Big Brother

George Orwell's "1984" described numerous horrors in the future totalitarian Britain or "Airstrip One". Secret police everywhere, people denouncing their loved ones, torture chambers, perpetual war, hate propaganda, beer served in litres..... All of these actually existed in under various tyrants various parts of the world.

But the really creepy horror was the perpetual observation by TV. The worst bit was the interactive TV with a hectoring harridan urging the reluctant comrades onto greater efforts in their early morning gymnastics. It must have seemed particularly unsettling in the 1940s when TV was an exotic novelty which few people had seen and even fewer could afford. Not even Hitler and Stalin had the technical resources to spy upon their people so comprehensively and intrusively. Even at a much later date, the East German Stasi depended on pretty old fashioned methods of spying on the population. When practically all the people were potential Enemies of the People, they went in for tens of thousands of snoops.

This premise in "1984" was that all this intrusion was compelled by an all-powerful state. Surely no one would "voluntarily" submit to perpetual public observation unless in the grip of some particularly pitiable mental disorder? Well, the good people of Reading were only too willing to show the way to the rest of the planet.

This reminiscence was prompted by the recent death of Margaret Sainsbury (formerly Margaret Wilkins), the pioneer of "Reality" TV. Back in the early 1970s, new lightweight video cameras made documentary filmmaking far easier that it had been with the earlier massive TV cameras or even the compact 16mm and 35 mm movie cameras. Documentary makers seized the new technology and boldly went where no sane man had ever gone before. Reading was the venue for two of the most notorious programs.

I suspect that this was at least partly due to financial restrictions - once TV crews went further out from London, a higher rate of salary and/or allowances was payable under the union-negotiated conditions. So I have seen an episode of "Inspector Morse" (set unforgettably in Oxford) being filmed at some suitably imposing building in Reading which might double as an Oxford college or library.

Reading Police let one of these newly equipped crews into their interrogation of a rape victim and changed British police procedures forever. The way they treated the traumatized woman created a national uproar and the police had to drastically revise their guidelines for such questioning.

But the Wilkins clan paved the way for any number of media creations, from "The Truman Show" to "Big Brother" and arguably any number of grisly confessional daytime TV shows all over the world. Mr Wilkins was a bus driver, Margaret was his wife and the family matriarch, and their unconventional family lived about a mile south of Reading town centre. Their crowded apartment in Whitley Street was barely half a mile from the green campus of Reading University, but it might as well have been on another planet. For a few weeks it was obviously even more crowded with a TV crew squeezed in.

The resulting program called simply "The Family". Its purported aim was simply to observe the everyday life of a British family. At this distance I cannot remember if the producers were so brazen as to claim it was a "typical" British family. An obvious problem with such a program was finding a family which was sufficiently stupid and/or venal to take part, especially with the paltry sums which were on offer. A second problem was to stop it being boring beyond belief, when the raw material was the trivia of everyday life. Even with the most selective shooting and ruthless editing, it threatened to lose much of the audience after the first or second episode, once the sheer novelty wore off.

Plainly the uneducated Wilkins were not the sharpest knives in the drawer. But I doubt that it would have been more exciting if a family of professors from the prosperous University area half a mile to the east had volunteered. Everyday life is pretty mundane in any home. Although, of course, a University household might have exercised more forethought about the impact on their family dynamics of displaying all their dirty laundry on nationwide TV and would have been less tempted by the money.

At the time I cynically assumed that the producers had picked the Wilkins simply because their unconventional (i.e. immoral) lifestyle might add a little spice to a desperately dull pie. Mrs Wilkins' youngest child was sired by another guy during an extra marital fling and the older daughter was cohabiting with her boyfriend under the family roof. It is difficult now to imagine how disturbing this was to ordinary British families who still struggled to maintain Christian family values, if not religious practice. It was that period when the lifestyle of the swinging sixties was spreading out from a tiny minority to a wider population, but before it had become complacently accepted - or, if not accepted, resignedly tolerated as being as unavoidable as a tsunami.

Looking back on it now, I see "The Family" as a blatantly political exercise to further the destruction of Christian values. It showed yet again that there is no such thing as "impartial" observation in social matters (vide Margaret Mead and any number of "scientific" anthropologists). The "observer" was a promoter of the values displayed by the Wilkins, merely by showing them as "normal". Even the luckless Mr Wilkins was praised as being forgiving to the wife who made him a cuckold. Though possibly not that forgiving....they divorced a year after the program, which is why Margaret Wikins died as Margaret Sainsbury.

And where the Wilkins went, any number of British families have gone since so that cohabitation and illegitimacy are an "accepted" part of the social scenery.

Also the program broke any number of taboos on basic decency and kindness, which have been gleefully exploited mercilessly by even less scrupulous program makers since. Most unsettling of all was the treatment of the youngest child, the 9 year old son. The adults could hardly have known what they were letting themselves in for when they "volunteered" as guinea pigs. It was a wholly unprecedented experiment. But at least they were consenting adults, even if ignorantly consenting. The 9 year old obviously was a helpless victim of their decision. Apart from having his illegitimacy exposed for world wide entertainment, he was filmed in floods of tears as his parents gave him a hard time about a poor school report. Imagine going into school the day after that episode........ I suspect that today child abuse teams would be on the job and am amazed that little fuss was made about it at the time.

The wonderful "Truman Show" skipped the less appetizing aspects of the hero's 24 hours-a-day TV exposure - such as his trips to the bathroom and his horizontal relations with his "wife". But then Peter Weir is an artist of taste and subtlety, unlike the majority of TV producers around the world.

I can't help wondering if the Stasi missed a trick; what if, instead of paying a fortune for an army of professional agents and informers, they had simply offered loads of cheap TV deals to East German families???? Get all your citizens to expose their intimate secrets voluntarily - and get a profit on world wide syndication rights.....