The Wild West of Noughties Reality TV

0:00The Rest Is Entertainment is presented by Octopus Energy. now remember octopus energy do something really great if they've got your birthday when you call in for whatever reason to octopus the whole music is the number one selling single from that year the year of your 14th birthday and we discovered didn't we that yours was um the only way is up by yaz and the plastic population we're going to discover mine now yours is i just called to say i love you by stevie wonder okay yes i prefer yours do you think it's weird to have whole music which is i just called to say i love you because listen and you know that i love octopus energy but i will rarely ring them to tell them i love them yeah yeah i would usually but you know be i just want to chat to them about something to do with my energy and i don't mean that sort of energy well look they can but surface the number one single of that year for you.

0:56And you can always choose not to have the music. You can choose for, no, but I think only animals do that, as I've said, and I want to go on the record as saying that. This episode is brought to you by Tax Act. Don't do your taxes alone. Join Tax Act's National Admin Night. Admin nights are social gatherings for getting through your to-do list. So get ready for a night of fun, finding deductions and filing taxes with Tax Act, where you can file your federal and state return for just$49 through April 8. Let's get together and get them over with. Visit taxact.com slash admin dash night for details.

1:37Protein is now at Starbucks and it's never tasted so good. You can add protein cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or matcha. Try it today at Starbucks.

1:54Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osmond. How lovely to be here. Lovely to see you Marina. It's lovely to see you Richard. Very nice to see you. What's been keeping you? All my children were very tired the other night and I said, what would you like to watch? And they just went, a Richard episode of Would I Lie To You. Oh my god. So I know. It's the one with Jason Isaacs, which I strangely hadn't seen. He's a lot of fun Jason Isaacs isn't he? Yeah, that came across. Yes, I thought he was terrific. Well, listen, that's a case for the NSPCC, I think, rather than for anybody else.

2:30What might we speak about this week in the world of entertainment? Well, I know we're going to talk about, as Bill last week, we're going to talk about reality TV reckonings, as it were. This kind of emerging genre where reality TV ethical abominations of the 2000s and 2010s are sort of repackaged in documentary format. Perhaps for learnings? I don't know. We're going to talk about why that's happening. and why it's happening now. Yes, and I'm going to give a few examples of some of the more egregious reality shows of the noughties and also quite why it was such a Wild West back then because it really, really was.

3:04And we are also talking about, we spoke last week about AI and books and again then we said, we're talking about Sora, which was Open AI's video thing, which Disney put a billion dollars into and they shut down. We'll talk about why they shut it down, what that means for Hollywood. Let's talk about reality TV. It was a different time, Richard. It was a different time. It was a different time. It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times. Yeah. The turn of the millennium era was kind of golden era. Golden. We can argue about golden. And it was unbelievably influential. It's no coincidence that the most significant reality TV star of that era was Donald Trump.

3:44And that he couldn't have become president without having done reality TV. because having failed in the 80s essentially in property or had to go away with a tail between his legs, he came back as a complete force via one of the absolute marquee reality TV formats. We want to talk about reality TV because there have been a whole slew of programs recently, big, big exposés on Netflix and various other streamers, big exposé of The Biggest Loser and the things that happened behind the scenes on that show. That was a weight loss journey. Weight loss US show. There was the expose of America's Next Top Model, which went behind the scenes on that and showed how various people were treated on that.

4:23There was about to be one on one of the most extraordinary shows ever made, The Swan. Yeah, I think that reality TV didn't used to exist as a thing. And we had docusoaps. Reality TV really came about because of the enormous success of Survivor and Big Brother. I remember, because I may have mentioned it before. That was my idea. and just the idea of putting people on a desert island and then voting people off one by one. I had no involvement on it after that. And I remember it would have been 93, 94, when the first ever territory made that, which is Sweden. They made a show called Operation Robinson, and that was the first ever survivor.

