Last autumn, ABC television hit the motherlode of all ratings winners when it stuck a middle-aged morning show presenter into a sober grey suit and encouraged him to ask people if that was their final answer. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with the avuncular Regis Philbin in the Chris Tarrant role, stormed American television like almost nothing before it. It seemed as if the US had just been waiting for a television forum for ugly, dumb people. The show ended up reviving the fortunes of its host network and encouraging a tidal wave of flimsy imitations, the most crass of which, inevitably, came from Rupert s Murdoch's Fox Network.
Greed was followed by the ill-fated Who Wants to Marry A Millionaire?, an extravaganza of bad taste which was left at the altar when the moneybags groom of Episode One, Rick Rockwell, was found to have had a restraining order issued against him in a previous relationship. The heartbroken bride, one Darva Conger, has since gained an annulment in Las Vegas and found solace by taking off her clothes in exchange for lots of money from Playboy magazine. Nobody can grieve forever.
The death of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire? after one episode taught US TV networks one thing, however. Real life (or that version of it which pertains when cameras are present) is cheap and it sells well. That single, infamous Fox broadcast attracted 22 million viewers, most of them tuning in to allow themselves be appalled by the spectacle.
The CBS network, with an undesirable viewer demographic, (average age 50), certainly caught the drift. CBS has been particularly sparky about getting some non-arthitic people in front of the cameras this summer. This Wednesday, the network, which uses an eye as its logo, launched Survivor, the first of two "surveillance" shows which it will air this summer in a bid to attract some of the Britney Spears constituency.
Survivor is another European-originated show, in this instance a copy of a successful Swedish programme in which 16 people -who are presumably too dumb to take their chances in the "ask the audience, phone a friend" malarkey - opt instead to battle it out with mother nature for the chance to win $1 million.
Last March, Survivor deposited eight men and eight women on the island of Pulau Tiga in the South China Sea and left them there for 39 days, in the company of a production crew who lived away from the castaways in a special compound.
CBS, not quite carrying the courage of its convictions, is keen to play down the voyeur element of Survivor by stressing that the show offers a fascinating chance to turn humans into lab rats and observe what they will do to get their teeth into the cheese. In deference to American prudishness, there will be none of the frank nudity or furtive lovemaking which has been a talking point of successful European surveillance programmes.
The show is designed to provoke confrontation. Deposited via raft on the island and given two minutes to salvage what they could, the sixteen competitors who were selected from 6,000 applicants were initially divided into two groups of eight and encouraged to live apart. Apart from struggling for their own survival, the groups competed with each other in specially designed challenges. Each weekly episode covers a three-day cycle of life on the island. Each cycle would include two challenges, one of which would be rewarded by a "luxury", such as a hot shower or a phone call home, and the other of which would be rewarded by "immunity status".
In the long run, immunity status was the prize that set the adrenalin pumping. At the end of every three-day cycle for the first six weeks, the group which failed to win immunity status would have to vote one of its own members off the island. The vanquished member would be escorted away within minutes of the vote. Game over.
After six episodes or 18 days on the island, the group system was dissolved and the remaining competitors were encouraged to become one group. In episodes 7 - 13, each player will compete for individual immunity status. Finally, when two players are left, the last seven to be eliminated will return and vote on who will be the ultimate winner.
CBS refused to be discouraged by the Swedish experience, which saw the first contestant to be voted off the island commit suicide within a month. Instead, the company subjected each contestant to six hours of psychological examinations and did background checks to ensure that another Rick Rockwell wasn't lurking in the undergrowth. Nevertheless, early publicity releases from the network refused to divulge the surnames of any contestants, in case media outlets uncovered skeletons in closets before the damage control team could react.
Survivor is fairly tame stuff and the ethics behind the proposition t haven't sparked off debates around water coolers all over America. The most shocking discosure so far concerned rats. Contestants told Newsweek that they were nibbled by rats while sleeping on the beach, but settled their argument with the rodents rather conclusively.
"You just skin them, gut them, and put them on a stick," said Gervase Patterson, who is a basketball coach back in the real world. "They were pretty good. I was surprised. They tasted like chicken."
If fear of rats rings any bells for those who did Orwell on the Leaving Cert, well CBS is exploiting the theme further next month. The network is currently wrapping up production of yet another European adaptation, Big Brother.
In the Netherlands and Germany the Big Brother concept has already made television history. The premise is simple, a slight twist on The Truman Show. The recipe? Take one TV company. Encourage the company to construct a little house. Place in the house 10 strangers, 28 cameras and 60 microphones. Remove the inmates from all contact with the outside world. Provide them with some challenges. Leave to simmer. Watch the ratings soar.
Like Survivor, the Big Brother show has an element of competition built into it. Every two weeks the house members meet and nominate two of their number for expulsion. Then it's over to the TV audience to decide which of the miscreants to banish.
CBS cheerily admits that it has bought itself a bagful of very cheap television. "If it works, great," said a spokesman. "If it doesn't, well, the network won't lose money." Indeed. All advertising spots are sold for the show's five-nights-a-week run, which begins in July and runs through into September.
In the Netherlands and Germany, the shows have been sensational successes. Cameras caught two lovelorn inmates making some rumpy-pumpy under blankets and showed another unfortunate rising from the toilet seat and made celebrities out of each and every contestant. In the Netherlands, one contestant left voluntarily to take up an offer from Playboy magazine.
In Germany, a contestant was summoned from the house by an apparently cuckolded husband after tabloids began reporting an affair between two participants.
CBS has built a house for its own participants in California and is offering $500,000 prize money to the last surviving member.
Just as with the great quiz show ratings war last season, rival networks will be serving up their own "reality" shows. Fox plans to film the everyday life of a high school in Chicago for American High, while ABC has already begun airing Making The Band, a fly-on-the-wall account of the creation and subsequent ups and downs of a boyband. The trend continues across Europe. The Spanish are watching their own version of Big Brother, ten other European networks, including Channel 4 in the UK, are putting versions into production this summer.
What does it say about television and our relationship with it? Well, in Germany, the Big Brother show was almost cancelled when Interior Minister Otto Schily learned of its format and decided it violated human dignity clauses in the German constitution. He failed to get the programme banned and stoked up some valuable publicity for it in the process.
Those who have a feeling for human dignity should boycott the show, he said hopefully, before the programme began breaking all ratings records.