House of cards

There has been a radical new departure from the lounge of reality TV - in Guatemala they've established a house exactly like every other reality TV house. It's full of delinquents and they're going to be shoehorned together for a good long time so that viewers can take pleasure in their dearth of social skills. The key difference is that these are convicted delinquents - proper, real-life criminals - and the programme-makers are going to rehabilitate these crims as entrepreneurs. Social benefit as well as larks. Could television get any richer?

All in a flash, I realise I've heard this idea before - not that you'd get a bunch of criminals and rehabilitate them, but that television would be such a compelling idea, the notion of getting on to it so delightful and intoxicating, that considerations of legality and ethics would become laughably irrelevant. A TV station would launch a programme called What's My Crime? and appearance on it would be so desirable that people who weren't even criminally minded would find themselves cooking up misdeeds. Little puppies might be harmed in the process. All this happened in a fictional dystopia; but it wasn't 1984, or Fahrenheit 451, or any other famous fictional dystopia about which people nod and say, "How remarkably prescient, how on earth did such and such cook up such a prescient thing?" What's My Crime occurred in 101 Dalmatians. Or, to give it its proper title, Yes, One Hundred And One Sodding Dalmatians.

It's a detail lost in the Disney rendition, but Cruella DeVil's henchmen had no great interest in fur coats. They had nothing against dogs. They just wanted to get on telly. This is their narrative arc, one saying to the other: "You and me, in evening dress, with carnations in our buttonholes - and all England watching us. But we must think out some really striking way of doing our crime. Could we skin them alive?"

"They'd never keep still ... What about boiling them?"

If I were you, naturally, I'd want to hear what dogmeister Pongo does next. (He acts fast! He and Missus see the pups into a Gypsy field, where they're helped by some horses in an unbelievably cute, though fictional, instance of cross-species understanding.) But the point is this: here we have reality TV distilled to its very essence. The superficial gloss (those carnations), the moral vacuum (skin them alive? Boil them?), the fame, the works. Every motivational curve behind everyone involved, in anything from Big Brother to Celebrity Love Island, was condensed (in fairness to the imaginary puppies, I'm avoiding the word "boiled") by Dodie Smith, not in the 70s or 80s, but in the 50s. So when people justify this business via its postmodernism, or the statements it makes about a society in ironic freefall, don't believe it. The potential for its mindlessness was recognised almost as soon as telly was invented. The only difference is, 50 years ago, the idea was not interesting enough to warrant more than a throwaway character sketch in a children's book. Now it warrants 10 weeks of telly.

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