5:04It then goes over to the States, is huge. John DeMole comes up with Big Brother, which is essentially Survivor, but not in a desert island, in a fixed rig house. and these shows absolutely bestrode the world. They were beyond enormous. It was interesting, funnily enough, in that Q &A answer just that Lisa Kudry gave us last week when she said, oh yeah, we're back quitting at the top. And she said, we were number one when we quit. Or maybe actually Survivor was. And so at the very first, reality TV, it meant something very specific, which is sort of like a social experiment. Ordinary people put in an unusual situation and you film them and you see what happens.

5:41And there was an innocence to them as contestants. Exactly. And because in America, really the only things they had were scripted and news, they don't really have what we have, which is factual entertainment and things like that. So reality TV came to mean everything that wasn't scripted in America. Now it means that over the air. So it started like lots of these things. And factual entertainment would be documentaries behind the scenes at Marks and Spencer or Inside the Factory or The Dog House when you're adopting a dog. Just little formatted real life things. Yeah, that would be a docuso. But we have a history of that sort of thing.

6:24Yeah, they didn't have those sort of things in the same way, I don't think. Exactly that. To them, reality TV meant, oh my God, what are all these things that aren't the 60 Minutes new show or a big drama? What are these things? And it helped that there was a writer's strike at a certain point, which meant that they didn't have any... Writers will always help themselves out by going on strike at exactly the wrong time. Yeah. We're now looking back 25 years, hence at quite what that meant. And the chase, it was a gold rush for non-scripted programming. So there was this enormous glut of shows because there was an enormous glut of viewers and an enormous glut of money.

7:05But there's always the law of diminishing returns in all of these things. And so things started to get more and more extreme, certainly in a pitch. The hook would have to be bigger. In a show, the kind of cliffhanger at the end of each show would have to be bigger as well. You know, that's how culture works. And it led to some of the extremes we're now seeing being exposed. Yeah, I mean, America's Top Model was full of it because there was such a ratchet effect with it. Fashion is obviously can be quite absurd anyway, but they were made to do like victims of shooting fashion, victims of a shooting as a fashion spread.

7:37So they would all have to be sort of splayed back against all. There was one girl whose mother had been killed by gun violence and she had to be sort of like this splashed against war. And if you weren't up to it, if you weren't hard enough, then you weren't hard enough for this business. And it was all of that, you know, it was, And she loved to scream at people, Tyra, because it's so interesting seeing how episode one starts and then where she is as time goes on. And you just feel that it's chasing that dopamine that just became unavailable from the things that they used to do in the earlier series.

8:13You know, performers didn't have to be treated with respect in the same way that they had with established stars. They didn't have agents. Yeah, exactly. But it was almost like there was this kind of pent-up rage about dealing with talent. And it could be sort of dispensed with. And they were almost sort of meat puppets. They could be manipulated. Actually, their interactions could be completely misrepresented. As you say, there wouldn't be an agent saying, hang on, what the hell did you just do to my client? And there's a sense of quid pro quo, which is, listen, you would not be in front of this many viewers if you weren't on the show.

8:48You want something out of it. And so it felt, I think, to some producers like, this is fair enough. Everyone's getting something out of this. Well, it's like that. It was something very Pygmalion about it. I was going to say, I knew it would be George Bernard Shaw. Yeah, but actually like the George Bernard Shaw play, which was quite sanitized Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. I built you. I made you. I created you from nothing. I can make people believe you're anything. But in a much darker way, I own you and you wouldn't be anything without me. Do you know there's actually a genuine play that's behind the whole of reality television?

9:20And that is Jean-Paul Sartre's The Huy Klo, which is where hell is other people. Three people in the ante-room of hell. That's where that comes from. And I was watching it at the Edinburgh Festival, maybe in 1990, in the Bedlam Theatre. I saw that production. No way. Oh, my God. That's really weird. Isn't that hilarious? Yeah. Jesus. Listen, we're on the right podcast. Yeah, I know. So I think, you know, lots of other bits. Shearer was there as well. Shearer. I remember him being there. Peston. Yeah. Peston was in it. They were all in it. And I came out of that and the idea of Head as Other People.

