For how long will the young men and women from the reality TV series Big Brother be household names? For three months, their conversational tics, sexual inclinations, methods of ablution, personal obsessions and much less have been on display on the small screen each night and on the Internet. But the series has now ended, with a 21-year-old Sydney man - the only inhabitant of the mock household not to have been evicted by viewers - taking the $250,000 prize. Almost certainly, fame for the Big Brother alumni will prove to be fleeting. The series has been a hit for the Ten Network, so much so that the beleaguered managing director of the ABC recently put some of the national broadcaster's current ratings slump down to the success of Big Brother.
The application of the Big Brother concept in various countries has produced an intriguing range of national responses. In France, where televised discussions on literature and politics actually rate, a group of liberators stormed the set, arguing that the show was a disgrace to French culture. In the United States, where the much more venal Survivor has been a smash, Big Brother proved to be too passive for the audience and flopped. Australia, with a more easygoing spirit, has been titillated and amused by the goings-on - including the definitively banal conversations - in the Gold Coast "house" with little attendant controversy. All the same, this should not obscure the fact that reality TV is by and large a con. It is a creation of the entertainment media in which an ersatz reality, where preconceived personality "types", bogus situations and faked relationships, which could be better described as alliances, is the currency.
Because the only objective of the show's producers is to entertain, it can hardly be expected to point the audience towards a bigger truth about human behavior, save perhaps for the modern electronic media's capacity to create its own short-lived phenomena.
