Cruel entertainments: reality TV

I went away camping with work colleagues on the weekend. A perfect excursion to Wilson's prom, hiking in to the
gorgeous Sealers Cove on Friday morning, a 10 km walk from the Mount Oberon lookout car park, carrying heavy-ish packs.

Mortification of the body is sometimes fun, as any monk with a hairshirt will tell you.

In any event, in a post-camping pub conversation, someone mentioned the concept of "survivor weekends" to me: a topic obviously inspired by the setting for our recent outdoor adventures. Apparently the idea is a group of friends stay together for a weekend, formed teams and competed in challenges for “immunity” before voting someone off after each round.

Someone said it sounded like fun, but you’d have to be careful only to invite those who could take it in the right spirit. To which I said: “Yup, it’d be great to say to someone – sorry, but you’ve failed our psychological profile for a survivor weekend. We’re not sure you can cope with rejection, so, for your own good, we think it’s best to exclude you.” OK, I’m certain it can be done in “the right spirit” - and it was very clear to me that the friend who raised the subject had participated in a weekend where everyone had kept sensible and taken it in good fun.

But I’m not sure I like, to use political jargon, the message it sends - and it's really not hard to image (or maybe "cast") such a weekend that would be a total disaster. I mean, it’s not enough that children are now imitating this kind of behaviour in the playground (because packs of pre-adolescents really need new, more subtle forms of psychological bullying) by voting kids out of their group or declaring them “the weakest link”, but responsible adults are now using this as a way to have “fun”. Yowza. It's not for me.

Of course, maybe this all just my insecurity talking. Had our camping expedition been a survivor weekend, as a clear non-camper I doubt I would have lasted long. (I turned up to the pre-camping packing fest with a pack that was, on reflection, clearly too small for several nights camping, thus probably getting away with an unfairly light load.)

Reflections on my lack of alpha-male potential aside, Reality TV it seems to me is fuelled by the promise of celebrity, but its “spice” of ostracism can carry off-screen. Zadie Smith, in talking about why she shuns “fame”, referred to seeing a British Big Brother contestant in tears on a London Street, being openly mocked by passers by. Ugly.

I can’t see that reality TV is anything but a blight on our social mores, and in an Australia where, according to some poll in The Age, only 57% of us still feel it’s the government’s job to look after the needy, I don’t think we need inducements to further callousness. At times, we’re all the weakest link, and if we can’t be compassionate enough to make allowances for that, we should at least be self-motivated enough to realise it.