9:50And I thought, well, that's where literally, I think two days later, the idea for Survivor came from. So it comes from Sartre. That we both saw. That's so weird. Oh my God. We were in that tiny, because it's not a big theatre. And the great thing is the most profitable franchise in the history of television came out of it. And neither of us made any money from it. So that's great. I don't think I deserved that. I was just in the audience, Richard. I think even I would not be trying to take a piece of that. But what was interesting in this, anyway, back to reality. Sorry, enough about plays. But back to reality.

10:23All right, all right, Timothy, shall we? It felt a bit more documentary at the start. And documentary makers have quite strict codes. And there's quite a lot of sort of ethical underpinning and philosophy to it all. And then it became like, okay, she didn't do the thing we wanted to do. Would it be possible for us to edit the time when she did and make it look like she did it at the moment we need it for the kind of emotional arc of this episode. Yeah, my counterpoint to that is certainly in the very early days of Big Brother as it being streamed 24 hours a day. And you remember those days where people watch people sleep.

10:53And actually, you know, that generation of documentary makers who are so lauded from the 60s and 70s who showed life as it is, all of that was very artful and all of that was constructed in an edit suite. And actually, Big Brother particularly was one of those shows where everything was on show all the time. quite hard to do a villain edit if everyone is seeing your dailies it absolutely from that point onwards became the norm that you could you know create your own narratives but i think in the very early days of big brother at least there was a purity to it which is let's just see what happens let's put these bit it was enough at that point things did happen yeah you know there's an there's a u.s series where and it's not like the first series they all decide first of all they get on they start getting on very well and they try to sort of live in a harmonious little community but one of them does literally lose their mind I think but not in a in a sort of violent way but thinks that there are being messages left everywhere saying if we all walk out we will all get a million pounds they debate it for hours saying even if not we'll be making a point um they start digging up the garden looking for buried money and actually the guy who the it's CBS, isn't it?

12:07Les Movers, he ran CBS. He's like the kind of titan, sends a message saying, you tell them that if they walk out, we're putting another lot straight back in because they're just losing the show. They think these guys are actually going to do it. It was like a cult moment. But imagine that the meeting where, Les, we just need to talk to you about this new show. Everybody then came into the market. They said, what else have you got? What can you do with people? What sort of environment can we put people in? How can we put people in? We did a show years ago uh endermob called chained where people were handcuffed together there's in fact there's a show on channel four now called handcuff it's it's it's exactly that we did a show called shattered where you weren't really allowed to sleep although we worked up very early in the production process that you couldn't do that and so they weren't allowed to sleep but they were allowed a 15 minute sleep every two hours or something that was what though by the way this you remember we've talked before and we've got a great sort of bonus i can't remember it's one or two episodes about him, Mike Darnell, the absolute evil genius who worked at Fox and was the evil genius of this era.

13:05And whenever he heard, a lot of people, when they heard a show was coming out, they were like, right, we're doing the same thing then. And they would try and get their shows up in like 10 days. I think the chamber was versus something called the chair. I remember the chair. You're tied to a chair, lowered into a pit. Something would happen like you'd be attacked by bees. John McEnroe hosted. He was, but that sort of started as a quiz show, which is, can you answer questions? under pressure, which is sort of a perfectly neat idea. And then, yeah, someone took, because Fear Factor was huge. Fear Factor hosted by, it's funny that people who disappear from our culture, Fear Factor was a huge show in America.

13:41We made it. Hosted by Joe Rogan. Where is he now? I knew that. Yes. So it's now 25 years on, and these documentaries looking back at what happened and the morals of the time are becoming incredibly popular. Like, really, really huge hits. I think it's interesting also that Y2K stuff has been sort of fetishized for so long, but people are now moving back into the 90s in terms of that. Yeah, the last great decade. So rather than saying, wow, this is an amazing time, at which point you always want to say, this was the era of trainwreck celebrities, the 2000s. You know, it was an awful time. Reality TV was so dark or whatever.

