Tonight the cameras will stop rolling for the last time as the final of Ultimate Big Brother brings the phenomenon to a close.
As we look back on the past decade, it seems to have been characterised by the amazing popularity of reality TV, a genre that until the early 2000s was absent from our cultural vocabulary. Whether it's ballroom dancing, eating insects or murdering 'I Will Always Love You', the British public has developed an extraordinary capacity for being entertained by 'ordinary people'. There are many who condemn this fascination. Stephen Fry encapsulates this view in his condemnation of reality television as 'squalid and dreadful'. The criticism is that it represents a cultural vacuum or that relies on humiliation for effect, and it is often fair criticism. Yet a closer examination of the genre reveals a surprising literary precedent that may make us see the genre differently.
The key lies in a literary parallel. In discussion of reality TV, Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which provided in its dystopian narrative the framework for Big Brother, is often cited. However, we might also draw an interesting parallel by comparing the phenomenon with a less obvious book, John Bunyan's Pilgrim’s Progress. In this 1678 classic, the protagonist, Christian, goes on an allegorical journey to the Celestial City. Along the way he meets characters such as Obstinate, Discretion and Piety, each of whom embodies their namesake.
Perhaps reality television is a twenty-first century equivalent? It is (sometimes painfully) obvious that producers pick particular individuals as contestants because they exhibit particular characteristics. Sky's website demonstrates this, listing 'The Top 15 Big Brother Clichés', such as the Exhibitionist, the Villain and the 'Nice but Boring One' – modern counterparts of Obstinate and co.
There are obvious differences. These modern counterparts live outside the stringent moral framework erected by Bunyan. And for all their archetypal qualities, the Big Brother contestants can create a real life drama complete with moral intricacies. Nonetheless, there have been moments of almost allegorical moral simplicity, such as the behaviour of 'nasty' Nick Bateman in the first series in 2000 and the Shilpa Shetty race row in 2007’s celebrity series. Like it or not, Big Brother and its ilk offers us a pilgrim's progress of our age, reflecting back to its audience the Vanity Fairs, Enchanted Grounds and Celestial Cities of our own age. In the light of that, the distaste many feel towards it is instructive. Oscar Wilde’s words in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray seem appropriate. Wilde suggested that 'the nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.' Big Brother does indeed hold a mirror up to our society. Yes, it is first and foremost entertainment, just as Bunyan’s novel was for those who first read it. But that is not to say that the audience did – and does – not also gain some insight into its own humanity from the entertainment.
Maybe, therefore, there is more to the phenomenon than elite opinion allows. And maybe it is not all negative. In his 2005 Faithworks lecture, Andy Duncan, then Chief Executive of Channel 4, called on its critics to 'look more closely. Big Brother winners are all role models in their way... because in the final analysis viewers choose people whose values they identify with and admire... those values are invariably honesty, integrity, constancy and kindness.' Give those values capital letters, and they are the characters of Pilgrim’s Progress.
Kat Brealey is studying Religions and Theology at the University of Manchester
