Reality television

Prompted this morning to ponder about the televising of various kinds of therapy.

Suppose, for example, we have a provider of a certain kind of therapy who wants to promote their activity, that is to say their provision of a kind of therapy, which provision may well be all of well-done, useful, worthwhile and cost-effective. And a  television channel who wants to fill a slot in their not very busy schedule. So we have a meeting of minds and a project to make an hour long programme about this therapy follows on.

One way to do this is to focus on the customers. Perhaps as crudely as sticking a television camera and crew in the consulting room. Perhaps topped and tailed by a bit of talking head.

The rule - in this country anyway - is that both the therapists and customers have to agree to being made into educational entertainment in this way. Although there might be some encouragement, monetary or otherwise. And if the customers are also being detained at her Majesty's pleasure in some not very pleasant place, they might welcome the opportunity to get out for a bit. Regardless.

So we then make a film of the therapist talking to his customers, one after the other, perhaps giving each customer a fifteen minutes slot or so. Some therapist-customer pairs are not going to make very good television, so one might only get one usable segment of film from every five pairings. Or whatever. But there is some selection going on here. What reaches the television screen is a long way from being either random or representative.

Then for this to work as television, both therapist and customer have to enjoy making a performance, an exhibition of themselves. Making a public exhibition of what is supposed to be private. And what the viewers see is a performance masquerading as real life, as therapy. All of which I find rather unsettling.

I remember seeing short films on management courses - aka hugging courses - where sometimes well-known actors take the roles of therapist and customer. They enact an encounter. The viewer trusts the maker of the film not to play games and gets the benefit seeing and learning from a fictional encounter, albeit hopefully based on real life, perhaps a careful composition drawn from a number of real therapy sessions.

But the viewers know that what they are seeing is a re-enactment, a fiction. The people in the film are actors, neither therapists nor customers. Which I think is a much more healthy way to do things - even if it lacks the spice of reality. The catch is that it is probably a lot more expensive than making a bad film from the real thing.

So I don't know what the answer is. But I do know that I don't like reality television.