14:17Now people have moved back to the 90s. They feel able to take a look at this and look at the dark side of the decade that they've just spent the last however many years fetishizing. Yeah, exactly. I mean, listen, there's some dark sides to the 90s as well, but we'd have to worry about that for a while. And then they'll make the documentaries about those. With things like America's Next Top Model and The Biggest Loser, you can see that these things start in quite a pure way and quite a gentle way, which is, oh, that's an interesting idea. People are interested in weight loss. We can get some ordinary human beings and we can help them lose weight.

14:49Oh, you know what? America's Next Top Model. It is a dream to be a model. We can get people from all across America. they can come and do various tasks and one of them gets a huge contract well i mean god bless they start purely yeah well yeah tara banks who was the sort of host of it and also felt like oh i'm becoming a mogul var it which i think was probably a key part of its appeal to her i mean god love it i do i do think she's one she is a monster but i think she's one of those monsters that's made not born to become a successful model as she did modeling is a disgusting business it always has been and it's maybe a bit less so now but to some degree it always will be and for her to come up and do as well as she did being a black woman in that business i think some bad things have happened to her and she never talks about them because i think she sort of self identifies as a strong person and i'm all for that as a credo and she'd internalized i think so much of that awful industry that what they ended up doing to these and they would have these hopefuls i made them do these shoots like it's really worth watching by the way if you have watched this documentary is great if you haven't then feel free to watch them and yeah it's called reality check colon america's next one and that colon makes me think yeah oh there's a strand in this reality check something else they're just trying to build a yeah it's quite difficult to hear from gen z about you know i can't believe you lived through these brutal times you're like i know your biggest star is like you know mr beast and you know all the other lots many Many other YouTubers who are arguably making people do quite odd things for money.

16:21And also, you're watching families like this where there's no control. I mean, there's much less control. And, you know, there have been documentaries about YouTube families like Piper Raquel and Netflix have done a few of those where you think, well, they had absolutely – these people have no safeguard. Oh, we're doing exactly the same thing again. Yeah, completely. We're doing 100 % the same thing again. So, The Swan, which, as I say, there's about to be a documentary about now. So you can't watch that one yet. But The Swan was a series. Amanda Byram hosted it. And The Swan was a show where women with poor self-image, I don't know where they cast them from.

17:00Ugly ducklings. Ugly ducklings. As they like to call them. Were taken under the wing of a bigger swan and had like a makeover over a series of months, which included, you know, a glow up, but also included plastic surgery. It was extreme. Lots of stuff like that. The key thing about the show was these women had no access to a mirror for the entire duration of the makeover. And that was the point of it, is they were being made over and made over and made over, but they could never see themselves until the last moment where they are revealed. Because reveal is such a huge part of reality TV. All of it.

17:36Yeah, even if it's particularly on the makeover shows. And the expectation of making this have clearly come across stories that suggest maybe this wasn't as wholesome as that description makes it sound. So it'll be interesting to hear what happens with that. But it was a Wild West. As you say, we have not learned from it at all because we're still, you know, this is the very beginnings of the attention economy. I get the attention economy has only ramped up. Can I mention two shows, though? One was a German show, which is called Sperm Race. and sperm race was 12 german guys we take them all to cologne and they give us a sample of their sperm take one sperm from each of these men place it near an egg and whichever sperm reaches the egg first that person wins a porsche and you go okay okay the other one was and as i say it's an absolute wild west at this time and stuff was coming out that you'd be like whoa okay dutch endermal had a show called uh the great donor show the great donor show and the idea of this show is there is a woman who is dying and there are three people who need a kidney transplant she interviews them and decides that she's going to give her kidney to one of these people there was enormous furore from everywhere the dutch government the dutch church every you know everywhere had gone absolutely crazy it was it dominated liberal richard they are but dominated the news in the netherlands for for a really really long time and they knew the day it was going to go out this is 2007 uh sort of june 2007 uh and this show goes out and everyone is watching it because everyone is like i mean this is absolutely mental goes out on a a Dutch channel called BNN.

