t cross the street for a photo with any one of those people. Jesus, you’d cross the street to get away from some of them. They had already long run out of real celebs by the time Ricky Gervais parodied it on Extras back in 2007. You wouldn’t even recognise these people. Channel 5 just tells us that they are celebrities to further enflame the sick, sadistic sense of schadenfreude of judging them from the settee.
This is what we’ve grown to want from modern programming.
A simple thought experiment: if someone told you that a contestant’s life was going to be ruined on Celebrity Big Brother tonight, would you be more, or less, likely to watch it?
In an interview with a stern-faced Emma Willis, Roxanne apologised to Thomas and said: “I’m the most hated girl in Britain right now.”
Which, to be fair, will be a great tagline for whatever reality TV show she goes on next.
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