NAKED CITY: THE ULTIMATE REALITY CHECK!

There was a recent episode of the ABC’s Australian Story about a former Adelaide man Scott Neeson, a highly successful Hollywood movie executive who gave up his career to establish and fund a number of schools in Cambodia for impoverished children. His moment of complete moral resolve came during an extraordinary moment when he was standing on a garbage dump in Phnom Penh watching children comb through the toxic rubbish to retrieve pieces of plastic to earn a pitiful weekly wage. His mobile phone rang and it was the agent of a high profile Hollywood star in total apoplexy over the fact that the wrong type of food had been put on the star’s private jet.

Watching local TV during the last few weeks, as the Network’s release their flagship “reality” shows, and you might have had a similar cathartic moment. Take for example Ten’s much repeated promo for the forthcoming rehash of MasterChef. There’s high drama when one of the contestants spills her meal from the oven and it hits the studio floor. Dear oh dear she can never serve that up to the esteemed panel of judges!

It’s almost enough to bring her to tears and no doubt we’ll all be tuning in to see how this heart-wrenching predicament is played out. Hang on, isn’t it time for a reality check on the reality show itself?  The spilt meal probably ended up in the garbage despite the fact that millions in the third world would have gladly “plated” it up, regardless of a little grime around the edges.

Like most reality shows MasterChef exploits a highly contrived set of tensions and personal dilemmas, plotted, induced and edited with all the subtlety of a nightly soap opera and about as far removed from actual reality as is vaguely believable. In past series the show has carted its contestants off to various locations around the world to sample the culinary delights of cities like London and New York. What’s to say Cambodia is not next on the travel agenda and there’s a cook-off on that same scenic garbage dump as seen in the recent Australian Story. No need to worry about any meals that hit the deck here as they will be quickly salvaged by the hundreds of hungry kids that daily scour the dump.

Of course that would never do as reality shows have no agenda whatsoever when it comes to pricking the wider moral conscience and the advertisers would not have a bar of it. Leave that stuff to the ABC and SBS. However here at the Naked City we are seriously pushing for a series of classifications, to match the current system of PGs and MA15+s that would apply specifically to reality shows. Viewers would then have some warning as to how real these reality shows actually are as the following content labels are forcefully applied:

OMGAFF+ – Stands for Oh My God Another F****** Franchise. The show was previously a hit in Holland, Kazakhstan and Brazil so welcome to the global conspiracy.

PP+ – Product placement per episode is likely to exceed the recommended twenty individual advertisers.

M+ – Contains gratuitous passages of manipulation whereby you are left hanging during the commercial break to learn the outcome of any situation.

H15+ – You need to tell your kids that this is complete hogwash and that’s there’s more spiritual enlightenment in a game of Mortal Kombat.

RRR – Time to switch off this brain numbing crap and power up the Kindle.