19:28And it goes out, this show, Dick Orte Donor Show, five years to the day that the guy who set up BNN had died because he was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant. And the Netherlands had the slowest take-up of organ donations in Europe. The entire show was a publicity stunt. The woman was an actress. She wasn't dying at all. The three people who needed a kidney all needed a kidney. they were on the waiting list for it. And the entire show is, you have got to sign up for organ donation. You've got to do it. The whole thing was a hoax. The whole thing was to raise... They call it the nudge unit in Downing Street.

20:09Yeah, exactly. So extreme. It changed the law in the Netherlands. Even during the show, 12 ,000 people signed up. You know, 350 people a year were dying in the Netherlands before that. They got over a million people, which in the Netherlands is a lot, watching this show because they were expecting, oh my god what are they doing now and they did this show which had enormous uh impact on social change we knew right from the start by the way the duchess said look this is what we're doing this is why we're doing it so we were getting pressing well that really is a social experiment how amazing that is totally fascinating i must say that a lot of the ones they're going back to you know obviously we've just said that um it's they've got brutalities of their own gen z and gen a what i find quite sort of depressing about this as a genre is a big part of me suspects it's a chance to have a second bite at the footage because what else are you going to do with the old you know so oh i mean we were just talking about it you know if you repackage you know you can i mean big brother you could definitely do there definitely people you have talking heads talking about that as as it goes on i mean it's as you say it's an amazing way of repurposing stuff and you know it's social history now yeah but there's a part of it that just feels i don't feel because you know there was that huge scandal just this last week about the married married at first sight australia they got someone who'd been thrown out of the show or had left the show someone called Brooke Crompton and she came back on for a dinner party at which her role, she'd clearly just been told to insult everyone.

21:30She insulted absolutely everyone, abused them. It was really horrible. This is aired incredibly recently, last fortnight. There's been this huge outcry. The statement is hysterical from Brooke. This behaviour is not a reflection of who I am at my court and I hope that Australia will one day see this. The grandiosity of Australia, yeah. I hope they will see this. But my feeling when they were doing this and with this whole new genre is it's a nice idea i think they're like a second bite at the footage i don't believe that they're doing it to sort of cleanse the earth and um plant new things because we're not seeing that at all and also another part of me does feel like we're stuck in this endless which we've talked about on so many different subjects it's another form of reboot of kind of old ip yeah i will say this though the one thing i always think when i watch those shows you watch the biggest loser and things like that the documentaries and they'll have the producer on and they'll say yeah but don't forget you know things were very different then and i was there then and things were not that different then you knew what right and wrong was and the people who would when i see some of the justifications for what people did on those shows and i think back to rooms that you know i had been in and everyone knew every everything i hear from those producers mouths i'm like no absolutely no way no one was thinking i'm sure this is okay i totally agree and when i look back on some of the things I wrote about celebrity culture during, because a lot of this was in the noughties and it was such a completely toxic era for celebrity culture.

22:57And, you know, it was the era of Britney and shaving her head and being completely tormented. And I've said before in this podcast, I remember once seeing when there was a big, lots of rumors that she was pregnant, Paparazzi put the camera up her skirt and there was blood on her knickers. And the headline was simply, she's not pregnant. We knew this was wrong. I wrote about all of that stuff in Heat magazine, the circle of shame, celebrities being kind of reduced to this, you know, they're sweating, they've got cellulite, all of that stuff. You knew it was wrong at the time, you know, and people had lived through eating disorders and lived through all sorts of things and actually were aware of it.

