Wannabes queued up to conceive a baby with a stranger live on air for a £100,000 prize. The show was a spoof, but what does it say about reality TV?
It started as a challenge – to come up with the ultimate tasteless reality TV show and test the boundaries of the format. But in just eight weeks, “Let’s Make a Baby” came dangerously close to becoming a real show. Hundreds of reality TV hopefuls jammed the phone lines when the show advertised for contestants, and TV channels from all over the world offered vast sums of money to buy the rights to the series.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we imagine we would get that far with such little effort,” says the programme’s producer and director, Helen Sage.
The undercover experiment was for BBC Three’s current affairs series Mischief. The programme’s makers came up with the most “tasteless and morally dubious” idea they could, and a fake production company to sell it. Let’s Make a Baby would centre around contestants – all strangers – living in a “fertility house”, with the least attractive being voted out each week. The remaining two couples would then have a race to conceive a child and win £100,000 each.
The idea was first pitched to focus groups, all of which agreed it was morally questionable but said they would watch it. “It’s completely offensive,” said one group member. “Would I watch it? Yes.”
More than 200 people – including a gay man who was up for the challenge of trying to have sex with a female – applied to be a contestant. They were not told the show was a fake until after the auditions. Real reality stars also bought into the idea of the show. Makosi Musambasi and Craig Coates from Big Brother 6 agreed to host it.
Finally, a party was put on at Europe’s biggest TV sales fair in Cannes to pitch the fake idea to TV channels from all over the world and test their reaction. Disturbingly, it created a real buzz and several offers came in. “As a TV producer, I was really interested in the question of how low my industry would go in its bid to attract viewers and attention, the answer is very low indeed,” says Ms Sage.
Professor David Wilson, who walked out as a consultant on Big Brother for ethical reasons, says the premise of Let’s Make a Baby is morally repugnant and all about cheapening life, but he is not surprised that it attracted so much interest. “Reality TV is not only reinventing the freak show, it’s about bedlam,” he says. “It’s the TV equivalent of slowing down to get a better look at the accident on the other side of the motorway. It’s about getting a view of other people’s misery.
“Those who take part are considered odd or bizarre for wanting to do so, but they are merely products of a society that now holds fame above anything else. All cultural reference points are now rooted in being a celebrity, and not attached to having an intrinsic skill.”
He says there should be an independent body to regulate reality TV, and is also critical of the psychologists and other academics who take part in the shows and “endorse the programmes with a fig leaf of credibility”. But the prize of large audiences and the chance of a big reward take over people’s moral compass, says Alan Hayling, head of documentaries at the BBC.
“Very intelligent people are operating in a moral vacuum,” he says. “The moral of the tale of Let’s Make a Baby is, sadly, that it is terribly, terribly easy, over only eight weeks, to show how low reality might go.”
So what is the future of reality TV? Will the public lose its appetite for it, will programme makers get a conscience? Neither, and things could get far more extreme, says Professor Wilson. “The limits of this type of TV are limitless. The other year there was a huge web audience for a film on the net of hostages being beheaded. It is about how deep and depraved our imaginations can go.”
And as for Let’s Make a Baby? A Dutch television company is currently making a reality TV show called I want your baby, not your love. In it, men compete to be the one to donate their sperm to a single woman who wants a baby but not a boyfriend. Not quite the same, but close enough.
Let’s Make a Baby will be broadcast on Thursday 26 January at 2230 GMT on BBC Three.
Source: BBC
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