When Cathy Come Home began playing during our Reality TV screening last week, I heard murmurs around the room:
"This is so ooooold, why are we watching this shit?"
"How is this reality TV?"
"Why aren't we watching Survivor?"
I couldn't help but laugh. Because I knew the lecturer had a plan. He wouldn't show us something completely unrelated to the genre of that week, surely!
I could see where the class was coming from though. This black and white 1960s film wasn't exactly my idea of reality TV either. I was thinking of the likes of "The Biggest Loser", "Survivor", "Big Brother", "Keeping up with the Kardashians", "One Born Every Minute". My modern list of Reality TV shows could go on, but even in this list I notice a difference - in some of these shows, people are doing something to win a prize (i.e who can lose the most weight, who can outlast the others in the middle of no where), while others show the lifestyles of the rich and famous, another to show the miracle that is birth. Hill (2005) states that the reality TV genre "is associated with anything and everything, from people to pets, from birth to death" and states that it is difficult to categorise. (Hill, 2005, p. 41). Biressi and Nunn (2005) believe that reality TV places "an emphasis on the representation of ordinary people and allegedly unscripted or spontaneous moments that supposedly reveal unmediated reality." (Biressi & Nunn, 2005). They also believe that it was thanks to the development of documentary-styles that reality TV as we know it today, came about.
And this is where Cathy Come Home comes in. See, I knew the lecturer had a plan.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Cathy Come Home is part of "BBC's influential 'Wednesday Play' series". Although made in 1966, it is a film that is still very much relevant to today. It tells the story of Cathy and her husband Reg as they go from normal, happy, working class folks, to losing everything - their home, their kids, as well as each other - as a result of unemployment and the class system during tough times in England. The film is part of the "docodrama" genre which came about in light of a growing interest in free documentaries being shown on British television. These sorts of documentaries were filmed in the social observational style of free cinema and direct cinema - a "raw", fly-on-the-wall observational technique, that followed ordinary people, but was not condescending towards them like past documentaries had been. (Biressi & Nunn, 2005). According to Biressi and Nunn (2005), Cathy Come Home is widely recognised as a "landmark docodrama that successfully married the chronicling of events and social realism that characterises British documentary form with fictional devices." (Biressi & Nunn, 2005, p. 54).
The aim of this docodrama genre, according to Biressi and Nunn (2005), was to give a voice to the working-class in representing the 'real'. It was most definitely achieved, as after it screened, there was uproar in England, with switchboards being overloaded due to the large number of people phoning up to see what they could do to help. (Wikipedia, n.d.). So popular and well known was the film, that for years afterwards, the actress who played Cathy was often stopped in the street and given money because the public were sure she herself must truly have been homeless. This genre paved the way for contemporary reality TV in the fact that it showed that ordinary people could in fact be portrayed as "complex characters negotiating a complex world." (Biressi & Nunn, 2005, p. 58).
All in all, I think this was an excellent choice of film for our reality TV week. It was something different and I feel that I really learnt something - not just the history and influences of modern day reality TV, but that it could in fact be used to portray an important message, and give someone a voice when they need it the most.
References
Biressi, A. & Nunn, N. (2005). Real Lives, documentary approaches. In Reality TV: realism and revelation. (pp. 35-58) London: Wallflower.
Hill, A. (2005) The reality genre. In A. Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. (pp. 14 – 40). Oxon: Routledge.
Internet Movie Database. (n.d.). Cathy Come Home. Retrieved October 16, 2012, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059020/
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Cathy Come Home. Retreived October 16, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Come_Home
Well said, Matthew. My observation is that is 1966 drama, though scripted, is a lot more 'real' than so called Reality TV. As PKD might have asked, what is real anyway? What do you think?
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree with PDK here. What is real anyway??? There are so many unanswered questions.... but we're talking about reality TV here not life so I'll stay on topic! :-P I've often said when watching many reality TV shows that they're completely scripted, but they try to portray themselves as if they are a normal "day-in-the-life" kind of thing. Even though it's not usually my thing, I think I prefered Cathy Come Home more than modern day "reality" TV because of the simple fact I KNOW it is scripted and the whole point of it was to portray a message. What does modern day reality TV serve as? Entertainment? And why is it even entertaining when it doesn't teach us anything. Am I being overly cynical?
ReplyDeleteI think we're just so saturated with American reality TV shows that we forget there are other types of of reality TV to be considered.
ReplyDeleteAlthough scripted, Cathy Come Home certainly gave a great sense of realism compared to the modern reality TV we're so used to. The drama was simply documented as the camera follows the people in their daily lives over the span of Cathy and Reg beginning as lovers to having a family and then to the decay of their relationship.
Modern reality TV follows the same structure but viewers can clearly see there was no real meaning to what was being shown. There is no relevance to the average viewers watching the rich and famous become even more so. With Cathy Come Home, the audience were able to create a complex connection with the characters as they go through their lives. This bond is mostly because the plot of the story is socially relevant at the time and the viewers are also living the same lives they are watching on their TV. And as you've pointed out, the docudrama was more like the voice that needed to be heard in that society. I certainly don't see how the Kardashians can relate to me and my problems.
I also thought that we were going to be shown a program such as "Keeping up with the Kardashians" or "Jersey Shore". It seems that people are becoming more interested in watching pointless shows about other peoples lives and their personal issues rather than serious life changing problems that people deal with. It's not that these issues are not present in modern society, i just think that "reality TV" is becoming more targeted at younger audiences roughly around their teenage years. Do we really need to know that Kim Kardashian is having problems with buying a car? No, but it's what the target audience craves, and the media is more than happy to feed that garbage to them as long as the money's good.
ReplyDeleteJust another point i would like to make. The idea of making reality television programs "real" is dead. It seems that the real "real" isn't very popular anymore, and this new fake "real" is what the audience likes. Modern shows (and documentaries especially) are heavily manipulated to exaggerate the idea the director wants to convey. It seems life just isn't interesting enough anymore. Made up situations that we're supposed to believe in keep us entertained, if this is reality TV in 2012, who knows how bad it'll get in the future, if it CAN get any worse that is.