23:30And it was a nonsense. I completely agree with you. It was done and it made a lot of people lots of money, but people did know that it was wrong. We've got worse now because it's permeated everything, this type of culture. Reality TV culture has sort of permeate everything you see it in the Oval Office now all the time yeah but and it came from the Bedlam Theatre in 1990 a production of We Clow that we were in the same we wouldn't have been the same night but it might have been it might have been you never know you never know um and another time we'll we'll we'll talk about the story of space cadets because we always have questions about space cadets and that was something in the very early days that that one i have to say i was uh at the beginning involved with another a story for another time when we convince people they've been to space after the break we're going to be talking about sora the open a eyes video app that is now no more it was going to destroy hollywood it has now destroyed itself

24:35Good sleep is everything. That's why Oli's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and L-theanine for both kiddos and grownups. So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. Erasing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance. Find Oli's sleep solutions for the whole family at Oli.com. That's O-L-L-Y dot com.

25:01Refreshing Wild Cherry Cola meets smooth cream.

25:07The treat you deserve. Pepsi Wild Cherry and Cream. Treat yourself. K-pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day. It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

25:50Welcome back, everybody. Now, Sora, you'll remember last year we told you it was this incredible piece of kit that was going to ruin Hollywood. Disney put a billion dollars into it. It could make just extraordinarily film-like video. Just unbelievable what it was doing. The worry was that it was going to put lots and lots of people out of business, that it was going to absolutely destroy the internet, cover it in slop. But it is dead. open ai have stopped it uh we're going to talk about why yes remember six months ago genuinely it was the i think most downloaded app in the app in the app store and they wanted to turn it into a social platform and they initially began by just copyright infringing on a completely unprecedented scale you can make anything happen at all you could make and then it sort of galvanized Hollywood and saying, this can't happen.

26:46And there was a sort of huge pushback. But then, so they disabled the use of characters and actors who hadn't given permission. But then they did do a deal with Disney, who was going to invest a billion in open AI. And they said they will use character likenesses. There were 200 characters, not voices, anything that kind of used other human stuff, they couldn't really do, although they are made by human animators. So the question is, has Sora closed down because Hollywood pushed back. No. No, very much. Sora shut down because it was wildly, wildly unprofitable. And even in the world of AI and that crazy Wild West, it was absolutely unsustainable.

27:28Don't forget, OpenAI have got very, very large pocketed backers, lots of VCs involved with it. Microsoft puts a lot of money in. And this thing was costing them roughly, Sora just existing in the real world, was costing them$15 million a day. It's so nuts. And I've seen estimates on each video, some saying$1.30 per video generated, some saying$2 per video, but it's free to the user. And also it was a sort of great novelty, like one of those, they show you that you can do it and you can make Elsa and Anna do this or that. And then you're like, okay, I'm never gonna do that again. And the reason it costs so much, by the way, that's the processing power.

28:13It's the computational power behind every single video that gets made. You know, we know that one of the key things about AI is they use a lot of chips. And those chips are incredibly expensive. And, you know, the infrastructure behind AI is the thing that's, you know, going to destroy the planet if something else doesn't do it beforehand. So it was costing them a huge amount of money. Yeah, I had there was an energy issue at the moment. Yeah, I think it's fine. I think everything is good. Let me just check on the straight of Hormuz. I think everything is good. So it was costing them a huge amount of money and using up an awful lot of computational power they could use elsewhere.

28:46And as you say, it wasn't actually particularly doing them any good. Because what is it? It's just nothing. I mean, they had a big sort of meeting and they said, avoid distractions. And it's all about for them, like business and productivity applications. Don't be distracted by side quests. You know, they're now in the Pentagon, sorry, Department of War, to give it its new title. And they want to stay dominant over Gemini. They're really worried, much more worried about Anthropic and Claude. And they've got to allocate resources, as you say. Let's talk about the Hollywood side of it. Because to me, in a way, first of all, Disney, they've got a new CEO now.