Vicious viewing

I WAS looking down at them. A couple of twenty-somethings, and she was quite a looker. They were nuzzling and snuggling on the marital bed, half naked. It was all getting quite steamy, the sheets were ruffled and they had no idea I was watching.

Yes it's true. I am a Peeping Tom. Like one of those strange men you sometimes read about who drill a hole through to their next door neighbour's bathroom.

Only I didn't have to go to any trouble. Neither was I doing anything illegal. The couple in question had volunteered to be watched by complete strangers. Katie and Jimmy Spill were the "stars" of the latest slice of reality TV.

Television has made us all voyeurs. Every time we switch on, we are likely to find ourselves staring into the lives of people such as Katie and Jimmy.

Passively watching is bad enough. Yet we go much further, judging, criticising, ridiculing all involved.

In the case of Katie and Jimmy in Made For Each Other, the Channel 4 series which began on Wednesday, their every move was scrutinised by a drama queen of a divorce lawyer, Vanessa Lloyd Platt, and a psychotherapist, Malcolm Stern. At the end they gave their "professional" verdict.

In essence, they said the couple's relationship was in a sorry state. At one point Lloyd Platt suggested Malcolm should have "jumped on" Katie to spice up their sex life. It was prurient, degrading - and people love it.

While MPs campaign to outlaw bloodsports, we are served up a daily dose of cruelty on our televisions. An element of humiliation has invaded most genres. Quiz show? The Weakest Link. Game show? Without Prejudice?, Big Brother, Dog Eat Dog, Survivor and many more. Lifestyle? What Not To Wear, DIY SOS. Documentary? Wife Swap. Comedy? The Richard Taylor Interviews.

The runaway success of Big Brother on Channel 4 started the stampede for surveillance telly. This was a producer's dream. Who needs talented, professional, expensive entertainers? Bung a few people in a house, film them around the clock, edit it to make the rows louder and the embarrassments bigger and watch the ratings soar.

This was always an unforgiving format. But in the last series, it was enveloped in a miasma of nastiness.

The one to suffer the most vitriol was Jade Goody. She entered the Big Brother house a fun-loving dental nurse from south London. She left it condemned by the national press as an "oinker" and a "vile fishwife". One columnist urged his readers to ring the programme and "vote the pig out".

This was all brilliant stuff for the broadcasters: the more controversy the programme created, the more viewers. And the media defended its attacks by saying the contestants volunteered and they knew what they were in for (that does not apply, mind you, to new programmes such as the Richard Taylor Interviews and Channel 5's upcoming programme Swag, in which members of the public are secretly filmed making fools of themselves).

The whole tacky business coarsens society. How can you tell a child not to call another names when your newspaper gleefully describes Jade as the "Elephant Woman"?

TV is encouraging us to make snap judgements, to denigrate people at the first opportunity. Civilising qualities such as mutual respect, patience, tolerance and compassion are about as welcome on television these days as Michael Barrymore.

What makes it worse is that viewers are being used by the makers of this sort of television. We are fond of dismissing the participants as dupes, but we are the bigger fools for believing that the shows represent some kind of truth.

Wife Swap (Channel 4 again) is the latest must-see bite of TV reality; but this is no more real than the tooth fairy or Terry Wogan's hair.

The programme takes two wives and places them with each other's husbands. Then the cameras roll.

If only it were that simple. In fact, the researchers spend months finding couples who are the most unsuited both to national television exposure and to one another before pushing them into the gladiatorial arena for our amusment.

Evening Press TV critic Julian Cole reviewed the first episode in the series. "As anyone who has ever watched television for more than half an hour or so could have worked out for themselves, the families had been chosen for maximum conflict potential," he wrote.

"So Dee and Dave were white, over-weight and insular, while Sonia and Lance were black, stylish and cosmopolitan." And how we chortled as Lance berated Dee for her "fat arse". A telling insight into the dynamics of modern marriage, the makers said. What pretentious bunkum.

Liza Tarbuck's Saturday night game show, Without Prejudice?, wants to have it all ways. It is as mean as many other formats, encouraging a panel of people to denigrate the contestants. The one they dislike least wins £50,000.

Its producers like to boast that the format exposes our preconceptions. But rare is the viewer that watches this sort of thing with their brain switched on. We're only here for the sneer.

And the programme is not as spontaneous as they would like us to believe. Last Saturday, York's perennial game show contestant Eddie Vee was on Without Prejudice? The first myth he exploded was that you have to ask to take part. As a well-known telly participant, he was invited.

"Somebody emailed me, and said do you want to win £50,000?" he said. "You don't turn that down."

On the show, he got off quite lightly, although some of the panel did object to his membership of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party and another called him a drifter.

But Eddie was unhappy with the way they edited the film about his life.

And he was misrepresented in another way. On the show, he has to dream up three wishes. His were connected with the health and welfare of his family.

No, said the researchers, you are not allowed to talk about your family. They cajoled him into more self-seeking choices, such as having a number one hit single and playing in a professional snooker final. The other contestants all wished for - guess what? - good things for their families. Eddie was condemned as selfish. Someone else walked off with the 50 grand.

"I was misrepresented. I got that Michael Jackson feeling," said Eddie.

Reality television is a pseudonym for cruelty television. The nastier the better. That is demeaning to the watchers and the watched. It also means the schedules are filled with more ordinary folk and fewer talented performers.

One of the architects of zoo TV, Chris Evans, seems to be wondering what sort of monster he helped create. "I was watching TV on a Saturday night and watched Jane McDonald's final Stars For A Night on BBC1 then I switched over to BBC2 to watch Stars In Their Eyes and I realised for two and a half hours it was the public that were entertaining us as if we had given up," he said recently. "What kind of message is that?"

Updated: 11:10 Friday, February 07, 2003